Five books, selected from the catalogue of the Il Dondolo publishing house, to be enjoyed in the time of holiday relaxation, under a beach umbrella or in a hammock under the pine trees at high altitude. These are the reading recommendations of Beppe Cottafavi, editorial director of Il Dondolo, starting with the publishing house's latest release "Femminologia del gioco del calcio" (Feminology of the game of football) by Ala Sinistra and arriving at Edmondo Berselli's cult book "Quel gran pezzo dell'Emilia" (That great piece of Emilia), passing through "La sconosciuta" (The unknown woman), a crime story by Barbara Baraldi, "Figadein", Picca's greatest hits, and "Io, bambino cretino" (I, a child idiot), by Salvo Cotrino.
These and all books published by Dondolo, the digital publishing house of the Municipality of Modena, can be downloaded free of charge from the publishing house's website (www.ildondolo.it) or from the MediaLibraryOnLine platform (www.medialibrary.it).
"Femminologia del gioco del calcio" (Feminology of the game of football) by Ala Sinistra, is the tale of a politically incorrect passion set against the backdrop of the Emilian province at the end of the millennium: the initiation into football of a normal girl when playing football was still very un-normal for a girl, suitable for those who play or have played football but also for those who will never play it.
"La sconosciuta" (The Unknown Woman), by Barbara Baraldi, is a detective story set in Modena around the Bonissima, one of the symbols of the city that is at the same time an enigma. And it is precisely in the shadow of this statue with its indecipherable gaze that a dark tale unfolds, one that plumbs the depths of the human soul. A psychological thriller with a fast-paced, hypnotic rhythm, signed by the Emilian author nicknamed by the press 'the queen of Italian Gothic'.
'Figadein' is Picca's greatest hits, the best of the best of the Modenese humourist among the pieces published in the Gazzetta di Modena column: the definitive Picca, the best of Picca-thinking.
'Io, bambino cretino', by Salvo Cotrino, is the first novel by the bookseller of wonders in the second-hand bookshop in Via Canalino, where you can find beautiful and hard-to-find books for a few euros. The book tells his story as the son of southerners who moved to Modena for work in the 1970s: a first-person account of his childhood, from birth to the age of thirteen; in the background the Italian province and a social cross-section with the class relations typical of that period.
And, finally, the cult book on the Emilia region, republished by Dondolo twenty years after its first release: 'Quel gran pezzo dell'Emilia' by the great Edmondo Berselli. There is a land with undefined borders that is the South of the North and the North of the South: some call it Emilia. Two steps further on it takes on the colours of Romagna. It looks with curiosity at Milan. It crosses the Po and is at home in Mantua. Perhaps it is a political laboratory, where pragmatic old communists for whom socialism was 'capitalism governed by us' still roam, together with human-faced mortadellas, imported Chinese and old punks who look like the reincarnation of Ligabue (in the sense of Antonio, the painter). This book recounts a country that is a fragment of Europe, a slice of the world that may yet prove to be a political model and is undoubtedly a psychological model.
Founded in 2017 from an idea of Beppe Cottafavi shared with the Libraries of Modena, the publishing house Il Dondolo publishes only unpublished digital books whose download is free and definitive and offers a quality catalogue closely linked to the territory, with narratives, essays, poems and images from Modena to Emilia Romagna. To date, 81 titles have been published.
