arturo's island

Arturo's island is the second novel by Elsa Morante published in the 1957 and winner the "Premio Strega" of that year.

In 1962 the novel inspired the eponymous film directed by Damiano Damiani.

Procida Island, year 1938.

Arturo Gerace, an orphan of mother, dead in giving birth to her grows almost in solitude on the beaches of his native island, bearing the weight of a bright name like that of a star name.

The father, Wilhelm Gerace, half German and half Neapolitan, is a figure vain and absent in the son's life: for work is forced to leave the islandoften, so Arturo spends his childhood to idolize him by inventing stories about his travels, much to live his sporadic visits as the gifts of heaven.

Child Arturo is a Warrior: he drinks goat's milk, he has almost no clothes or food, but is free to run in every corner of that terrestrial paradise, between beaches and cliffs, hungry for readings knights and daydreams.

He has only two friends: the dog, Immacolatella, and a child, Silvestro.

For the rest he lives in the dilapadated family palace another inexhaustible source of fairytale vicissitudes and immense loneliness.

With the growth Arturo discovers the feminine world but also the harsh reality of disillusionment, especially against to he father who is no longer able to venerate as a time.

It turns out, moreover, that Wilhelm is a homosexual who lives in the overwhelming memory of a dispotic mother, which allows to marry a woman just to mask himself its true nature.

It reveals the reality: the Eden of Procida became too narrow for the young 16-year-old, come the time to go beyond the borders to begin the adventures, those of the real life and not dreamed.

Arturo abandons his childhood, his paradise, his island, to start enlisted as a soldier to the Mainland.