Magnifico e tremendo stava l’amore

All lovers swear that their love is different from that of others. Especially at the beginning, when the undertow of life has not yet affected their feelings. Then things change, and the stories tend to resemble each other. But not this one. The love story told in these pages – taken from a crime news story – has a surprising ending, that only reality and its mysterious justice could have imagined. After all, ‘when destiny is relentless, it also shows a certain amount of imagination’. After ‘Dove non mi hai portata’ (Where You Didn’t Take Me), Maria Grazia Calandrone investigates the lives of the protagonists of a real event, with the eye of an investigator and the sensitivity of a poet. And she gives us a story in which the chiaroscuro is so many and intertwined that it prevents us from having a single reading. Like all love stories. “Magnifico e tremendo stava l’amore re-elaborates a crime story. On 27 January 2004, after about twenty years of suffering violence, Luciana killed her ex-husband Domenico with twelve stab wounds and, together with her new partner, threw his body into the Tiber river. On 24th June 1965, after years of suffering violence at the hands of her husband, my mother Lucia threw herself into the Tiber river, together with her new partner, my father. This was because in those years there was no divorce law. The reason for my obsession is all too obvious. But Luciana’s court case ended with a ruling destined to set a precedent. I therefore thought it useful, indeed necessary, to trace the human and legal motivations behind such an avant-garde sentence in the court records. The analysis of the story and its outcome led to the writing of a book that surprised the writer himself, as it became an incorrect work that doesn’t exclusively take the victim’s point of view. It asks who is the victim, what pact binds the protagonists and in what darkness of the people that pact has rooted. In short, the writer has tried to understand the reasons for the violence in depth. And perhaps, who knows, she has worked precisely to emancipate herself from a simple view of violence. There is therefore no condemnation, but an exposition, poetic when possible, of that magnificent and terrible love” (Maria Grazia Calandrone).