If water laughs

Paolo Malaguti's book is an adventure novel, one of those classic stories that will captivate teenage readers as they can identify with the protagonist – a child who, just like them, is going through that liminal stage that is adolescence, reaching the threshold of adulthood. This is a book about travels and is set on the water: not on exotic Caribbean seas or the Indian Ocean, however, but the on the rivers of the Po Valley and the Venetian Lagoon, in the 1960s. The main character is a boy named Ganbeto, who, having just about managed to complete his third year at secondary school, goes to church to light a votive candle and thank St James for his help. Still, his life is about to change completely, turned upside down by the few words uttered by his father and his grandfather Caronte during dinner; after pouring him a glass of wine, because “that's how men talk”, they tell him that the following day he'll go to work on the Teresina, his grandfather's barge. Up to that moment, Ganbeto's whole world had only comprised the village, except for that one time when he accompanied his mother to Padua to “visit Saint Anthony” – now, a brand new world opens up before his eyes: a world lived on the water, “made of moorings and small shipyards, jetties and sluices”; a mysterious world that inspires awe but also kindles curiosity and a desire to explore. A world that, nevertheless, is changing, doomed to fade away in an era when road freight was increasingly replacing fluvial transportation, and the old barcari (bargees) slowly turned into labourers, leaving their boats for the factory warehouses that were crowding the Venetian countryside. Se l’acqua ride Paolo Malaguti Einaudi, 2020