With this new episode of Archivi d’Affetto, we will immerse ourselves in the story of a city through the portrait of a very special book. Turin, then and now, has become the protagonist of a layered narrative, a mirror of places, characters and atmospheres. If in the previous episodes we explored the visions of Leonardo Mosso and Laura Castagno, the culture of commerce embodied by Alda Farinella’s Jana store, and the civil commitment in the teaching of Piergiorgio Tosoni, this time our trip goes directly onto the streets and squares, also known as the “living rooms”, of the city.

Archivi d ‘Affetto dedicates this fourth episode to the unconditional love of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini for Turin. We have chosen to do so, showing the original lists and notebooks, written during the gestation of their first novel: The Sunday Woman.  After years of work, published in March 1972 for the first time, and considered a detective story for superficial custom, this work contains much more. In fact, we can find  the complex representation of a city invested, like few others, by migratory flows from the south of the country, but also a catalogue of signs, detected and decoded with extraordinary abundance, of the contradictions of the bourgeois society shaken by changes.

The authors outline a pungent reading, in an ironic key, of the character and sociolinguistic traits of a dozen Turin citizens involved in the investigation of the two murders through a close correlation between toponymy and name of the characters.

A gallery of figures that become the key to understanding a certain Turin spirit: sophisticated and worldly, but also crossed by tensions and ambiguities. Through them, the city reveals itself in its dual nature as a physical and imaginary place, a crossroads of identities and collective projections. According to an interpretative reading of the city and its territory, an urban planning articulated through a series of strongly characterized places, from its conflicts to immutable traditions, interiors, exteriors, clichés and stereotypes.

Fruttero & Lucentini were two craftsmen, above all. They worked with time, with space, and with images that came to them who knows how or that they built with patience of imagination, and also with those images that by precise calculation would have come to the minds of their readers. But they worked with words, above all: sounds, rhythms, variations, architecture of a sentence, a page, a novel.

But mostly, F&L worked while having fun. Their architectures were even more immaterial than the materials they were made of, and this happened because their novels – starting with the first, The Sunday Woman – were the result of years and years of strenuous discussions on the broad lines of the story or on the details of a description, on the tone of a joke or on the colour of an adjective. Years spent discussing what and how to write before writing a single word.

Similarly, while not being a brand, despite the use of the commercial “&” in their name, F&L had worked together for fifteen years before publishing The Sunday Woman.