Using the suicide of Francesca Spada as a starting point, the book excavates postwar Naples and the memory of the Italian Communist Party. A personal tragedy becomes a path into political history.

From one death, the memory of a city and a party begins to unravel.

Memory and feeling rooted in Milan’s Navigli district rise in poetic form. Love, pain, faith, and alienation intersect in an intimate and urgent collection.

Pain and love intersect in the memory of the city.

Borrowing its title from a medieval musical term, this critical essay collection alternates between textual analysis, themes, and method. It illuminates both the details of reading and their wider contexts.

The details of reading are reassembled from another angle.

Based on a series of lectures, the book revisits twentieth-century Italian history through politics, society, and memory. It is both memoir and a dialogue with the century itself.

The twentieth century is reread in the words of someone who lived through it.