Satelliti

Emanuele Bosso’s Satelliti is a dual-period coming-of-age novel about Filippo and Tommaso, two boys whose friendship develops into an intense, ambiguous love that neither is able to define or fully escape. The title describes them as celestial bodies trapped within the same gravitational field: continually approaching and withdrawing, apparently capable of moving independently but never truly free from the other. From its opening, Filippo explains that death eventually altered their shared trajectory and pulled the scattered threads of their lives back towards the same place.

The prologue is set in December 2006. Filippo, now thirty-six, has returned to Fassiano, the remote mountain village he left as a young man. He walks through the snow to the detached storage room behind his grandmother Sandra’s house, known to him and Tommaso simply as “the room at the back.” It was their refuge, the site of their greatest intimacy and the repository of the secrets that shaped their lives. Sitting on its steps, Filippo remembers the only photograph ever taken of them together, shortly before their relationship was destroyed.

The main narrative then returns to 21 August 1985. Fifteen-year-old Filippo is travelling from Rome to Fassiano with his mother, Sara. His father, Vincenzo Botteri, has been absent for three years, and the family has finally reached the point at which they can no longer pretend he will return or continue supporting them. With nowhere else to live, Sara has been forced to return to the village she fled while pregnant fifteen years earlier. Filippo resents losing Rome, his friends and his familiar life, while Sara is frightened by the prospect of placing herself again under the authority of her mother.