God played football

The main characters in Dio giocava a pallone were, like the author, born at the beginning of the nineties. Each in their own way explore the uneasy transition from adolescence to adulthood that will make them strangers to themselves. The class tests with their football-like strategies of who passes the answers and who copies them, high school days where a good mark means the chance to go to a sunny beach and fall in love, moonlit parties, a passionate kiss with an unexpected partner; a make believe island that serves as a metaphor for an adolescence that finds you lost as you emerge from it, cigarettes and alcohol are often not necessary; the careful, forbidden listening to the longings of your body, mad, frenetic races on rigged mopeds along the boulevards and promenades in a nostalgic time-warp. In his careful, immaculate prose, Giorgio Ghiotti recounts his adolescence like the present indicative of living life, and why no one ever really relinquishes it.