ROME — With new titles landing in bookshops almost every week this autumn, Giulio Perrone Editore’s Passaggi di dogana has just crossed its 100th volume and is pressing on towards number 110. Launched in 2012 , the series maps real cities through the lives of the artists who reinvented them, from Banksy, through Caravaggio, Maradona and Agatha Christie, which was authored by Italy Now literary reviewer Melania Guard. Potentially, it is endless. Italy Now spoke to Maria Camilla Brunetti, who runs the series.
Q. What does it mean to cross a border through a book?
“Passaggi di dogana explores the frontiers of hybrid writing. Each title reads a real landscape through the life and work of a great figure, mostly modern and contemporary, though not only. Geographies shift, places are spaces in constant movement, as our sensibility and our history are, and they transform through the gaze of the great interpreters who shaped them. Potentially, the series is infinite.”
Q. How do you choose a new title?
“Every title is a unique project, so our needs vary each time. With the publisher Giulio Perrone and the editorial team, far in advance, we think about which place and author pairings we would love to explore. From that mapping, which I would call geographical, cultural and identity-driven, we move toward the authors best suited to a particular genius loci (the spirit of a place).”
Q. What is the invisible thread linking figures as different as Christie, Banksy and Maradona?
“All of them, in the forms and voices of their authorship, reshaped and retold certain geographies. They handed them back new and welded them forever into the collective imagination of hundreds of thousands of readers, fans and citizens.”
Q. In the age of Google Maps and TikTok, what can a travel book still offer?
“An authorial gaze. The writing, the style, the lens a writer chooses for the bond between a place and a great cultural figure, that is what separates us from a simple travel clip on social media. We love the content we make for Instagram too. They are different containers, each with its own style. But our titles are immersive experiences, a place, a life, and the voice telling that relationship. It is a triad that has created beautiful crossings.”
Q. Why Agatha Christie, beyond Poirot and Miss Marple?
“We wanted the woman behind the writer, her modernity, her hunger for adventure and knowledge, and we wanted a title for the 50th anniversary of her death. For Christie the places are essential. One of her favourite pastimes was moving house, falling in love with new places, making them hers. Houses have their own personality in almost all her books.”
Q. Which title made you most want to pack a suitcase?
“Every title is unique, so it is hard. Working on In Brasile con Jorge Amado gave me a real desire to see Brazil. In Perù con Mario Vargas Llosa did the same. In Abruzzo con Natalia Ginzburg convinced me to return to Ginzburg’s places, and A Palermo con Letizia Battaglia made me long for Palermo again, following the traces of an unforgettable artist.”
