LA CHIAVE DI BERLINO

A European story of impressive lucidity, a coming-of age memoir, the story of a city.

"No other city is so full of emptiness: Berlin's emptiness is filled with the baggage of those who live there, the holes and absences left by history and a century of two dictatorships. There is the transgressive Berlin of raves and sex parties; the creative Berlin of artists and designers attracted by the cheap rents of the nineties; and the nostalgic Berlin of expatriates from across the globe, beginning with the large Italian community, seeking a new life in Berlin, or a break from the past, from happiness or from oblivion. "I came to Berlin in 2009. I still live there. I left, I came back. Over time, I had different reasons to stay, more or less valid, more or less vulnerable to winter harshness and nostalgia". Vincenzo Latronico moved to Berlin in his early twenties, for a reason that is not clear even to him and that only thirteen years and a book later will begin to come into focus. What is certain is that, at least in the beginning, the city's call is too strong: full of voids in which to grow and shadows in which to hide, Berlin is the city in which to be young in the 1920s. By recounting its complexity (the still-burning historical memory of two dictatorships, the real estate market increasingly given over to speculation, the nightlife between emancipation and commodification, the gentrification that the author denounces even in the knowledge that he is an agent of it), Latronico writes a true coming-of-age novel, personal and generational at the same time.