Nicola Lagioia, Puglia and Santa Barbara: "I tell Italy in three generations"

“Bringing everything back home” is the title of one of his 2009 novels. But now, for Nicola Lagioiathe time has come again to bring something home: it’s about “Santa Barbara” (Einaudi), the new novel that the writer won the Strega Prize in 2015 (with “The Ferocity“) will present today at Capursoa few kilometers from Bari, the town of his parents and grandparents. “It is a fictionalized Capurso, reinvented“, Lagioia explains to AGI, “but it is one of my childhood places, to which many memories bind me and in which lives a particularly precious heritage of oral narratives“. A heritage which, he explains, “was fundamental for writing the novel”. Given the very high demand, there will be two appointments: the first at 5pm, the second at 7pm, inex cinema Enal which will reopen for the occasion.

Lagioia and Puglia

Just over 10 years later”The Ferocity“, therefore, Lagioia returns to set a novel in Puglia. A book that spans two families and three generations for over half a century (but which has “very little that is autobiographical”) and which, explains the author, “comes from many memories, but above all from stories, from oral narration which in Capurso, as in every Italian town, is particularly flourishing, is based on an ancient and wise tradition”. “Tolstoy said – he adds – that to be universal you just need to tell your own village. Ultimately it’s always the part for the whole, and I would say that I know this ‘part’ quite well.”

“Santa Barbara” revolves around the navel of the Apulian province, but it is the author himself who defines the novel “profoundly Italian“. It is “for the work on the language, which I hope I have conducted sufficiently well”. “Every literary work on the language dialogues with the territory – geographical, cultural, sentimental, emotional, civic, spiritual – in whose cradle that language was born and continues to evolve“, adds Lagioia. In the book, he explains further “I tried to work on the so-called microhistory, trying to make my own the lessons of Elsa Morante, Carlo Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Ernesto De Martino and all those authors who, starting from minimal events, have told another story of our country, very far from the official one and often more interesting”.

The success of “The city of the living” and youth distress

Yet Lagioia had dealt with an “official” story in the previous book, “The city of the living“, reconstruction of themurder of Luca Varanikilled in Rome by Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato on 4 March 2016. An extraordinary success that first became a podcast (told by Lagioia himself, “a way to tell the same story with another expressive toolvery far from literature, yet close to its origins, given that literature is born oral”) and then a 2026 film by Edoardo Gabbriellini.

“I appreciated – says Lagioia – Gabbriellini’s choice of deviate from the point of view of the book, seeking one of its own, very authorial“. The film, in fact, tells the story from the victim’s point of view, a 23-year-old boy tortured for hours before dying. A story, the one written by Lagioia in that case, which in addition to analyzing a brutal murder also investigates the unease of the people involved, killer and victim. And these days we find ourselves talking about youthful distressalthough for very different events, at the basis of both the peaceful demonstrations and the more violent ones that occurred throughout Italy in recent weeks. “I think that these protests – notes Lagioia – establish the failure of an entire political class. Not only this government but the Italian state has not dealt with two enormous issues in the last 30 years: the South, and the young people. Everything important that you remove, or pretend to forget, ends up coming on you.”

The management of the Turin Book Fair

Alongside his literary production, Lagioia held the position of director of the Turin Book Fair. An experience”beautiful and informative” but also “very tiring, and for this reason I doubt I want to go back to those stress levels“. “It is a period in which I receive joy from literary writing – he concludes -, but I am proud to have contributed to saving and then relaunching the Salon“.