Grotesque frescoes, naked Venuses, young loves, dark corridors and a garden as lush as a mysterious jungle. In the cellars of this enigmatic mansion a prominent Jew, Pardo Vidas, was murdered by the Nazis. This is the setting in which Guglielmo grows up in the firm belief that, within those same walls and protected by Pardo’s ghost, there is a hidden treasure – as popular rumour deeply rooted in the town’s Jewish neighbourhood has it (the scene is a Tuscan province). As Guglielmo grows up, the search for the treasure unfolds revealing step by step all the phases he progresses through: love, rebellion, sex, fear, violence, courage, illusions…

Guglielmo journeys through life’s circumstances with a tragicomic foolhardiness, which is initially disturbing but then becomes amusing and even comical. The many characters in the novel, all masterfully depicted, provide as many opportunities to expose the dreams, unhappiness and bewilderment of a soul that in self-discovery discovers life and seeks the meaning of it.

In “Il Tesoro” events are narrated in flowing and soundly interwoven prose, in a style that is never banal and which catches the reader’s attention, engages and amuses.
Franco Brogi Taviani writes consistently excellent and extremely enjoyable prose which expresses a noble Tuscan ascendancy from which he has also inherited irreverence and brazenness....

The story has an aura of authenticity that makes it almost, one might say, necessary...

The narrator’s rhetorical and linguistic skills are clear. The structure of speech is broad, while its syntax is both flowing and well-ordered...

His prose is rooted in the ultra-Italian, precious, scurrilous Boccaccio...

...a Boccaccio revisited through Galileo, reverting to medieval coarseness and at the back of the reader’s mind, a comparison with Fenoglio...

It’s like looking at one of Caspar David Friedrich’s uninhabited paintings with a boisterous sonnet by Cecco Angiolieri in the background...

And throughout the novel chiaroscuros place the reader under an experimental sky ...

Literary skill shines through right from the start: events, which are plausible, are narrated in a flowing and soundly interwoven style and in prose which is never sloppy or banal, almost always cultivated and refined, sometimes creative (his use of adjectives in particular is masterly). This makes it an engrossing novel that is often amusing (there are frequent ironical and self-mocking comments) with characters whose weaknesses and limits are gently highlighted, leading us refreshingly and spontaneously back to childhood’s imaginary world and to the world drenched in dreams and utopias of the protagonist’s adolescence.
For all the above reasons, I believe the novel deserves to be published.

This is a collection of comments from readers and excerpts from letters sent by publishers who in the past rejected the novel or forgot it in some drawer. The question is: if these are the words used for rejection, how will appreciation be expressed?

The Marsilio Publishing House has decided to answer this difficult question by simply publishing
"THE TREASURE" in the "Le Maschere" series edited by Paolo Caruso.