Vittorio Del Tufo he is convinced that to grasp the profound meaning of reality it is necessary to use the specter of myth. What for a reporter risks appearing as a sort of paradox, on his page is outlined in terms of a practice with hermeneutic tones: he seems to have acquired the lesson of René Girard when, in Violence and the Sacred, he explains that «if there is it is a real origin, if the myths, in their way, do not cease to remember it, if the rituals, in their way, do not cease to commemorate it, it must be an event that has made an indelible impression on men, given that they end up forgetting it, but nevertheless very strong.” Thus, only by retracing the plot of the legend, following the tangle of signs it contains and unraveling the symbolic apparatus it refers, does it become possible to arrive at a form of knowledge of history. The research and writing work that Del Tufo conducted with the triptych Magical Naples, Magical Turin and Magical Paris constitute the testimony and the weekly appointment set on «The morning» – where he is central editor – with the column «Virgil’s Egg» conducted together with the photographer Sergio Siano it is delivered as the paradigm of a commitment as an archaeologist of knowledge immersed in the thousand narratives that branch out from the tormented belly of the city. Only through the glasses of myth can – in the words of Anna Maria Ortese – “mitigate the wild harshness” of everyday life and grasp, in the depths of the magical aura, “the ambiguous nature of things”.
This – «The ambiguous nature of things» – is the title of one of five chapters in which Vittorio del Tufo articulates Il caso Virgilio (Colonnese, pages 246, euro 19), his new novel which already from the title programmatically moves into a successful balance between the action novel and the historical investigation. «A fictional story which, however, must be read against the light, because behind the fiction, as often happens, surprising truths could hide», he recommends in the postscript.
The action starts from a dinner held in the villa shimmering with aristocratic elegance but marked by the melancholy of a grainy splendor. Here the Marquis Gaspare Albenga gives the young archaeologist Rita Persico a funerary urn with a lid in the shape of a human head and a case containing a papyrus roll. These are two mysterious and disturbing objects found in a tunnel of the house on the extreme promontory of Posillipo, a few dozen meters of sea from the two small islands of Gaiola. It is the late summer of 1973, Naples is slipping into the cholera epidemic amidst lounge conversations and memories of happy evenings with illustrious guests – the Swedish champion Hans Olof Jeppson, the idol of Napoli fans in the early 1950s, the the coach of the Azzurri Bruno Pesaola, known as Petisso, the other bomber Luis Vinicio with beautiful women in tow – and the exploits on motorboats and racing cars of the Neapolitan play boys, sons of a Francis Scott Fitzgerald-style city. For his part, Albenga also has a failure behind him, the collapse of «Albax», which had cost him a 9-year sentence. Before him, the owner of the villa had been the English engineer Nelson Foley, brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the Sherlock Holmes character who came here in search of new ideas for his detective stories. He would have had them. On the night following the party Gaspare Albenga and his wife Irina will be savagely killed by a gang of Slavic assassins hired to take away something they had not found. In the darkness between 14 and 15 April 2009, at Gaiola, the wheat king Franco Ambrosio and his wife Giovanna Sacco were allegedly murdered at home, pouring the curse of the villa of mysteries into the news.
The last days of the summer of 1973 are the cornerstone of a narrative that interweaves chronological levels: from Greece in 19 BC to Monaco in 1919, from 1140 to 1920, from 1370 up to the date of 9 March 2020 which, in opening the Covid-19 pandemic emergency draws a parable with the other of cholera. Vittorio Del Tufo chooses an absolutely symbolic point of view, the Posillipo hill, which with its load of past and present constitutes the founding nucleus in the tufaceous porosity of the city’s identity geography. He entrusts himself to Virgil, to the Master, to the Magician who in Pausilypon’s home, «his second skin, his obsession» tried to rest from his worries and give respite to the pain. Rita Persico finds herself dealing with disturbing and tormented questions, with the black hole of Virgil’s death, of his journey to Ikaria, of the secrets hidden in his tomb, of the hunt for his remains also by Adolf Hitler, head of the society esoteric Thule who wanted to impose the new era of the Puer, of the old and new Neapolitan Progeny, of crimes and twists, of art dealers and young Colapesce, of the enigmatic Thunder Cave and the inscriptions in Villa Heigelin, of the cryptic Masonic codes and the Nazi imagination populated by divinities, giants, dragons and supermen: the sequences follow one another in a pressing rhythm, the progressive unveiling of characters and places towards leads to an outcome that is nevertheless open, in the song «You are the Wizard and your name is Oracle, you are the Wonderworker and the Warrior, you followed in the footsteps of Chiron and Siron” already met at the beginning of the story.
The Virgilio case is presented in the form of an exciting mystery, but rather than the guilty actors of a theater of evil it brings out the authentic protagonist that Del Tufo proposes: the Time, its cyclical nature, the meaning of its decline, the secrets it keeps in its folds, the anxiety it imposes to overcome the implacable trend that men have always tried to oppose by prolonging life. Not succeeding, if not by resorting to magic.
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