Molly Recommends 2 Books Set in Italy

“A Saint Reading,” circa 1470Credit…Bartolomeo Vivarini Hold your breath/Make a wish/Count to three/Come with me and you’ll be/In a world of pure imagination. Instead of touring a surreal chocolate manufacturer today, we’re wishing ourselves to someplace much realer and saltier, which is … Italy! I was fortunate enough to travel to lovely Parma last month on assignment for this newspaper. That article isn’t print-ready yet, but I will alert you when it’s out. Until then, we can armchair-travel together through the power of text. The only thing I read while in Parma was a phrasebook that proved indispensable for ordering cornetti and requesting napkins after being aerially struck by an Italian pigeon. But the real gold was what I read before the trip, in anticipation. Buon divertimento, Molly Dino is an Italian layabout who dawdles through life on a steady cash drip from his wealthy mother. Sometimes he paints. Mostly he experiences boredom, which he defines as “the obscure consciousness that between myself and external things there was no relationship” — so, as he defines it, less a mood or an affect than an intermittent sensory disorder. Interesting! The boredom is dispelled when Dino begins an affair with an enigmatic teenager named Cecilia. Her erotic enchantments provide the painter with a frequent and vigorous form of “contact,” shall we say, with reality. All is well until Cecilia’s eye roves to a new man and Dino goes insane with jealousy. Amid manic bouts of spying and interrogation, he discovers a new stage of boredom: that of helpless repetition and obsession. Moravia’s prose is formal here, even starched. Remember the kid who sat next to you in math class and primly guarded his test paper from cheating eyes with a bent elbow? That is the way Moravia writes — except that you, reader, have been granted omniscient privileges to sit on his shoulder and copy all the answers! Read if you like: Philip Roth’s novel “The Dying Animal” or the Yeats poem from which Roth mined his title, the painter Lucian Freud, ironing clothes Available from: A good bookstore or library, […]

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