Dreaming of the plane trees on Via Montenapoleone

From San Francisco, Enrico Rotelli reported in "La Lettura" an interesting detail regarding the current US bestseller, "Theo da Golden e la forma della felicità" by Allen Levi (Salani, 441 pp., 20 euros): In translating the novel, Alessandra Casella altered the original text, which listed, amongst Europe’s wide, tree-lined boulevards – alongside the Champs-Élysées and the Ramblas – the much narrower and by no means leafy Via Montenapoleone. This is not merely yet another confirmation of the superficial understanding of Europe held overseas, nor of how some bestsellers are written by setting their plots on Google Maps – as E. L. James, who had grown up in Buckinghamshire and had never even seen Seattle through a telescope – nor of the fact that Milan now exists as an imaginary place in the minds of foreigners suffering from tourism overload just as much as in those of Rete 4 viewers, who are convinced that simply stepping out of the house is enough to be gutted on the spot by the Maranza. By taking refuge in the more generic phrase ‘the great streets of Milan’, the translator did the opposite of what Raimundo Benvindo Silva did – the editor who, in José Saramago’s “The History of the Siege of Lisbon” (Feltrinelli, 352 pp., 14 euros) inserted a mischievous ‘not’ into the sentence about the Crusaders coming to the aid of the Portuguese against the Moors: in doing so, he created a parallel world in which Lisbon remained the Arab city of al-Isbunah, or in which, at the very least, Afonso Henriques had to work much harder to earn the title of ‘rei fundador’.

I know that Alessandra Casella’s professionalism prevented her from glossing over Allen Levi’s inaccuracy, prompting her to leave it to the reader to determine whether, in Milan (where there are 240,000 trees), the avenue comparable to the Champs-Élysées and the Ramblas is Corso Lodi or Via Lazzaro Papi; yet part of me would have liked it if, at least in this summer’s bestseller, as in Saramago’s parallel world, majestic plane trees and shady lime trees had suddenly sprung up along Via Montenapoleone. They would have uprooted the large cars parked haphazardly, obscured the overly glittering shop windows and allowed everyone to flock there in search of a bit of coolness.