Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2019), the winner of Italy’s most prestigious award, The Strega Prize, is a powerful investigation of the heart and soul of contemporary Italy.
Three well-off young men—former students at Rome’s prestigious all-boys Catholic high school San Leone Magno—brutally tortured, raped, and murdered two young women in 1975. The event, which came to be known as the Circeo massacre, shocked and captivated the country, exposing the violence and dark underbelly of the upper middle class at a moment when the traditional structures of family and religion were seen as under threat.
It is this environment, the halls of San Leone Magno in the late 1960s and the 1970s, that Edoardo Albinati takes as his subject. His experience at the school, reflections on his adolescence, and thoughts on the forces that produced contemporary Italy are painstakingly and thoughtfully rendered, producing a remarkable blend of memoir, coming-of-age novel, and true-crime story. Along with indelible portraits of his teachers and fellow classmates—the charming Arbus, the literature teacher Cosmos, and his only Fascist friend, Max—Albinati also gives us his nuanced reflections on the legacy of abuse, the Italian bourgeoisie, and the relationship between sex, violence, and masculinity.
Speakers:
Edoardo Albinati is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in Rome. His novel Svenimenti won the 2004 Viareggio Literary Award, and The Catholic School won the Strega Prize in 2016. For the last twenty-five years, he has worked as a teacher in Rebibbia, the largest prison in Rome.
Antony Shugaar has been a professional translator since 1976. He is currently translating his fortieth book for Europa Editions, the innovative and acclaimed New York/Rome publisher. He is currently translating his second novel by Roberto Saviano, for Farrar Straus & Giroux (FSG). He has translated four Strega award winning novels, Story of My People by Edoardo Nesi (2011), Resistance Is Futile by Walter Siti (2013), Ferocity by Nicola Lagioia (2015), and The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati (2016), and has just received his second NEA fellowship to translate The Desire to Be Like Everyone by Francesco Piccolo (2014), his fifth Strega. He has translated for such publishing houses as Farrar Straus & Giroux, Viking Penguin, Harper Collins, Melville House, Other Press, Atlantic Books (London), New York Review Books, and many university presses, including University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, the Brookings Institution, and others. He has translated illustrated books for Princeton Architectural Press, the Getty Trust, the Art Institute of Chicago, Vendome Press, Abrams, FMR, and Rizzoli International. He regularly translates essays and articles from the French for the New York Review of Books. He has translated many scholarly essays for the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. He has translated children’s books, for Abrams, Eerdmans, and others. He has translated graphic novels, for One Peace among others.
IDEA Boston is an Italian-inspired festival celebrating authors, books and culture, and organized by independent bookstore I AM Books, situated in Boston's North End neighborhood.
