Cencio

Fabio Geda’s Cencio is a historical coming-of-age novel built around the catastrophic Florence flood of November 1966. It alternates between the experiences of thirteen-year-old Sergio “Cencio” Alderighi, a working-class Florentine boy whose family loses almost everything in the disaster, and the diary of Nicola Sammichele, a privileged twenty-year-old law student who travels from Taranto to join the young volunteers later remembered as Florence’s “mud angels.” Their brief friendship changes the direction of both lives, although Cencio does not discover the full extent of Nicola’s intervention until almost fifty years later.

The novel opens in June 2014. Sergio is now an elderly architect living with his wife, Letizia. Their children have left home, and the couple have settled into a quiet domestic routine. One evening a woman named Beatrice Sammichele telephones. Her father, Nicola, has recently died, and while sorting his belongings she found a black notebook inside an envelope marked “for Sergio.” The notebook contains Nicola’s record of his days in Florence during the flood and repeatedly mentions a boy called Cencio Alderighi. Sergio confirms that he was that boy.

He initially suggests that Beatrice preserve the notebook for Nicola’s children and grandchildren, but she insists that her father wanted Sergio to have it. There is information inside concerning Sergio’s family, and Beatrice believes he must read it. When the parcel arrives, Sergio waits until Letizia is asleep before opening it. On its first yellowed page Nicola has written “Firenze ’66.” The novel then moves back to the morning of 4 November 1966.