Una splendida rovina

Una splendida rovina is an autofictional novel about a writer-narrator who, in his thirties, tries to escape the stalled ruins of his own life by buying an actual ruin in the countryside with a woman he has just fallen in love with. The book begins with the sentence that contains the whole plot: “We wanted a different life, like everyone, so we bought a splendid ruin in the countryside. This really happened. The rest, almost.”

The narrator is an Italian writer and translator who has been “living around” for years: not fully homeless, but not rooted anywhere either. He moves between cheap residencies, temporary sublets, remote-work colonies and friends’ houses, telling himself this is freedom while knowing, underneath, that it is also avoidance. He cannot afford big-city life, his literary ambitions have stalled, and he is postponing any adult decision by calling drift a lifestyle.

In 2017, while reporting on a remote-work colony in Lithuania, he hears from a Norwegian accountant about a strange former monastery in north-eastern France. It sounds impossible: a huge eighteenth-century building with more than a hundred rooms, shared kitchens, a cinema, dance and music studios, libraries, saunas, a deconsecrated church, peacocks, a private forest, and an improvised anarchic structure where artists and remote workers can stay cheaply. When a sublet in Marseille falls through, the narrator writes to the monastery and goes there.