Mi compro una Gilera
The character who narrates and says I has turned 40. The age of maturity? Perhaps. The only real certainties are his daughter, his writing, the city where he lives, Russian literature and the exemplary episodes that memory (whether private or public) never ceases to modify and counterfeit - the story of the author's mother running over a pig with her bicycle, the scene of Pasternàk coming out of his dacha to go receive Stalin's famous phone call.
Between the emotional microcosm of the father-daughter relationship and the Parma macrocosm (where the mayoral election campaign alludes to a neurotic, incompetent Italy victimized by its own politics), the crucial theme of responsibility and individual choices creeps in.
Dramatis personæ: Calisto Tanzi, Stalin, barbisino D’Alema, Boris Pasternàk, il triangolista di Parma, Leonardo Sciascia, Orietta Berti, Silvio Berlusconi, Arturo Toscanini.