Liberi tutti is a school-gate melodrama disguised as a confession, and its biggest problem is that it thinks its own frantic moral cleverness is enough to carry a plot. The narrator is Titti, a first-grade teacher at the Rocco Carbone primary school, speaking to investigators after an incident involving her class. She insists she can explain “how things went,” because she knows not only the children but also their parents, whom she calls “bambini-grandi,” adult-children still deformed by their own childhood wounds. This framing is immediately too pleased with itself. Titti’s voice is breathless, intrusive, sentimental, judgmental, funny in flashes, and then smothering for pages. She keeps promising to get to “the facts,” but the book delays those facts so aggressively that the suspense starts to feel like a gimmick.
The story begins with Miryam Manin Piperno, a timid six-year-old who approaches Titti’s keyboard during preparations for the Christmas play and plays “Yesterday.” Titti interprets Miryam’s anxiety through the metaphor of an invisible referee blowing a whistle in the girl’s head: every classroom activity becomes a competition she fears losing. Miryam’s musical gift connects her to her father, Toni Manin, a former Venetian music teacher and failed rock pianist from a band called the Black Blot. Toni is now a stay-at-home father, having left teaching when his wife, Rachele Piperno, became the powerful head of WeWaka, a humanitarian foundation. Their arrangement is supposed to be progressive: Rachele works, Toni raises Esther, Miryam, and David. But of course it is rotten underneath. Toni is lonely, sexually deadened, and talking to an AI app at night because he has lost his friends and his adult self. Rachele is efficient, ambitious, Jewish, commanding, and emotionally unavailable, a woman who treats her children as another project she does not quite know how to touch.
Titti’s first major interference is to recommend the podcast Saldi to Toni. The podcast is hosted by Adele Colavita, single mother of Frida and professional analyst of the “M.E.I.C.,” the heterosexual male in crisis. Adele has conceived Frida alone through assisted reproduction in Spain, and she has raised her as a total mother-daughter unit: no father, no partner, no real boundary. Frida sleeps in Adele’s bed, shares her life, and exists almost as Adele’s little spouse. The book clearly wants this to be both tender and alarming, but it states the alarm so often that it becomes schematic. Frida is brilliant, blasé, possessive, and shut off from the other children until Adele begins to fall in love.
