UOMINI DI CAVALLI

A much-awaited debut novel: UOMINI DI CAVALLI by Pietro Santetti, a young talented writer, who used to compete in show-jumping rides.

Lucio is nineteen and he is what in the field of horsemanship is called a jumping rider. Horses are all his life. Along with famous riders who have made history. And with one best friend, Ferro, who shares his same dreams of victory. In view of such ambition, Lucio's father is only a hindrance. All around them, there is a pressuring world, made of harsh competitions and often shady business, of wealthy investors and their daughters, moving under the watchful eye of trainers and horse traders. Everything seems within reach for the two talented friends, even sex, and girls seem all too easy to conquer. Agonism ignites dreams of glory in both Lucio and Ferro, and a growing, anxious desire to emancipate from their families, from the roughness of small-town-life. However, it doesn't take much for them to fall victim of manipulative schemes and compromises of a ruthless environment, in which harassment is not so uncommon, just as the violence on animals (often seen as needed). The balance is disrupted and Lucio, having cut ties with his father and his lifelong friend, moves to Switzerland to take a big leap and go all out, even with love. Can the distance between Lucio and his bonds ever be cut again? Will his early successes be enough to give a solid foundation to his goals? In the face of the future, even youth seems to lose its drive. This is an extraordinary story about "men of horses", a world unfamiliar and unexplored to most readers, which here, precisely because of its singularity, becomes a metaphor for the struggle for life, and makes you feel the grimace of fate in the wounded beauty of a horse. No one better than Pietro Santetti, a talented rider turned writer, could tell us this story, with such a passion.