IN A FAR-FLUNG CORNER of northwestern Italy, girdled by industrial haze, flanked by a crescent of jagged Alps, stands Turin, grandiose necropolis of a town. Baroque palaces, shaded neoclassical arcades, interwar military monuments and diverse hordes of bronze statues recall a history as the first capital of modern Italy and, in a fuzzier, earlier time, royal capital of the Kingdom of Savoy. It’s a museum city, famous for its eponymous Shroud, its Napoleonic trove of Egyptian tomb treasures, its streets where Nietzsche suffered his tragic mental collapse. At first glance, a quiet museum city—yet museums rarely come without an odor of death, or, in Turin’s case, a whiff of Armageddon. Nicknamed the “City of Black Magic” by its tolerant Italian neighbors, Turin has a long reputation for everything disquieting and spooky. Dozens of bookshops can still be found near its center selling witchcraft manuals, Satanism how-tos, UFO monthlies and the supposed confessions of ex-Illuminati. Walking along the River Po, you’ll see bridge after bridge daubed with bilingual End Times graffiti. (LORD JESUS IS COMING VERY SOON TO SAVE US WITH OUR FAMILIES, one reads, beside IL S. GESU STA ARRIVANDO.) By dread coincidence, Turin has also lent its Italian name to the Torino Scale, used by astronomers to grade the chances that a near-Earth object might “threaten the future of civilization as we know it.”
Giorgio De Maria’s The Twenty Days of Turin is a sinister, imaginary chronicle of the author’s home city as it suffers “a phenomenon of collective psychosis.” Written during the late 1970s, when Italy was tormented almost daily by terror attacks and police-state crackdowns, it balances apocalyptic fantasy with biting cultural observation. And while (we can all hope) the paranormal wrath he describes is pure invention, De Maria did not have to hunt far for scenes of a terrorized society. Wordless fear, determined amnesia and an aggressive impulse to look the other way are the story’s cornerstones, and at least as chilling as its bizarre violence.
On its release at the end of 1977, the novel found early praise in L’Espresso and La Stampa, the latter hailing it as “a book dipped in the stream of cruel and timely metaphors.” But trying times lay ahead. In the 1980s, De Maria experienced a sudden, almost Gogolian, crisis of art and faith, leaving behind decades of combative anti-clericalism to become a fervently traditional Catholic. Devoting his pen to religious literature, he struggled with depression and would produce no further novels in his lifetime. Meanwhile, The Twenty Days of Turin, his fourth and final work, fell out of print when its small, artistically minded publisher—Edizioni il Formichiere, or Anteater Press—closed in 1983.
Faced with these hurdles, The Twenty Days of Turin had a significant gambit against oblivion: it was a book that fueled nightmares, and its cult status has endured among a shaken but grateful Turinese readership. One of the novel’s major champions is scholar and critic Pier Massimo Prosio, whose Guida Letteraria di Torino remains the classic overview of Turin’s literary culture—a hyperproductive milieu that can boast Eco, Pavese, Arpino, Levi and Calvino among its famous names. In the third and current edition (2005) of his survey, Prosio judges The Twenty Days of Turin to be “one of the most forcible examples of this starchy, formal city’s capacity for stories of mystery and terror.” Following De Maria’s death in April 2009, Prosio wrote in the journal Studi Piemontesi: “As a storyteller, De Maria belongs to a rather peculiar and exotic tradition of Italian fiction, a writing that lies at the juncture of real and surreal, the blending of reality and imagination in a not impossible conspiracy.” That style, he added, found its “most favorable expression” in The Twenty Days of Turin, “a proper ghost story,* hallucinatory and distressing, in the vein of the great horror masters, especially Poe.” Equally, La Stampa’s obituary of the “reclusive and atypical” De Maria singled the novel out, many decades after it appeared, for its “image of a gloomy, disquieting Turin, stalked by demonic and violent underground forces which anticipate the reality of terrorism.”
