The blurred boundaries between rationality and imagination, reality and the supernatural

Turin, last days of 1959. Nino Giacosa has recently returned to his hometown after an absence of many years. He lived in Rome for a long time cultivating the hope of writing for the cinema. Now he is just a man broken inside, on the run: from gambling debts, from the ghosts of the defeat of El Alamein and the long prisoner of war, from Miriam, the woman he loved.

One evening, by chance, the man spots Miriam in front of the threshold of the elegant building where a singular character lives who has been bewitching and disturbing Turin for some time: the prodigious Rol. Things are said about Gustavo Rol, an erudite and gallant gentleman from Turin that many find hard to believe: he reads in closed books, predicts the future, paints without touching the brushes, materializes and dematerializes objects, travels through time, peers into the minds of others , relieves physical pain. In front of shocked and speechless spectators, every evening Rol, without apparent difficulty, produces incredible paranormal phenomena for which it seems impossible to explain. Its legendary evenings, aimed at a highly selected audience, are attended by figures such as Gianni Agnelli, Federico Fellini, Franco Zeffirelli, Jean Cocteau and Albert Einstein. Convinced that Rol is a simple illusionist and determined to unmask him and then write a story dedicated to the great deception that has hypnotized an entire city, Nino then forces Miriam to introduce him to one of these evenings not knowing that what he will see is the meeting with the “magician” will change his life forever.

Narrated with seductive and enchanting skill, "The Last Magician" (Neri Pozza, 2024, Euro 18, pp. 240. Also Ebook) allows Francesca Diotallevi to ask herself and us readers profound, disturbing and at the same time fascinating time on the blurred boundaries between rationality and imagination, between reality and the supernatural, putting us in contact with one of the most enigmatic figures of the twentieth century, Gustavo Rol, a character who really existed, for many a saint and an enlightened man, for just as many just a skilled illusionist. and manipulator of objects and human beings.

Our guide in the encounter with the Rol mystery, which is the mystery of the unknowable and the inexplicable that has always accompanied human existence, is Nino Giacosa, a skeptical, indeed cynical character, endowed however with two uncommon qualities: curiosity and the ability to listen, leaving the right space for the words of the other. Thus, between two men, apparently so different as Nino and Gustavo Rol, an unexpected complicity is soon created, the result of the loneliness that they both experience and that unites them.

Nino Giacosa is alone because he is incapable of fighting to the end for what he loves: his job, his woman. The "magician" is alone because his "gift" makes him admired, feared, but never fully understood. To use the words that the real Rol spoke in 1975 when speaking of the many who participated in his "experiments", words that Francesca Diotallevi makes her protagonist pronounce on a cold night in 1960: «After a long time I have built nothing in you; I only filled the many hours of your boredom, I gave you a show. But at least you could have made a small attempt, that of moving towards me...". Who knows what whoever had the desire or compassion to do so would have found... perhaps a simple and fragile man in flesh and blood, perhaps a game of mirrors or perhaps an impalpable shadow and for this reason even more fascinating.