Wednesday 12 November 2025 Romanian Ghosts arrives in all bookstores and stores. Ten extraordinary biographies of Carolina Vincenti, latest release from the La Lepre Edizioni catalogue. The book will also be presented at the small and medium publishing fair – Più libri Più liberi 2025. Ten portraits of characters suspended between East and West are the ghosts that pass through this fascinating choral tale. They have a double thread in common: exile and an extraordinary destiny. Thus Romania is recalled through the fragmented memory of the diaspora where, as in a matryoshka, each story contains another. The author wanted to tell the story of the Romania she had listened to and looked at through the lens of the stories of those who had lost that country. She explored the lives of others to answer the question of who you are, where you come from, what language you speak in dreams, and it seemed easier to answer by telling about others. Because no one questions his own identity more than an exile. The comfort of memories becomes the thread to follow and nostalgia lives in the details: a certain house or the scent of a tree, or even Eliade’s Mantuleasa street. Belonging is a balm that generates well-being, as those who set out into the world in search of an identity know well.
The Romanian exiles who inhabit this book are the figures of a kaleidoscope. Cioran, simultaneously genius and failed flâneur, Sergio Calibidache, idolized musician but hostile to recordings, Constantin Brancusi, spearhead of the avant-garde who did not like to talk about himself, Paul Celan, poet of sublime agony, Panait Istrati, writer of enchanted short stories, the “Gorky of the Balkans”. With them Mircea Eliade, the most illustrious historian of twentieth-century religions – but also an enchanting novelist and poet – and Ioan Petru Culianu, a very wise Gnostic killed at the height of academic glory by a mysterious assassin. Or again, Marta
Bibescu, Proustian muse of the salons of the Belle Époque, Dimitri Cantemir, the visionary prince who had observed Europe take off at the end of the seventeenth century and the Bosphorus crescent decline and Elena Ghica, formidable itinerant princess, archaeologist, botanist, writer and pioneer of the liberal thought of the cosmopolitan elite. Like a matryoshka, each story contains another and contains the seeds of nostalgia of those who leave their world to enter a new life.