My own introduction to the book came through the mountaineer and music journalist Luca Signorelli, who first read it shortly after its release. He was seventeen; his brother Andrea was fifteen. Their chief pursuits at the time were truancy, hard drinking, playing Black Sabbath albums and devouring French science fiction comics. They knew only vaguely who De Maria was. What professional critics thought of his work, or anyone else’s, didn’t interest them. Had some well-meaning elder suggested to them that The Twenty Days of Turin was “literature”—or (a thing more insufferable to their teenage tastes) “magical realism”—they might never have opened it. But like all wickedly memorable novels, it had a cold-caller’s talent for snaring readers early, before they understood the finer writerly merits of what was scaring them to death. “Back then it felt as if your own backyard was taking some kind of twisted center stage,” says Luca. Most of the original De Maria fans I’ve chanced into, from cartoon animators in Turin to ski shop proprietors in Courmayeur, were no older than the Signorelli brothers when the book was printed. Andrea Signorelli himself is now the front man of thrash metal group Braindamage. As an extreme mark of devotion, he lives in an Art Nouveau house in the same exact location as the book’s first terror victim. He’d dreamt of settling there, he admits, ever since he read The Twenty Days.
Forty years on, the novel’s fantastic elements have only crept closer to daily existence. Perhaps De Maria’s most farsighted invention is a Church-run charitable enterprise called the “Library,” created in a door-to-door appeal by a mysterious group of smiling teens. It consists of a reading room where citizens can donate their private diaries or browse the written thoughts of others. The Library does not accept conventional printed books. “There’s too much artifice in literature,” the youths claim, “even when it’s said to be spontaneous.” They demand only “true, authentic documents reflecting the real spirit of the people.” The Library’s supposed goal is to help shy individuals find friends with similar interests and connect in “dialogues across the ether” after paying a nominal fee to learn the diarist’s identity. Read today, in a world driven by blogging and social media, much of this sounds too familiar: diary entries on public display, crowdsourced amateur content, a new space promising emancipation to users who previously thought they were alone, even the infectious optimism that start-up founders brandish while pitching their disruptions. Without ever mentioning computers, De Maria has predicted the Internet’s evolution better than many cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties.
Tellingly enough, the Library’s patrons turn out to be “people with no desire at all for ‘regular human communication.’ ” The institution becomes a colossal storehouse of memoirs by perverts and maniacs, taboo fantasies and even whole diaries devoted to bullying (“pages and pages just to indicate, to a poor elderly woman, that her skin was the color of a lemon and her spine was warping”). This collection of personal horrors—which De Maria often juxtaposes with images of garbage dumps and overflowing sewage—swells to mountainous proportions: “It had the variety and at the same time the wretchedness of things that can’t find harmony with Creation, but which still exist, and need someone to observe them, if only to recognize that it was another like himself who’d created them.” Worse, rather than helping its users connect, the Library consumes their privacy in a “web of mutual espionage . . . malicious and futile.” Paranoid that anyone around them, friend or foe, might have read their unguarded confessions, the diarists are drained by an unnatural insomnia that sleeping pills cannot cure. Every night, they shuffle across the streets of Turin in a fugue state, congregating in squares, unable to speak to or recognize their fellow sleepwalkers. As they are crudely slaughtered in each other’s full view, the insomniacs remain too atomized to react to the violence or describe the predatory entities responsible. And though the Library’s initial form, housed in one location, is destroyed, it later reappears in a distributed network that covertly spans the whole city, as ineradicable as the Internet in real life. What is posted, alas, can never be unposted.
Being prototypical Turinese, De Maria’s characters live under a code of repressed dignitas, a shell of stiff-upper-lip politeness—evoked locally in the phrase “la tradizione sabauda”—which both buffers and imprisons them. Tact is everything in their shy, buttressed world, while mortification is a fate worse than death. This leaves them especially vulnerable to the Library when it emerges to feed on their loneliness, and spells their doom as long as a fear of embarrassment exists. Profiled alongside his novel by La Stampa in 1978, De Maria remarked on these anxieties: “I want to say that Turin is not a neutral city. Even if you don’t outwardly know anyone and no one knows you, you always get the impression you’re being watched.”
