How do you write about the compelling need to write, to translate reality into narrative, while also writing about someone who decided not to write? As Italo Calvino observed in his back cover note for the original 1983 edition of Daniele Del Giudice’s debut novel, Lo stadio di Wimbledon, this is a book “about a young man who, some fifteen years after the death of a certain individual, goes in search of friends the man knew in his youth, who are now quite old” (2025: 133). Who that man was (the Triestine intellectual Roberto ‘Bobi’ Bazlen), or the fact that many of his friends are now part of the history of twentieth-century Italian culture is relevant, yes; but in the end, the one we really care about is that young man, with his search for a rationale, a reason to write or not to write. All the while writing about two men – the now deceased Bazlen and the young first-person narrator looking for him – who seem intent on not writing.
The title of Anne Milano Appel’s English translation, published by New Vessel Press, suitably spells it out: this is A Fictional Inquiry, an investigation into the nature of fiction itself and its entanglements with reality. It is also a funambulist’s dream of perfection, a tightrope walk through the sky connecting places, people, memories, sensations with the lightest of touches and the most assured yet delicate steps. Rereading Del Giudice’s debut novel, I kept being reminded of Philippe Petit, looking at once so solid and so ethereal, as he walked suspended over the city between the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center in 1974. There is a slowness in Del Giudice’s prose that betrays intimate care and demands our attention in return.
When you approach this slim volume (his books were always slim), you must prepare for slow reading: for sudden epiphanies and equally unexpected silences, for precise, diamond-sharp images that seem almost transparent in their capturing of a suspended thought. It’s a balancing act that moves things in and out of focus, layers surfaces and memories one upon or against the other, and leaves us intrigued as well as exhausted – just like the narrator and probable author’s alter ego, who keeps falling asleep, then waking up and having to start all over again: listening, opening his eyes, focusing. This is how we first meet him, as he is emerging from a brief nap on the train taking him to Trieste, where he will begin his inquiry. And it will happen again, as he dozes off on airplanes, in armchairs, on hotel beds, on his way to and from Trieste or, later, to London.
Reality slips, intentionality faulters, attention moves from object to object, layer to layer. Maps and stories have equally central roles in the novel: Mercator’s map or the routes taken by airplanes, from one control tower to another; reality and representation, or the search for ‘a point at which knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect’ (102). Proximity and distance are at once scientific method and sentimental attitude: discussing the art of navigation, the narrator notes how “[t]he mariner follows the lighthouse by repeatedly calculating the distance; it’s a good way, I think, to approach things, constantly measuring how far away they are” (84). Ultimately, the tension between living and writing comes down to control, or the lack of it. At the high point of a conversation with one of the many women he encounters during his search for Bazlen’s traces, the narrator does a conscious double take: “I listen, but though part of me follows the story, the other part tries to understand what internal time she’s speaking in. I’d like to find a reasonable line between controlling the situation and definite surrender” (100).
All of Daniele Del Giudice’s books were about those tensions: between reality and representation, life and literature, science and intuition, control and surrender. In Atlante Occidentale (1985), the dialogue between those positions is entrusted to two more men, an old writer and a young physicist, who share a love of flying (a passion Del Giudice also cultivated for much of his life). In the short stories collected in Mania (1997), we see characters exploring the limits of their ability to control the uncontrollable: desire, death, technology and its intrusive manipulations of our lives. And in Orizzonte mobile (2009), a book that combines travel writing with historical fiction and autofiction, he explicitly evokes the image of the tightrope walker, a man “in bilico sopra un filo” [balancing on a wire], a man who knows that “È impossibile ricordare tutto” [One cannot remember everything], but continues to perform his role as “colui che tiene le fila, un uomo sui fili che ha saputo tendersi da sé” [the one who holds the reins, a man on the high wire who pulled his own strings] (3-4).
Narrating, for Del Giudice, was holding those reins, “governing” the story as you “govern” a ship, creating an order, isolating events, images, memories, as if they existed outside simultaneity and copresence (ibid.). Orizzonte mobile was Del Giudice’s last novel, before his descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s and eventually his death. But those themes and those questions were all already present in A Fictional Inquiry (Lo stadio di Wimbledon), even the idea of copresence or simultaneity, which appears at the very start of the story, when the narrator recalls watching the perfect engineering feat that pulled a highway bridge together. As pieces were raised into the air, lowered, then finally fell into place, “it had been a moment of absolute simultaneity, in which everything appeared to be copresent” (4).
Translation is also a feat of copresence, of looking for traces and holding together what seems constantly to slip away, elude, or exceed the words on the page. As many have written, translating is the most intimate form of reading. It is an act of discovery, which then gets shared with others. Reading in translation leads to its own discoveries and, at times, becomes discovering anew. In my case, reading Anne Milano Appel’s crystalline translation of Lo Stadio di Wimbledon meant returning to one of the Italian authors I most enjoyed through the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. I had looked for Daniele Del Giudice’s books on my shelves in 2021, when I read about his death. I had leafed through them, not ready to return to them. Now A Fictional Inquiry has taken me back to the beginning: the first book by an author I grew to love. Whether it’s a discovery or a rediscovery, this is the perfect place to start reading Del Giudice, again.
Del Giudice, Daniele. A Fictional Inquiry. Translated by Anne Milano Appel. New Vessel Press, 2025.
Loredana Polezzi is Alfonse M. D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Studies in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies, Stony Brook University (US). Her research interests combine translation and transnational Italian studies. She has written on travel writing, colonial and postcolonial literature, translingualism and migration. Her current work focuses on memory, mobility and translation in transatlantic Italian cultures.
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo. “Note by Italo Calvino.” In Daniele Del Giudice, A Fictional Inquiry, translated by Anne Milano Appel, New York: New Vessel Press, 2025.
Del Giudice, Daniele. Atlante Occidentale, Turin: Einaudi, 1985.
Del Giudice, Daniele. Mania, Turin: Einaudi, 1997.
Del Giudice, Daniele. Orizzonte Mobile, Turin: Einaudi, 2009.