The writer crafted a novel meticulous in its facts, chronology, and historical accuracy. At times, the work demonstrates precision and rigor in dates, names, and documented events. Yet it achieves something greater: it chronicles light and color, notes and sounds, thoughts and emotions. The author employs Love—as understood in the Florentine dolce stil novo—to narrate the bond between a father and his son. This love is unique and inimitable, beautiful and incomparable, transcending any disability.
Every father harbors a particular tenderness for his most fragile child. Tata Antonio thus loves his son Mariniello with special and intense devotion, inversely proportional to his own education and social standing. After lengthy reflection and hesitation, he decides—with love and for love—the course of his child's existence. This son is loved all the more because illness has rendered him disabled. Their communication isn't based merely on empathy, mental understanding, instinctive union, natural attraction, or even telepathic resonance. It is something far deeper.
Their symbiosis resembles that of mushrooms and forest floor, determining growth in the shade of great trees. They are each other's humus; each needs the other. Each one stimulates the other's growth, even from a distance. They exist in the same relationship as earth that provides nourishment, warmth, and shelter to a seed that grows and bears fruit.
Disability does not limit them—it binds them together more strongly than simple love between father and son ever could. With "Mariniello," Stefano Prizio reminds us with Tuscan grace that Love is our father, the sentiment to which all of us, without exception, owe the good we are and the best we can become. No disability holds sway against this Father who "always kept the boat steady through every storm, and everyone leaned on him in life's tempests."
TITOLO: MARINIELLO, ROMANZO
AUTORE: Stefano Prizio
EDIZIONE: 2021 Delta 3