The narrator of The Twenty Days of Turin is an unnamed salaryman who lives alone, playing classical recorder and researching the insomniac massacres that struck his city a decade earlier. His attempts are rebuffed by fellow citizens who refuse to speak about the events and find their mention impertinent: some are even members of a Millenarist sect that accepts the killings as God’s will. Ironically, very much like the Library’s patrons, the protagonist himself is a lonely misfit searching for other individuals who share his forbidden interests. Though he befriends two similarly inquisitive characters—the generous attorney Segre and the part-time occultist Giuffrida—his quest ends in personal disaster.
De Maria, who began writing macabre fiction during the 1950s, shared certain vital details with his doomed narrator. “Earlier, I’d wanted to be a musician,” he told La Stampa’s interviewer. “I have a piano degree from the Conservatorio. It was reading Kafka, reading The Trial, that forever converted me to literature: an epiphany, pure and simple . . .”
From his house on Corso Galileo Ferraris, De Maria would host salons, reading new material to guests and showing off his skills as a concert pianist. A frequent face at these evenings was Emilio Jona, who became one of De Maria’s closest friends. Jona was Jewish, a friend of Primo Levi and a confirmed leftist in his politics. In 1958, alongside De Maria and other musicians and writers, including Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino, he formed the Cantacronache, an influential avant-garde music group that sought to revamp and politicize the Italian folk song. “Giorgio’s personality was sparkling, lively, completely anti-conformist,” Jona recalls. “He was witty and entertaining.” Jona made a curious contrast to the other regular of De Maria’s soirees: philosopher and belle-lettrist Elémire Zolla. Unlike his two companions, Zolla was both a Catholic and a far-right thinker in the anti-modern tradition of Julius Evola. A prolific author, he would later become known for printing original essays by Jorge Luis Borges, and for his divisive preface to The Lord of the Rings, which endorsed Tolkien through a lens of reactionary Italian esotericism. His friendship with Jona and De Maria was possible at a time when Turin’s intellectual culture wasn’t viciously divided over politics.
In 1958, De Maria debuted his writing in Il Caffè, one of postwar Italy’s top literary magazines. The published piece was a long story describing the 1995 assassination of a fictional “Pope Benedict XVI.” It proclaimed his enduring interest in unreliable narration, alternate timelines and topsy-turvy parallel universes. Despite the work’s anti-clerical sentiments, Zolla contributed a short, humorous note of introduction to be run alongside it, sponsoring De Maria as a new author to watch. The note concluded:
This is one of his long stories, or better put, one of his accidentally recorded digressions. De Maria’s too fond of explaining his philosophical system in Piedmontese dialect, which will be an obstacle to introducing him. And that’s an add-on obstacle to his scorn for the written word. His biography? He plays the piano and perhaps one day he’ll see the publication of a “History of Godawful Music” from castrati to present-day keyboard thumpers. He graduated with a thesis on the shadiest heretical sects of the Middle Ages. He’s tried to adjust himself to employment within various nationwide firms without success, because to a certain point his bosses could no longer manage to support the presence of a man so utterly harmless and insensible to the beauty of “human relations.”†
Old-souled yet iconoclastic, De Maria was a paradoxical radical who epitomized Theodor Adorno’s quip, “One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.” Mass culture, like organized religion, at once unnerved and fascinated him. Raising his children without a TV set, he seldom visited the cinema but listened keenly to secondhand descriptions of movies his acquaintances had seen. While writing songs for the Cantacronache in the early 1960s, he became interested in the new style of jukebox rock sung by Italy’s urlatori, or “screamers.” As innocuous as these urlatori seem today, De Maria heard a dark and painful undercurrent to their music. The resulting analysis (included in this volume as “Phenomenology of the Screamer”) shows his gift for drawing fearful meaning from mundane sources. Its account of “inward petrification,” neurotic voyeurism and futile outbursts of “primordial, barbaric desires” suggests an early origin for the horror themes that would find full expression in The Twenty Days of Turin.
