‘The’ Tullio and the Strangest Eolao in the Whole Canton ...

Switzerland is often imagined as an ideal country, a symbol of order, cleanliness, seriousness and rigour. Davide Rigiani’s novel is set in the Canton of Ticino, where this ideal fades slightly, mixing a little with Italian imagination and disorder. It is precisely in this canton that the Ghiringhelli family lives: the father is an avant-garde poet, the mother an inflexible banker, their two children are a teenage girl and “il Tullio”, a boy in the last year of primary school. Tullio isn’t doing very well at school. He struggles to follow and listen to the teachers with their rules who try to explain the world – “The first rule said that you have to follow the rules, end of.” – but his mind is full of life and all kinds of creatures: talking plants and animals, sports personalities, superheroes, medieval knights, aliens and a very particular creature, the only one able to cross the boundary between the two worlds, passing from chaotic fantasy to orderly reality: the eolao. Precisely what it is is difficult to say, also because his appearance changes all the time, but he becomes attached to Tullio and together they’ll live out many adventures. It’s a story about the importance of imagination, which speaks to children and adults at the same time with irony and fantasy, told with a lively and surprising language, which puts us on the back foot with a rich vocabulary and great inventiveness in the use of words.

Il Tullio e l'eolao più stranissimo di tutto il Canton Ticino
Davide Rigiani
Minimum fax, 2022