Finish high school. Find work. Build a home for the small, deeply loved, fragile family that depends on him. Pay for the essential care his premature daughter Maria will need. This is the dream of an ordinary life that Rosario Altieri, barely an adult, guards fiercely and fights for with every ounce of strength he has.
The protagonist born from Dario Levantino's pen in his new novel The Violence of My Love (Fazi), embodies a hero waging epic battle against a fate that offers no redemption. Rosario's dream sits embedded in the thorns of a beloved place—because it is "ours" and "no one can speak ill of it" unless they live there—the harsh, impossibly difficult neighborhood of Brancaccio in Palermo. Like a precious stone, Rosario shields his dream with everything he is, even as he stands completely defenseless: guarding it, loving it, is the only ray of light in an horizon that seems to offer nothing else.
We meet Rosario on the brink of his eighteenth birthday. In days, he will leave a group home—a cold roof, barely a family—where he was placed after his young mother fell ill and died. Then Anna returns. She is barely an adult herself, "with belly swollen with love and clothes grown tight." Months earlier, she had followed the family abroad, saying what seemed a permanent goodbye to the boy who had captured her heart with a tender devotion. That love had made her pregnant. Her family threw her out for refusing to abort. From that moment forward, they are alone, with nothing except each other: Rosario, Anna, and soon fragile little Maria, with Jonathan, a stray dog who will never leave her side.
It is the parish priest, Father Giovanni, who offers them shelter—first Rosario, then Anna, then newborn Maria. A cramped storage room in the church becomes their refuge, since his own home already housed the children of the neighborhood's sex workers. The real power belongs to the neighborhood boss, who pulls the strings of every resident's life in Brancaccio and demands respect, deference, and absolute obedience—even for basic rights like public housing that should be theirs by law.
Their only true refuge is an overturned boat on a rough stretch of beach overlooking Brancaccio's sea—a horizon finally free and filled with possibility. A secret place they cleaned together, which Anna furnished and made beautiful, where they escape the squalor of the present, dream of a possible future, and feed on each other's love; but also where Rosario reads aloud from books that, he recognizes, have "saved my life… kept me from becoming like everyone else… showed me that understanding others means understanding yourself… taught me that good and evil exist in every circumstance, and that our duty is to answer for our actions at the tribunal of our conscience before sleep." Rosario loves the humanities. This is why he chose a classical high school over a trade institute. Yet he finds little that is human in his life. Marked by his neighborhood and by a father imprisoned for drug offenses, he has been held back, deemed out of place by most of his teachers at a school that is fundamentally indifferent to students like him—a school deaf to qualities that cannot be easily measured, isolated by his classmates. The environment is entirely hostile except for one precarious philosophy teacher who genuinely cares about his situation and recognizes Rosario's gift for developing his own ideas about the subjects discussed in class.
Rosario has few anchors, but they are essential. Fragile and yet strong, they never stop steadying his conscience: his mother Maria, dead from anorexia, who wanted her son to study; his maternal grandfather, whom he never knew but from whom he inherited his name and his natural gift as a goalkeeper of character; Father Giovanni, who "without getting lost in liturgies" taught him that "understanding what good is may be impossible, but recognizing evil is not: when we do, we feel guilt and shame inside"; and Anna, his love "forever," and little Maria—whose grave illness never becomes a reason to flee—who represent the tangible desires he must care for with tenderness and resolve. Around this luminous core, too many, far too many betrayals: a school unable to offer real opportunity to every student; an inept and corrupt bureaucracy; healthcare barely sufficient for those who cannot afford more; social services and employment agencies that look away.
This novel, with its neorealist qualities, provokes many kinds of reflection: sociological, educational, psychological, religious, political, anthropological. But it is the profoundly human dimension that leaves its mark and compels each reader to reckon with their own restless heart—that tribunal of conscience Rosario invoked—and ask themselves what role they play in the world: the apparent, human absurdity of a boy whose stubborn, genuine strength (the only violence the title evokes) is devoted to caring for and loving what has been entrusted to him, and who remains capable of recognizing the world's suffering in his own. So absurd that he wins the war despite losing every battle.