Much as Zolla presents him, De Maria held a picaresque series of day jobs. After serving as a wool merchant, he was employed by Fiat in the 1950s. “Because he was a nonconformist and a leftist, he was transferred as punishment from Turin to Brescia—this despite his first wife being the daughter of a Fiat executive,” Jona recalls. “Giorgio was very absentminded and sloppily dressed and he’d get his jacket smudged with grease in no time when he ate. He told me that when his dossier finally came to light, one thing they cited as evidence of contempt for the company was that he regularly came to the office with streaks of talcum powder on his suit.” Following termination at Fiat, De Maria became a theater critic for the Communist newspaper L’Unità, and—notwithstanding his aversion to television—also worked at the network broadcaster RAI-TV. Under commission, he wrote a teleplay (Prova d’appello) portraying a lethal dystopian game show. RAI-TV canceled the program but was forced to pay De Maria by a 1975 court ruling.
Pondering his late friend, Jona mentions the strange, oracular quality that ran through his stories of that era: “He described the [worker and student revolt of] 1968 before it happened; he prophesized the suicide attempt of one professor who couldn’t stand the fall of his academic empire; he dreamed up, long before the big strikes at Fiat, a sexually motivated factory uprising.”
Jona, trained in law, happened to double as De Maria’s family attorney. De Maria fictionalized him in The Twenty Days of Turin as the urbane legalist Andrea Segre—perhaps the story’s most valiant figure, who embodies the better values of old-school Turin. “I was among the first to read the typewritten manuscript and the verdict I gave was entirely positive,” Jona writes. “I recall that a character, the attorney Segre, was to some extent a portrait of me, and this is why, according to Giorgio, in honor of our friendship, he wasn’t killed off.”
De Maria’s retreat into religion startled his old comrade, though the two stayed on good terms. “I recall that he publicly read out a kind of hilarious little tale describing this transition, and it was massively amusing to listeners who were unaware that he was truthfully recounting his conversion . . . His writing definitely lost its sting and irony, becoming flatly Catholic, but to a point, in his personal relationships, he retained some of his old contrariness.”
Echoing his personal struggles, De Maria’s fiction is filled with incidents of mental breakdown and talent cut short. The narrator of The Twenty Days of Turin treats his recorder as a reflection of his psyche, and it comes as an ill sign when he finds his usual joy in playing Bach has suddenly evaporated: “I placed my hands on the instrument without any certainty and breathed out foolishly like someone puffing into a blowgun.” Another piece in this volume, “The Death at Missolonghi,” depicts a shadowy force that robs Lord Byron of his writing ability. Decades before “impostor syndrome” became a household phrase, De Maria wrote this bleak description of private creative death:
It happens at times that men can outlive themselves and persevere, like wraiths, by carrying out the actions they have always carried out; their souls are mute but not their voices, and their hands and feet do not stop moving. Seeing them in the street or riding in the saddles of their chargers, no one would think that their minds had lost their hum, that the blood in their veins was heatless and spent; nor do the women they still hold tight to their bosoms ever imagine such a tremendous absence . . . And in the city there’s no lack of them . . . Often even, the more the vacuum inside them is pierced, the more grandiosely they act, giving shows of themselves, fashioning great spectacles of gaiety, dauntlessness and brio. There’s never a Carnevale in Venice where their masks don’t make an appearance. And if times and manners continue to slide as they do now, it shall not be long before these walking husks will form great crowds, whose presence no one will be able to evade.
