Vita avventurosa di un’acciuga cantabrica

On the deck of the Capitan Cerano, picaresque sailor Giovanni tells the wretched man that is his executioner how he got in front of the noose that will soon turn him into shark food. The adventure had begun when, as a child, with the police on his heels, he had found refuge under the rigging of a seemingly abandoned trawler. The ship had then set sail, and his hiding place had turned into the voyage of a lifetime…Under the intrigued and stunned eyes of both the executioner and the reader, unfolds the story of an existence spent among thefts, deceptions, brawls and more or less stormy marriages. First aboard an old schooner, then on a German battleship or a Turkish merchant ship, Giovanni sails more and more remote routes, bound for the Bosphorus, for Mozambique or Malaya, loyal solely to his own rebellious spirit, and barely tamed by the prophecy of an unfrocked priest who insists in seeing a new Baptist in him.The hour of his execution is approaching when the tale lands in Patagonia, domain of the ruthless Don Ferdinand, and there the seafaring adventure fades with surprising narrative grace into a western-like epilogue: it is time to find the last words of the story, capable of turning chance into fate and death into revolution.With this belated debut, suspended between the magical realism of the great South American storytellers and a ragged and affectionate Corto Maltese, Lucio Di Cicco has written a novel of sails and redemption, most human and passionate.