Bianca Pitzorno returns to bookstores with ‘La sonnambula’

“Like many characters in my books – explains Pitzorno – the Sleepwalker was also born from a real inspiration: leafing through an issue of the Sassari newspaper from the late nineteenth century entitled ‘L’Isola’ and kept by my grandmother, my gaze fell on the advertisement of a ‘renowned sleepwalker’, what today we would call a medium, who practiced openly in an alley next to my family’s house, and had a non-Sardinian name, Elisa Morello. Did she use a pseudonym, I wondered, or did she come from another region of Italy? And in this case, through what vicissitudes did she arrive in Sardinia? Who were the bourgeois ladies – the amount of her consultations was not modest – who turned to her for advice ‘on any subject’?

Pitzorno – the reader will discover – plays with the archetypes of the adventure and love novel, dips his pen into the Gothic and the picaresque to write a novel teeming with life, dreamlike, ironic and political at the same time. Inhabited by mysterious visions, the sleepwalker is at the same time alien to any superstition, capable of facing her destiny as a lonely woman in a hostile world with dignity and courage. Through her extraordinary adventure Bianca Pitzorno celebrates the power of the human mind and reminds us that thanks to our strength of spirit, rationality and imagination we are the ones who write our lives.

After all: “My writing method has always been this – reveals Pitzorno -: choosing a character with certain characteristics and placing him in an anomalous situation, asking myself and asking him how he can get out of it. In the case of the sleepwalker, it was not difficult for me to identify what the difficulties and pitfalls could be posed along the path of a young woman armed only with her pride and resourcefulness in a chauvinist world regulated by rigid social divisions such as the Italian provinces of the late nineteenth century. The city from which part of the story is actually Sassari, which however, as I often do in my novels, I call by the name of Donora. This novel therefore mixes historical facts that actually happened – which I partly fished out from my family’s memories or from other newspaper clippings, and partly derive from the extraordinary archive work of the Sassari historian Enrico Costa (1841-1909), to whom ‘La sonnambula’ is dedicated and that of the great popular novels of the nineteenth century passionate reader, but interpreted with a thread of ironic allusions to the literary fashions of those years”.

For readers who love the author, there is a surprise between the pages: “Perhaps some readers will be able to recognise, in the end, a small cameo by the seamstress who is the protagonist of my novel The Dream of the Sewing Machine: the destinies of women have always been close to my heart; just as for the seamstress owning one of the first portable sewing machines was the way to free herself from poverty and subordination, so for the Sonnambula it will be courage, imagination and spirit of resourcefulness. In this novel, moreover, I enjoy breaking the invisible wall that separates the author from his story and from those who read it, and I enter the scene myself, in the dreamlike role of a little girl holding a rooster with colorful feathers on a leash… Those feathers symbolize writing, its infinite nuances and possibilities. I am convinced that literature is the most powerful tool to demonstrate that no life is insignificant or banal: each existence, if read with curious and empathetic eyes, reveals extraordinary twists. Not all the stories of the Sonnambula, of her clients and of all her adventure companions are extraordinary existences at first sight, but precisely for this reason I believe that readers will be able to recognize themselves in them and, through them, give a special meaning to their own destiny”. (by Paolo Martini)