Meet the author: Michele Cecchini

In the late Twenties, Antonio Bevilacqua leaves the environs of Lucca in hopes of an acting career in the off-Broadway theatres of San Francisco. There he comes into contact with the art world which centres on such figures as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Elegant and degraded, frigid and solar, welcoming and cruel, San Francisco exalts and disappoints its children and step-children – including the Dagos, Italian immigrants. For a time Antonio moves to Hollywood, where he is employed as a stand-in for Chaplin, taking his place on the set to facilitate the arrangement of the scenes. He seems, therefore, to have found his ‘Merica’ of the ‘muvinpicce’ – a term derived from the English ‘moving picture’ in the awkward yet somehow poetic half-English half-Italian pidgin used by the Dagos. In language as in life, Antonio Bevilacqua, transformed in the meantime into ‘Tony Drinkwater’ (the literal translation of his name), inhabits a no-man’s land between what he once was and what he has not yet become.

Michele Cecchini was born in Lucca in 1972. He teaches literature and lives in Livorno. In 2014 he and Ettore Borzacchini created and presented the radio programme “Aperte Virgolette” – from 2015, Saccadé – on the QuiRadio station. In 2010 he published Dall’aprile a shantih with Erasmus publishers. Per il bene che ti voglio is his second novel.

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