Shortlisted for Premio Campiello 2022
Shortlisted for Premio Viareggio Répaci 2022

“Il tuffatore is a narrative mosaic in which personal memories, interviews, quotations and sensations forge a picture of an Italy that no longer exists.” la Repubblica

“Stancanelli retraces Italian history from the post-war period to the present day through the characters and events of national and international politics. Its digressive structure relies on intimate memories, linked to a beloved friend who died too soon, and on the enumeration of data and technical explanations, with a lexicon that is therefore mobile, very rich. But, above all, it relies on literature.” Rosella Postorino, tuttolibri

Elegance and passion for risk coexist in the diver. As a young boy, Raul Gardini had learned how to dive from the Ravenna pier. Handsome, seductive, always tanned, scion of one of the most powerful Italian industrial families, he had both the ambition and unscrupulousness needed to change the rules of the game. He was driven by desire, by an obsession to go straighter and faster towards solving any problem. At any cost.

Elena Stancanelli recounts the parable of Raul Gardini as the novel of a vanished generation, made up of men defeated by history, proud of their courage, arrogant, ready to risk to the point of gambling. Men who were hard to resist. The story of an entrepreneur who left Ravenna to conquer the world enters the life and memories of the writer, it intertwines with the songs of Fabrizio De André, moves against the backdrop of a provincial Romagna among Fellini’s ghosts, heroic myths, sudden rises and ruinous falls. All around there are the dreams of glory of a country that looks to the man of providence at first with hope, and then with suspicion. Until everything collapses. And the diver remains up there, alone, suspended in flight between life and death.