2026 will be a year full of editorial news, a season that opens in a promising way with «La sonnambula« (Bompiani), the novel written by Bianca Pitzorno which crosses the nineteenth century to question the present with a writing capable of crystallizing time, without escaping the complexity of our days.
At the end of the 19th century, “somnambula” was the term used to define those women who fell into trance and were considered capable of coming into contact with the invisible sphere. This is precisely what happens to Ofelia Rossi – the protagonist of the novel – who has to deal with the protective demands of her family who, to protect her from the society that considered her hysterical, arranges a marriage for her, projecting her into a domestic hell. But Ophelia rebels. He runs away from the town of Vibrona, takes his destiny into his own hands and transforms his ambiguous talent into a profession. She will become a renowned “somnambulist”, consulted by bourgeois women seeking answers, listening and above all, meaning to their lives.
«La sonnambula» is not a novel about the supernatural, nor does it indulge in a decorative Gothic. It is a book about the power of gaze and interpretation. In fact, Ophelia does not predict the future like an oracular exotic figure; before offering a response she reads social and linguistic signs, intercepts repressed desires, anxieties and traumas that clients are unable to rationalize.
In the village of Donora – the fictitious name behind which Sassari is hidden – in her living room, in via del Fiore Rosso, Ofelia earns her living by offering prophecies for the price of 5 lire, but in reality she offers a place where the bourgeoisie projects its anxieties, in a subtle dialectic that fuels the narrative and constitutes its political heart.
Pitzorno – 83 years old, famous writer with more than 70 works, including essays and novels, beloved children’s author, already winner of the Rapallo Prize for non-fiction in 2022 – builds the book on the moving border between document and invention. Part of the events arises from archives, chronicles and nineteenth-century newspaper clippings; the rest is invention and inspiration, with the precise intention of giving a voice back to those figures considered marginal in history.
What emerges is a bourgeois Sardinia, far from any folklore, crossed by power relations, male violence, rigid social hierarchies, but also by subtle forms of female resistance. In this world, women survive through the word, the story, the construction of informal networks of solidarity.
Telling stories, in Pitzorno’s pages, is already a political act. It is no coincidence that the Sassari-born author has long since chosen to no longer write for children. Not to deny one’s own path, but rather to look for another gaze to read the complexity of the present.
At the same time, «La sonnambula» maintains a radical trust in the reader’s intelligence, even when the story seems to proceed freely, every event is held together by a rigorous structure. In this sense, narrative freedom is never arbitrary: it is profound control of form, attention to rhythm, the ability to bring out meaning without imposing it.
Ofelia Rossi narrated by Bianca Pitzorno is neither a victim to be pitied nor a picturesque figure. She is a woman who transforms disadvantage into a profession, listening into competence, marginality into a space for action free from the control of family and men. In this sense, the sleepwalker becomes a metaphor for writing itself, because telling means reading the lives of others, also to give meaning to one’s own. Without fear of making your voice heard, free and outside the box.
A dense novel, full of stories and looks at reality, in “La sonnambula” there is no complacency. Rather, the idea emerges that telling means exercising a vigilant gaze on the world. Pitzorno shows how reading the past is, still today, one of the most effective ways to understand the present. And to be able to make a difference in the world of slothful people.