The story of a house in Tangier protected or perhaps haunted by a duende, the spirit of its former owner. The fascination of a world that is coming to an end and begging to be told.

Diego is the duende, the whimsical spirit protector of Tebarek Allah, the old house that the narrator buys on the spur of the moment while Tangier, besieged by speculators, is changing, and which becomes the festive refuge of extravagant expats, collectors, decrepit ladies, weary adventurers. The story of don Diego Mullor Heredia, the man before the spirit, an artist with a pen, is interwoven with the stories of those who have passed through: the beautiful and damned young people of the beat generation, the poet friend who buys eighty-six pairs of yellow babouches to make them gifts and then abandons them, Mohammed, the deaf-mute gardener with the gift of gratitude. A magical and sensual home, where plants and stones come to life to bring back the essence of our ties with history, spirits and nature. This place becomes the gateway to Tangier, a mythical city between Europe and Africa, East and West, a land without a master, a refuge for poets and smugglers. An adventure novel, where time seems suspended and magical, and iconic and anonymous characters brush against each other. Melancholic and ironic, Arabesco takes us to a distant, archaic and mysterious world, full of ancestral cultures and modern contradictions. Umberto Pasti, journalist, writer and garden designer, divides his time between Milan and Morocco. He is the author of Giardini e no (Bompiani, 2010), Animali e no (Bompiani 2026), Perduto in Paradiso (Bompiani, 2018) and Un giardino atlantico (Bompiani, 2019), among others.