Available in all bookstores starting Tuesday 22 October for Salani, Before Being Princes it's the new book by Niccolo Agliardi: the story of a night like few others, in which beauty, discreet and radiant, offers itself to those who are able to grasp it, to those who keep their eyes open.
“Instructions for the use of life. A father, a son and the Prof Vecchioni. Facing each other, with the desires, fears and provisional certainties of three different generations. A conversation that is not afraid of depth, even when faced with the most incandescent themes and which, page after page, becomes a hymn to the power of the word, capable of shedding light in the darkness of those who are perpetually searching for themselves.”
Three men, therefore, sitting around a table, ready to exchange truths that, perhaps, they don't even know they possess.
One is Samthe son that fate has entrusted to Nicholas and the other is the father who his father is not and has not been, that is Roberto Vecchioni: the man who many years before had written to a young man Nicholaswho dreamed of being a singer-songwriter, a letter that today is ready to be passed as a baton to his son.
The book – which will be presented on October 28 at Feltrinelli in Piazza Piemonte a Milan and the November 6 at Borri Books in Rome – it is not a novel, nor an essay, much less a memoir. “It is the narration of a crucial appointment with two fundamental men, the journey of a single night through three generations: Sam he is 20 years old, Roberto Vecchioni he's over 80. I, in the middle, recently turned 50”, he explained Agliardi.
Then, he added: “In these pages I have intertwined all my clumsy attempts to become a singer with the memorable, and much more successful, encounters that have marked the last 30 years of my life. Thirty years separate me from Sam and another thirty from the Professor. And they were years of songs, of catastrophic falls, of fractures and unexpected rainbows. Of severe masters, courageous journalists and spectacular plot twists.
All this was already written in a prophetic letter that the Prof had sent to a twenty-year-old from Milan who hoped to become a singer-songwriter. The recipient of the letter was me, even if he didn't know it yet. Today I delivered that same letter to Sam, with the hope that he can subvert the plans with the same amazement that happened to me. So that, at the end of the crazy dance with the unexpected, I can discover that happiness was hidden right there. The way everything went”.
