With the saga of "Nero" the Mammucari brothers take us to Samarkand

“Where the night lives” is the seventh volume of Nero, the saga of the Mammucari brothers set at the time of the Crusades opens its second narrative cycle. The backdrop to this episode is the legendary Samarkand, a city with a two thousand year history, an ancient crossroads of trade between Europe and China. But it is the authors themselves who explain to us how their Samarkand is different from the one we know. Or rather: the ones we know.

“Whichever Samarkand you want to talk about, it will be best to surrender to the thought that it is only one of the infinite Samarkand possible, exist or imagine. Because it is no longer even a city, rather an idea that changes face depending on who pronounces its name or marks its destiny.It is not the same one founded by the Aryan prince Samar, whose name it would still bear, but not even the one founded by the Turanian Afrasiab, depending on the founding myth we want to believe.It is not the same Marakanda conquered by Alexander the Great or the one that conquered him, so much so that he was forced to confess in defeat: «everything I have heard said about Marakanda is pure truth, except that it turns out to be much more beautiful than I could have imagined ».It is not the same one that would have been taken over the centuries by the Chinese or the Arabs, not the one ruled by the Turks. Above all, it is not the same glittering, sumptuous and famous Samarkand that Timur the lame chose as the capital of his kingdom after having rebuilt it. Rebuilt? Yes, because the fury of Genghis Khan had already fallen on her, conquering her and razing her completely to the ground, forever erasing every tangible trace of the many Samarkands that had once been. And so this Samarkand, ours, with its alleys, its squares and its Golden House, still unaware of the disastrous fate to which the Mongols would soon condemn it, can only be one of many imagined, alive and solid again as it once was; just as, if it’s any consolation, it always has been” we read in the afterword.

The volume, an episode of a saga, has at its center precisely the Golden House and a series of thefts that will lead to a dangerous pact, with suspended outcomes. The 80-page hardback volume, illustrated by FedericoSantagati and Giuseppe Matteoni give the reader large splash tables where you can immerse yourself in the alleys of Samarkand and get lost in its atmospheres.