The scenery of De Maria’s stories matches his protagonists’ depersonalization. Even when the setting seems recognizable, there is always some clue that we’re in a treacherous mirror universe where the hand of Fate lurks to gaslight the unwary. “The Death at Missolonghi,” presented as a rambling letter from a bishop to a cardinal, carries an obviously false date, “the December of 1879.” This befits its unreliable narrative, which puts Byron at the mercy of an elderly Venetian shopkeeper he has cuckolded. We’re none too sure when The Twenty Days of Turin occurs, though its subtitle (“A Report from the End of the Century”) implies that it’s nearing the turn of the millennium. Our earliest clue that something has been displaced comes in the first chapter, where statues of Napoleon and Vincenzo Vela are described facing opposite ways from their real position in 1970s Turin.‡ Only the book’s first terror victim, addled by insomnia, seems to recall their correct setting: “I could swear the statues of Vincenzo Vela and Napoleon Bonaparte had swapped places. It isn’t Vela with his back turned on us, is it?” It should be Vela, at least in our reality, but this eludes the narrator, who later notices that two other statues have traded pedestals across town without explanation. “I thought that if I were a sculptor I would have made some corrections to the monument,” he says. “Yet I had to admit that I felt a touch out of place myself, even if I didn’t know enough to say what my rightful condition could be.”
The entities behind the book’s carnage deserve some space of their own. Giorgio De Maria’s son Domenico has confirmed in conversation that his father, writing The Twenty Days of Turin, hinted that the novel in progress would concern terrorism. At the time, Italy was home to roughly a dozen militant political organizations, from Marxist “armed cells” to clandestine neofascist networks. At least four thousand cases of political violence—some higher estimates run to fourteen thousand—are thought to have occurred during the “Years of Lead,” leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
The era’s insurgent groups were far from homogenous. Left-wing radicals such as the Red Brigades focused their violence on authority figures and avoided indiscriminate strikes on the public. Seeking popular legitimacy, they explained their reasons for each attack in lengthy communiqués. While their favorite assassination targets were police and judges, the Red Brigades gained lasting notoriety with the killing of former prime minister Aldo Moro. Their violent strategy ultimately backfired, losing the support of their blue-collar base. Neofascist groups, meanwhile, waged a far bloodier campaign. Bombing civilian crowds in squares and railway stations, they caused the highest death tolls of any attacks in Italy’s history since the Second World War. With few exceptions, they did not claim responsibility for these acts and—thanks to a now-infamous relationship with law enforcement and government officials—they went largely unpunished until the 1980s. Even since then, prosecution attempts have often ended in limbo. In the case of the 1974 Piazza della Loggia bombing, which caused eight deaths and over a hundred injuries, Italian courts only managed to convict two surviving perpetrators in 2015.
These neofascist terror groups suggest the most obvious human model for the “foul, small-minded deities” that threaten De Maria’s Turin. In keeping with their real-world counterparts, the entities remain forever untouchable, hiding in plain sight while authorities round up desperate, ill-fitting scapegoats. The narrator himself, when challenged, cannot find the nerve to name them aloud. Nor shall you hear the surprise from me. I’ll only say that the entities’ physical form evokes a very understandable Italian fear of the 1970s: that the past wasn’t as dead as it looked, not even in a quiet museum city. As Segre the attorney laments, “It’s very hard to rebuild anything when you haven’t yet severed the serpent’s head.”
If De Maria had limited himself to writing a flat political allegory, The Twenty Days of Turin mightn’t have aged as well as it has. His entities, however, have an odd feature to their hostility that makes them uniquely discomforting today. Before the massacres, Giuffrida and Segre accidentally hear them conversing and making horrific howling noises with “the intonation of war cries.” Importantly, the creatures are not speaking face-to-face, but over the airwaves. Each voice reports what it sees from a blinkered, solitary position in Turin, and jealously tries to outdo the reports of its rivals. Even before they develop the capacity for speech, the nascent beings are driven by attention-seeking and one-upmanship: “Every now and then, a single voice would stick out from the choir, a metallic-sounding voice that seemed to express a clear desire to push its way through, to overtake the others stuck in their common effort.” Segre has the impression that the howls, coming from “disparate directions,” were “relaying some kind of message,” but also “rising up against each other.”
