Cardinal Ravasi tweets the new novel by Giovanni Grasso: "A small flower of humanity in the violence of the First World War"

Cardinal Ravasi tweets the new novel by Giovanni Grasso: "A small flower of humanity in the violence of the First World War"


The photo of the novel on a wooden desk and a few dense words: «In the desert, in the absurdity and violence of the First World War, a small flower of humanity, respect and generosity blossoms among the soldiers». So the cardinal Gianfranco Ravasipresident emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, in a tweet promotes «the surprising story of Lieutenant Giardina's secretthe latest novel by Giovanni Grasso».

The Italian biblical scholar, theologian and Hebraist thus invites you to read the Roman journalist, writer and essayist, director of the press office of the Presidency of the Republic since 2015.

The plot of the novel
But what is the story of the novel? Luce Di Giovanni is a determined, enterprising young woman, architect in an important studio in Paris, who she made herself after a troubled adolescence. Marco Grillo is a solitary journalist, a bit eccentric, gifted with great irony, who lives in Rome, surrounded and haunted by family memories. Two restless souls destined, like parallel lines, never to meet. But when Luce returns to Italy, to her home country just outside Rome, to attend the funeral of her beloved grandmother Antonietta, she crosses paths with Marco's resigned existence. In fact, before she died, her grandmother entrusted her with a task: to discover the burial place of her father, the infantryman Antonio Crespi, presumed dead in 1916 in the Dolomites during the raging battles against the Austrians. The first archive searches yield no results.

The clue that reveals a secret
The only clue is a letter from Lieutenant Gaetano Giardina, Crespi's company commander, announcing his death to his family "as a hero". Thanks to her obstinacy, Luce manages to learn that the only living descendant of the lieutenant is Marco Grillo. She tracks down the journalist, who makes her grandfather's war diary available to her. But some pages, the decisive ones, have mysteriously disappeared. Only a trip to Sicily, to the old Grillo house, will be able to penetrate the thick fog that surrounds the end of soldier Crespi. And she will reveal to Marco a distressing, intimate secret that weighs on her family. The past that resurfaces, full of twists and turns, will force Luce and Marco to come to terms with the present and to question themselves about a new, possible future.





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