Short Stories

Life, as is often the case, had not been too kind to Alessandro Cominardi, aka Alex. Like all of us, Alex is a good lad, though. A really nice guy, and by no means stupid. A little inadequate for...

  The first thing she does is turn off the radio. The sky is black outside the car. It oppresses things, it crushes them. The young man turns the ignition key off, the engine falls asleep, and he breaks the silence as...

She looked up into the sky. The light was escaping at its edges and the moon was just becoming visible. No stars yet. There was a narrowing of the path in front and the crowd slowed down as people...

Nadia got up at half past six, four minutes before the alarm clock would usually go off. She walked into the white ceramic tiled bathroom, turned the shower tap on, took her pyjamas off and threw herself under the...

  On the first days of February 1941 the desert climate was already hot. The dispatch riders, two bersaglieri covered with sand as far as their eyes, reached us at dawn in our camp, north of Antelat, on the rocky...

Luciano was slowly climbing the stairs of his house, a typical 70’s building located in the suburbs. It was seven o’clock on a warm summer evening, one of those evenings that he would have once spent outdoors, drinking a...

With a mixture of concern and dismay, Riccardo gazed at the marble and red brick entrance to the cemetery, framed by four slightly crooked cypress trees. The village graveyard was not at all solemn: if it weren’t for the...

The poplar had to be pollarded. Actually it should have been cut down because the pioppolo fungus that had been eating it for two years and had meant that that summer the leaves had not grown as shiny as...

I climb the creaking wooden stairs, moving cautiously up the steps leading to the attic. I had not been there for years; every time I visited my mother it was only for dinner, for an errand, for a quick...

  It had not been that easy to come to terms with it: too often his days would end too quickly. In the beginning, it didn’t even seem that this was the real problem.  Time, as is it known, marches...