“I write about the imperfection of love to exalt its beauty.” The new novel L’Affaire Casati Stampa by Davide Amante is featured at BookCity Milano. Surpisingly, we will still have to wait a long time for the English edition.
In front of a fascinated audience, right in the center of Milan, where the famous private clinic “Città di Milano” once stood, Davide Amante talked to the audience about the passionate, unconventional and dramatic love story between Anna Fallarino and the Marquis Camillo Casati Stampa.
The Affaire Casati Stampa is still not available in English translation, we hope to see it soon in American and UK bookstores. Voted by by our Book Review as the best novel of 2021, achieving bestselling numbers in online sales just over eight months after its release in Italy, The Casati Stampa Affair is a novel that leaves no one indifferent.
Many people during BookCity Milan were holding in their hands the colorful cover of the Affaire Casati Stampa, featuring the Marquis’s mistress Anna, whose cover portrait is vaguely reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s pop art.
The novel investigates a love affair that caused a scandal in the late 1960s and ended so tragically, to the point of being described by major magazines of the time as Italy’s biggest scandal. The story echoes still today in articles like CNN’s https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-zannone-orgy-isle/index.html which however don’t really find correspondence in the story narrated by the novel. The Marquis Casati Stampa, one of the richest and most famous families in Milan (one of his villas was later sold to Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister, Villa San Martino in Arcore) fell in love with the beautiful Anna Fallarino, 13 years younger. The two had a voyeuristic and passionate relationship that ended in murder-suicide out of jealousy. Davide Amante reconstructs, through the investigations of a magistrate and a police officer, all the stages and events of this anti-conformist couple, in an impeccably styled novel.
As the author says: “I am in search of the human soul, and it is in despair, madness and in the most unconventional stories that you can find the great breath of life.”
A novel that is featured at BookCity Milano, the Italian event dedicated to books and reading, which this year celebrates its first ten years. Approximately 1,400 face-to-face events are scheduled in more than 260 locations, alongside the online interventions.
Davide Amante was born in Milan in 1970. In addition to The Affaire Casati Stampa (2021), he published The Guardian of the Stars – The journey of Anais and the wind (2019) available in English and translated in six countries, Il Dossier Wallenberg (2016) also available in English as The Wallenberg Dossier and on the verge of becoming a feature film, Altair (2014) the best-selling novel about the sea and travel the ranked as top seller in Italy.
https://www.davideamante.com/en