This hardly matches the old-fashioned terror of radical vanguards and synchronized cells, of insurgencies that counted on thousands of followers as a social base. More than anything, it resembles today’s “lone wolf” terrorism, where no-hopers are inspired to copy the massacres of other no-hopers in a rolling wave of despair. Replacing a chain of command, we have friendless deviants who prompt equally friendless imitators far away through a sort of perverse quantum entanglement; the atomized lead the atomized. Whether he worships Breivik or al-Baghdadi, the lone wolf terrorist is a figure in Plato’s Cave, called to violence by the currently trending shadows of other lone wolves. And like the Library users they slaughter, De Maria’s entities have a frustrated, pathetic quality that they cannot conceal in their bragging. Never having met in person, they scream threats at each other through the unearthly communication medium that binds them. Their terror attacks are less a coup d’état than a personal contest for status, a status they initially try to measure in virtual quarrels over which of them is more privileged. Their rage, in short, feels wholly contemporary.
Finally, readers of a metaphysical bent may wonder what the entities precisely are. Is Giuffrida right in his theory that their voices represent society’s “unconscious mind venting itself”? Or could they—as the Millenarist characters believe—be twisted angels sent to punish mankind, seraphs who happen to speak Italian instead of Enochian?
On its original cover, The Twenty Days of Turin reproduces a nineteenth-century lithograph by Félicien Rops titled Satan Sowing Tares. A towering figure creeps over a city, one hand outstretched, scattering his naked underlings from open fingers onto the scene below. Rops based the print on a parable in the Gospel of Matthew. In the story, Satan is an enemy who sows a farmer’s wheat field with tares—toxic weeds that look almost identical to the true crop. Asked by his servants how to combat the infestation, the farmer replies, “Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” Jesus himself later reveals that the parable represents Judgment Day: “The field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one. The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.”
It’s apocalyptically fitting, then, that De Maria’s entities schedule their carnage for July, the traditional wheat-gathering month on European calendars since the Middle Ages.
The motif has a local precedent with which De Maria was likely familiar. In 1821, Joseph de Maistre, the foremost Catholic contrarian of Turinese history, argued that it was symmetry and proportionality, not lack of cruelty, that confirmed the hand of an intelligent Creator. “If the plague recurred each year during July,” he wrote, “this pretty cycle would be just as regular as the return of harvest time.”
Like Maistre before him, De Maria imagined a Divine Providence that was ruthless, opaque and, viewed through limited human eyes, seemingly amoral. The Twenty Days of Turin offers none of the cozier fears expressed in the phrase “. . . or the terrorists win.” Nobody wins in De Maria’s nightmare, where the Cosmos itself has become terroristic. It’s open to doubt if even the Cosmos can reach its goals. The only safe choice available is not to pry too deeply. To paraphrase the novel’s most fearsome mortal character: Why insist on searching where human reason could find only shadows?
But then, someone has to ignore such warnings, or else ghost stories wouldn’t be ghost stories.
* English in the original text.
† English in the original text.
‡ Turin’s Vincenzo Vela Monument, designed by Annibale Galateri in 1911, now stands at the T-junction where Corso Castelfidardo cuts across the northern tip of Corso Stati Uniti. A bronze statue shows the sculptor Vela inspecting his masterpiece, a stone image of the dying Napoleon in his chair. During the 1970s, Corso Castelfidardo, which had not yet been extended into its present T-junction, terminated at the monument, forming a sharp corner with Corso Stati Uniti. The Vela statue, then, would have faced away from any real house on Corso Castelfidardo. However, the novel’s plot implies the reasons for such a “mistake.” Before 1941, the statues of Vela and Napoleon stood outside the Gallery of Modern Art on Corso Galileo Ferraris—directly opposite the fictional location of Segre’s apartment. The house where De Maria hosted his 1950s salons lies two blocks away on the same street.