Michele Cecchini presents “Un morso all’improvviso”

Summer in the Library 2026 – “Friday Author Series”

The “Friday Author Series” is a collection of six literary events featuring authors who will present their latest works, ranging from fiction to non-fiction. These meetings, organized in collaboration with PromoCultura, will take place throughout June and July in the beautiful setting of the “Forini Lippi” park, located at Via Provinciale Lucchese 41.

“Un morso all’improvviso”

“He looked dead, but he must not be quite dead yet,” says the Falcon to the Blue Fairy in Collodi’s classic novel. Today, Pinocchio is a forty-year-old schizophrenic living with his wife and adopted daughter in a Tuscan suburb. Everyone knows him as “Beo,” short for scarabeo (beetle)—a dung beetle, to be precise. His “Land of Toys” is the local community center dance hall, where he spends his Saturday nights with his friend Luciano. He tries to multiply his money with scratch-off lottery tickets, and while his feet don’t burn, they suffer from psoriasis, which he interprets as a sign of his imminent decay.

Plagued by hallucinations, Beo is particularly obsessed with Martians, whom he blames for the disappearance of his father years ago. To ward off the misfortunes constantly looming over him, Beo imposes a myriad of rules, rituals, and ceremonies upon himself that make him feel wooden and puppet-like. Yet, despite it all, he persists in seeking poetry within the degradation and enchantment within the squalor. Following a series of fairy-tale and picaresque adventures, one evening the persecution of the Martians truly takes shape: Beo finds himself face-to-face with them, and from that moment, his life changes. To lose himself completely will be the price he must pay to find himself and finally become a real person.

With his disenchanted yet lighthearted view of the world, Michele Cecchini leads us through a story that is at once carefree and heartbreaking, full of surprising twists, and told with an extremely poetic and delicate writing style.

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