The Foundation recommends

Maus

One of the most beautiful stories ever told about the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman begins by narrating the life of his father, Vladek, a Polish Jew who escaped imprisonment in the concentration camps, and his conflictual relationship with him. Maus is not solely focused on the Shoah, however – above all, it's a story about people, the story of a relationship between father and son that also encompasses that tragic historical period, which is successfully described through real words and events that go straight to the heart of readers, also thanks to the great attention to detail paid to both illustrations and dialogues. The characters are represented like animals: the Nazis are cats who sadistically play with their prey, Jewish people are mice while Polish people are pigs. An allegorical representation that doesn't detract from the tragedy but impels us to reflect on the symbolic codes that had in fact been adopted by the Nazis, who referred to Jewish people as rats or parasites to be exterminated. The story unravels over two interwoven temporal planes: the author's present, when the father narrates, with difficulty, his life story to the son – a deeply painful memory and a heavy heritage for Art – and then the past, the years lived by Vlodek before and during the Second World War. Maus is a great literary work, as well as the first graphic novel to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize – a must-read, so as to never forget.  

Maus
Art Spiegelman
Einaudi, 2010

Paper factories

An anthology that retraces the history of Italian industrial literature, from the 1930s – a period when the literary genre acquired its own features and coherency – up to the 2010s. From Leonardo Sinisgalli and Carlo Bernari to Silvia Avallone and Antonio Pennacchi, through Ottiero Ottieri, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Giovanni Testori, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luciano Bianciardi, Elio Vittorini, Giorgio Caproni, Laura Pariani and several other great authors. The work is structured according to thematic chapters that narrate different historical periods and different protagonists in the world of factories: employees, entrepreneurs, labourers and intellectuals. The factory, narrated in these pieces selected by Giorgio Bigatti and Giuseppe Lupo, evolves over time from a grimy site, with its unpleasant smells of production materials and labourers' sweat, to a digital and technological factory, clean and sustainable, embodying a completely different concept of industrial production. A book that makes us rediscover a key feature of Italian identity – the factories that were at the heart of 20th-century industrial development – through a multi-voiced narration led by some of the greatest literary authors, a polyphonic exploration of their nuances and complexities, tensions and passions.

  Fabbrica di carta. I libri che raccontano l’Italia industriale (Paper factories. The books that narrate industrial Italy)
Curated by Giorgio Bigatti and Giuseppe Lupo
Laterza, 2013

Ufo 78

In Italy, the year 1978 immediately calls to mind the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the events related to the Fourth Andreotti government, the “Years of lead” marked by far-right and far-wing terrorism, the fight for women's rights, the succession of three popes on the papal throne, the rise of communes, the widespread drug problem. We find all this in Wu Ming's book, though depicted from an unusual perspective – 1978 was also the year in which the highest number of UFO sightings was recorded in Italy – and narrated by the different voices of a group of characters whose connection is the world of ufology: Martin Zanka, a communist author who writes books about “paleo cosmonautics”; his son Vincenzo, a former heroin addict living in a commune in the Lunigiana region; Milena Cravero, a young anthropologist researching ufologists; and then Jimmy Fruzzetti, Gheppio, Pardo and many others. The book's different narrative levels interweave at several points and revolve around a mystery that unravels within the setting of an uncanny, even unfathomable, mountain: the Quarzerone, an imaginary place where, for various reasons, the lives and investigations of the protagonists converge. The narrators develop an elegant interplay of fact and fiction, creating an atypical and enthralling murder mystery story that delves into the dark heart of Italy's past and reinterprets the history of those years through complex, and never obvious or stereotypical, viewpoints. The book is also interspersed with wonderful music, including that of Popol Vuh, Franco Battiato, the Deep Purple, the Area – the perfect soundtrack to accompany its reading.  

Ufo 78
Wu Ming
Einaudi, 2022

A Christmas Tale

“He was filled with sudden joy. It wasn't yet clear to him what drove him to accomplish that feat, but he had nonetheless derived some meaning from it. He had faced is fear. Yet, at the beginning of every crossing he let go of the ballast in his soul, so that the wire became a path towards freedom.” A few weeks before Christmas the man, who used to be an extremely talented tightrope walker, decides to attempt one more walk on a wire stretched between a library's balcony and an abandoned church's bell tower. He's 67 years old, his body is a bit rusty but still extraordinarily sprightly. So, one cold morning at dawn... Here's Fiaba di Natale by Simona Baldelli, Sellerio, or, “the amazing journey of the Man in Mid-air”, a simple and only slightly sad story. During the crossing, as below him the whole town comes to a halt, the man engages with a police officer and a firefighter, who try to persuade him to get off the wire, as well as a priest, his doctor and, finally, his daughter. And there, between the wire and a rescue crane, their relationship resumes, with the memory of a shattered family and the future glimpsed in his young grandson, whom he had never met until then. Memories: “‘What are the stars?’ the little girl had asked him. ‘Dreams’ he had replied. ‘And we are in great need of them, because it's from dreams that everything is born.’” This is the message of the story: don't get lost in fear and keep on dreaming.

Fiaba di Natale (A Christmas Tale)
Simona Baldelli
Sellerio, 2020