Infinite Summer
A Novel
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A novel set in Tuscany during the magical years when thousands of businesses blossomed, manufacturing objects for everyday life as well-made and beautiful as the Renaissance art that inspired them
Infinite Summer brings the reader back to Italy in the 1970s, a time when growth and full employment propelled smart and industrious young men to create companies devoted to design, architecture, automobiles, and more. Three men share a dream of building a textile factory from scratch. Ivo Barrocciai, the enthusiastic son of a textile artisan, embarks on an elaborate project: to build a luxurious factory that will be “the envy of the Milanese.” He recruits Cesare Vezzosi, a small building contractor, and Pasquale Citarella, a hardworking foreman from the south. Their relationships with each other and with their wives, their secret passions, their ambitions, and the compromises they have to make create a comical, moving fresco. It is at once a family saga and a love story—not only about people, but also about a reborn, ambitious, and courageous nation that revolutionized taste and fashion, a nation proud and thrilled with its new place in the world. Nesi shows us Italy at its best: the Italy with which we fell in love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Italian writer and politician Nesi introduces readers to the Italy of the 1970s, decades years after the economic downfall of WWII, when a rebounding country is bright and hopeful again. Drawing on his real-life experiences in the textile industry, Nesi charts the growth of this new Italy through the founding of a grand textile company. Ivo Barrocciai, the son of a blanket merchant, is one of the brave new youth who view the newly connected and recovering Europe as an opportunity to be seized. By closing down his father's humble blanket factory, Ivo plans to open the largest textile factory that their town has ever seen. The factory and its construction gathers a generation of men who came of age in the tumultuous era after the war and exhibit the traits it took to survive in such unsure times. The novel is mainly a love letter to Italy, but also a celebration of the traditional masculinity of that era. Few women in the novel are fleshed out into full characters; many serve only as testaments to the virility of the male leads and become, much like their cars and clothing, status objects for the men who can claim them. The end result is a testosterone-fueled tale of triumph in a changing world.
