The countryside around Florence. Between the 70s and the 80s. Seven, maybe eight double murders. Couples who, seeking privacy, go with their car in the woods, on the edge of the roads, and are slaughtered. Students, young people on their first job or on their first European vacation. Crimes carried out in a workmanlike manner. They seem to be the work of an arms expert who mutilates his female victims with a sure hand. A doctor: people are convinced that he is a doctor. Of course: he is someone who knows women, he knows how to cut them (a gynecologist? Could he be a gynecologist?). Or maybe he’s a butcher? A simple poacher? A farmer, one of those who know how to do everything? A pack leader?

A meticolous judge who receives the excised fragment of the breast of one of the victims by post. A detective, a bit of a fantasist, who takes a ramshackle trail populated by magicians and fortune-tellers. Pimps, whores who look like Raphael’s madonnas, burglars with candid souls. A child who nobody believes to, the wife of a  suspect who chases journalists with a broom. People who tell their own version of events, always different, while the police and the carabinieri try, failing, not to step onto each other’s feet and the witnesses begin to go crazy.

In balance between the absurdly comic and the brutally ferocious, the story about “the Monster of Florence” becomes the story of how this story was told. In the fields, among the vineyards and the game bags of the hunters. On Sunday evenings, outside the red light cinemas. In the books of monstrologists and the courtrooms. Sexophobia & misogyny in thick patriarchy sauce.

 

“In Il capro language collects and delivers the moods of a complicit and guilty society.” – Finalist Premio BERGAMO

“[Silvia Cassioli] is an authentic writer full of sensitivity and talent…her linguistic virtuosity as a narrator [produces] a deadly verbal machine blending the tragic, the pathetic, the comic and the grotesque, inseparable from each other in the story of the Monster of Florence” – L’Indice

“ A docu-novel: Il Capro mixes a language that is at the same chronicle-like and grotesque, that mixes Italian with Tuscan dialect […] through an omniscient voice-over the narration extends around the many double murders committed by the Monster of Florence.” Corriere della Sera

“Il Capro: the tragic chorus behind the monster.” La Repubblica

“Cassioli moves with an unusual elegance, always ready to disseminate the mockery between the lines in the chaos that is the Italian popular costume” Players Magazine

 

396 pages – Original language: Italian (Il Saggiatore, 2022)