This is an unfinished novel that Sergio Guerra allowed me to read at the beginning of 2019. He had talked about it more than once, and I wanted to look into the possibility of having it published. He played it down – it was a juvenile work, it was not finished, it had no worth, it was written in English, there were mistakes – but in the end he was pleased to salvage those pages from a distant past which was so dear to him. The story takes place in the 1980s – the years that followed bombs and repression, the years of disco music, of the first imported TV series, of yuppies, of junk-TV for those of us who stayed in Italy. But for Sergio, who speaks in the first person here, they were the golden years of Melbourne, of the search for a new citizenship in order to escape military service (compulsory until 2004 in Italy), of musical experimentations that would lead him to be a composer and a songwriter, as well as the beating soul of several local bands – from the Fratelli Tessuto [Tessuto Brothers] to the Soul Fix, up to the Orchestra Orientabile [Orientable Orchestra] – once back in Italy, this time to stay, after his mother’s sudden death after being run down on a pedestrian crossing.
