Rome, 26 April 2024 – Giovanni is not yet ten years old when, launched into the streets in search of his friend Michele, he comes across blood, corpses and the discovery, made ferocious by the reaction of Michele’s mother, that his friend is not will come back again. And he is still a child when his father, Teofilo Curcuas known as Zimisce, returns home “with his lungs full of black clots” and he is sent to live with his maternal uncles, the Focas, so that he can be trained to fight. In his future there is the self-denial of the strategos and, from the shocked expression at the news that Nicephorus, the beloved uncle who will take care of him for the rest of his life, would like to become a monk, it is clear that it is not there for him nothing more natural in the world.
After all Sonia Aggio, young author of the novel “In the Emperor’s Room” (Fazi Editore) included in the dozen of the 2024 Strega Prize, warns us from the first pages through a quote taken from “The mirror and the light” by Hilary Mantel: «But massacre is their job. They were raised to do this, like butchers in the slaughterhouse.” Giovanni begins life as a soldier far from home, with his cousin Costantino and a boulder that since Michael’s death weighs on him as much as the destiny that awaits him and which, if it weren’t for recurring visions and prophecies, he could never have guessed. That boulder is anger, an atavistic fury which, combined with the experiences of adult life, massacres and attacks but also the death in childbirth of his wife Maria Scleraina and his son, guides him on the battlefields, in palace meetings, in relationships with emperors and peers allowing him to intercept deceptions and movements of power. An anger that exceeds in cruelty, as in the case of the massacre on the road to Adana, and which will make him “that Armenian devil, that merciless beast” who, in assonance with Macbeth often cited by the author, will make a terrible decision precisely towards of Nicephorus.
Sonia Aggio, 28 years old, from Rovigo, already author of “Magnificat”, narrates the historical and existential parable of Giovanni Zimisce, accompanying the reader in the era of the Eastern Roman Empire of the 10th century, restoring the atmosphere between the scents of “laurel, roses and olive oil” and the stench of blood and death. Through family trees, the map of ancient Anatolia and the events of Constantinople, Aggio intertwines History and Literature, real-life characters such as the Emperor Constantine with beings shaped by literary material including the three witches who brought the prophecy. Narrating about John the man and Zimisce the leader, “born under the sign of reptiles, of secret negotiations, of vice”, the feeling remains that the protagonist is not convinced that he deserves the crown. This too, however, had already been predicted: “How long will you resist the fulfillment of your destiny? You weren’t ready to listen the first time, were you? But today you are. Your destiny awaits you.”
