How much do we know about ourselves?

Incognito is a word capable of evoking different emotions. It makes us think of something dark, mysterious, not known, at least to the end. The unknown was the ocean faced by the sailors led by Colombo or the motionless horizon described by Buzzati in his "The Desert of the Tartars". The word, however, has a second meaning which overlaps with the first. Incognito is the human being who hides his own identity, who subtracts himself and his intimate essence from others. From this point of view we are all a bit incognito in our daily lives, we hide ourselves with the naturalness and consummate skill of an agent infiltrated in hostile territory occupied by a dangerous enemy to deal with: ourselves.

Mario Fortunato , in his latest collection of short stories entitled " Atlas of unknown cities " (Bompiani, pp. 216, also e-book), tells us precisely the surprise that can suddenly seize us, when we find ourselves naked in front of our identity or one of our many facets.

Thus we scroll through twenty-one situations, twenty-one cities . Some close to us like Milan and Turin, others distant and exotic like Saigon or Cape Town. Places that are the background of seemingly ordinary events, but which become out of the ordinary when the protagonists suddenly find themselves faced with decisive moments in their existence. For an old couple of lovers tired of each other it can be discovering that they hate each other after visiting that monument to love that overcomes even death that is the Taj Mahal, in India. For a man in his sixties who hates his own name and a good part of the humanity that surrounds him, the decisive moment that partially reconciles him with life and with his city, London, is the one in which in line at the checkout of a shop has an unexpected movement of solidarity towards a stranger.

In all the events narrated by Fortunato there is always a moment, a gesture, a word, but above all a place, indeed a city that acts as a detonator for change. Every city welcomes those who are incognito and confronts them with their prodigious moment, their breaking point. Each city acts as a mirror to the protagonists drawn in a clear and anti-rhetorical way by the author, who takes us on a literary journey - and also a visual one because punctuated by Claudia Peil's illustrations - above all emotional and in a certain sense dreamlike through the surprises hidden in the folds of everyone's daily life .