La ragazza eterna

Renata is a champion, a woman who radiates beauty and intelligence with the grace of a tropical butterfly: for this reason, perhaps, Boccia always accepted that their love could not take the form of a middle-class couple, and he even found the courage to attend her wedding to another man. But one day Renata rang his doorbell at his apartment in the centre of Bari and told him that she had received a diagnosis that left no hope; her return was a cry for help. However, in her unpredictable style, Renata chooses to remove herself from the situation by immersing herself in the colourful social life of Bari, and it’s up to Boccia – who is a psychiatrist and has a strong sense of his mission – to come to terms with the shadow of evil that has touched them both. So, together with a colleague, he starts thinking about the possibility of experimenting with Renata an illegal therapy according to Italian law but one he is convinced is effective: psychedelic drugs, whose potential for treating depression, addiction and deep-seated anxiety through substances such as psilocybin, ayahuasca and LSD is being rediscovered by the scientific community. This novel is a journey into the human psyche, its suffering but also its potential for openness, sharing and the creation of new universes. It is a social novel that, in recounting the desacralisation of contemporary life, depicts our human comedy with irresistible humour. And it is a great love story: that of Boccia and Renata but also that which each of us can rediscover for ourselves and for our own ghosts, deciding to open up to a new feeling of time and identity. The ancient Greeks undertook the journey to Eleusis to be initiated into the mysteries of Demeter, Persephone and Hades: Andrea Piva’s protagonists bring us the last splinters of the luminous force released by those rites of death and rebirth.