“Like fireflies”: this is why you should never stop shining

Winner of the LetteraFutura national literary competition for emerging writers, Francesca Pongiluppi , with her novel "Come le lucciole" (Solferino, 2025, €18.50, also available as an e-book), offers us a novel that retraces some of the most painful events in Italian history . As Loredana Lipperini, president of the jury that awarded the book, wrote, Francesca Pongiluppi has created "a novel with a refined architecture that skillfully interweaves two dimensions distant in space and time, deftly moving between two narrative levels. On the one hand, Genoa in 2001, that of the G8 and those who wanted to change the world; on the other, Italian Colonial Africa, that of economic exploitation, political oppression, and the use of violence against the local population ."

It all begins, in fact, on the eve of the 2001 Genoa G8 summit, when Sonia, the book's protagonist, puts herself before politics for the first time. While her comrades prepare for the great protest that will sadly mark the beginning of the new millennium, she decides to sort out her past, frozen in 1984 with the death of Jolanda, who was like a second mother to her. Now her husband, Giannetto, has also passed away, and life seems to summon Sonia to Ca' Mimosa, her childhood vacation home, high among the rocks of a Ligurian village far from the sea. But will this convocation become a definitive farewell to the past, or will it mark a new beginning?

For some time, Sonia is carried away by memories and nostalgia for those places. She thinks back to Jolanda, to her grandparents with whom she spent her holidays at Ca' Mimosa. When Sonia manages to enter the mysterious "green room," which she had never had access to during her childhood summers, she has the most important encounter of her life: Jolanda's diary. And the pages, like a scalpel, open unexpected wounds, reveal disconcerting secrets: the story of Jolanda-Jojo, her years of exploitation in brothels in colonial Libya, her arrival in Liguria, her meeting with Giannetto, the war and the Resistance, a love capable of returning in other forms. By immersing herself in that life, Sonia feels as if she's freeing Jolanda and herself, rediscovering a more authentic dimension of militancy and struggle.

For all these reasons, we can define Come le lucciole as a political and coming-of-age novel, capable of uniting, across time, the hopes and expectations of very different women in their shared search for their place in the world and new ways of inhabiting it. Francesca Pongiluppi creates a wonderful interweaving of memory, current events, and possible futures, centered on the dream of forging a destiny stronger than the sins of history. Learning from the fireflies: protecting yourself from pain doesn't mean ceasing to shine, but rather shining brighter.