Something is rotten in Pomerania

Forty years ago, Andrea De Carlo emerged as the embodiment of a distinct type of writer: the ‘Italian-yet-international’ author in search of a country home, young and successful, and perpetually fleeing Milan. Today, something similar can be found in Vincenzo Latronico, whose latest novel, Una splendida rovina, has just hit the bookshops, published by Einaudi just as De Carlo’s early works were. Latronico, too, who was born in 1984, is Milanese (albeit born in Rome) but rather stateless; his characters are nothing like those of the current Italian literary canon – such as the wise grandmother sitting beneath the ancient carob tree of wisdom – but instead roam the most contemporary Europe, post-Erasmus and post-Schengen, much like De Carlo’s characters in 1980s California.

Both write books in a language full of foreign names that already seems to have been written in English, and they deal with friends and couples set against a backdrop of the countryside and the city, as well as a great deal of architecture. Milan is always the place to escape from; Milan, now as then, is no good. For De Carlo, it was mainly the pollution and the climate – including the political climate – that weighed heavily; now, forty years on, with climate change, the fog has disappeared and perhaps even some of the smog too, thanks to the cycle paths, and the main issue is rather the sky-high prices. 

Where the similarities end: it seems to me that De Carlo became famous in Italy almost immediately, whilst Latronico is more acclaimed abroad. Furthermore, whilst the characters in the former’s work often dreamt of California and sought refuge between Tuscany and Umbria, Latronico’s America is, rather, Germany. There had already been La chiave di Berlino, published three years ago, a fine emotional and architectural exploration of the German capital – a European capital which, for many years, has combined the ‘plas’ (as they would say in Milan) of major cities (history, freedom, human and social complexity) with extremely low rents. The city of choice for a post-Erasmus, post-Isherwood generation equipped with free roaming and 5G, Berlin was also the setting for Le perfezioni, the 2022 novel that brought Latronico international success: an English edition in the prestigious Fitzcarraldo blue; a finalist for the International Booker Prize, reviewed in the Washington Post, “the writer who knows what Millennials want” according to a very 1980s-style profile in the New York Times. The result is that in Milan, not only is it now impossible to find a flat, but there are writers who want to kill themselves out of envy (though they can’t throw themselves out of the window because they live in the basement).

However, even Berlin is no longer an option; prices have risen there too, the good times are over, and it’s time to find other solutions. Hence the search for a ‘splendid ruin’. The new book tells the story of a couple of ‘digital nomads’ – a writer and a concert organiser – who met in a sort of commune-sanctuary run by a charismatic old photographer in north-eastern France, and who want to find a splendid setting at a low price, so they set off in search of a colossal ruin in the former GDR – a book that’s highly topical, not least because of the AfD’s neo-Nazi issues – and there to do what is known, as only in Italy, as ‘smart working’. They therefore buy, for a song, a gigantic old house in need of complete renovation, with a huge park, and neighbours who see them as an exotic attraction.

A Splendid Ruin is also a practical guide to property investment. Up to this point, the hunt, the selection and the purchase of the manor house and the tools to renovate it more or less follow the script of any of the videos that arrive on our phones every day, for property enthusiasts: couples, singles or friends who say, ‘We’ve done something crazy – we’ve bought this’ – insert property type (villa in Brianza, farmhouse in Alessandria, trullo in Puglia, castle in Bordeaux), in short, you name it – manor houses with impossible floor areas and states of disrepair, but in the Instagram narrative the process is always described with enthusiasm, featuring workers who are generally fit and muscular, their physiques generously on display for the phone camera, coffee brewed over a brazier at dawn, affectionate pets, a rediscovery of the seasons and a slower pace of life; in short, a turning point (though the business model remains a mystery; once the restoration is complete, will they find other ruins to fix up? Will they become brand ambassadors for building products? Will they open a B&B?). Latronico’s novel also has its romantic and adventurous side, with love affairs that begin and end, and artists, hippies and post-hippies amidst makeshift campsites (with a hint of Tondelli’s style) and yoga masters who emerge from nowhere and turn up at your door early in the morning, and beer – lots of beer. And even a big dog.

However, when it comes to housing, everything that can go wrong does: chimneys in need of rebuilding, dishonest tradesmen, expensive septic tanks, asbestos, boastful chimney sweeps, an estate agent who’s half treasure hunter, half con artist, and even Hausschwamm, an aggressive fungus that preys on the timber of the house’s beams from the inside, jeopardising the structure’s stability.

A novel that serves as a warning to all of us, then, who compulsively scour Immobiliare.it, eyeing up abandoned ruins in the most unlikely places at ridiculously low prices, dreaming of renovations and DIY projects and ‘escapes from the city’ – not least to escape the ever-hotter and longer summers – heading off to the famous ‘inland areas’ for a life ‘in the villages’ and on high peaks – will 900 metres above sea level be enough to beat the heat? – and we simply refuse to accept that if a terraced house costs one euro (or even twenty thousand or thirty thousand – in short, always far too little), there must be a reason, and that if the village is deserted, there must be a reason. In Alessandria, but also in Pomerania – oh well.