Here Trachi’s direct traces vanish. But, as perhaps some may remember, over the following days the newspapers reported on a strange series of horse-rustlings, all perpetrated with the same technique: a door knocked down, the halter undone or ripped off, the animal (always a mare, and always alone) led into some nearby wood, and then found exhausted. Only once did the abductor seem to meet with any resistance: his chance companion of that night was found dying, her neck broken.

There were six of these episodes, and they were reported in various places on the peninsula, occurring one after the other from north to south. In Voghera, in Lucca, near Lake Bracciano, in Sulmona, in Cerignola. The last happened near Lecce. Then nothing else; but perhaps this story is linked to a strange report made to the press by a fishing crew from Puglia: just off Corfu they had come upon ‘a man riding a dolphin’. This odd apparition swam vigorously towards the east; the sailors shouted at it, at which point the man and the grey rump sank under the water, disappearing from view.

‘Quaestio de Centauris’

First published in Il Mondo (4 April 1961) under the title ‘Il centauro di Trachi’. It was then included in the collection Storie naturali (Einaudi, 1966).

Tommaso Landolfi

1908–79

Landolfi was an aristocrat from the province of Caserta, once home to the Bourbon kings of Naples. He loved gambling and hated being photographed. He avoided literary events, granted very few interviews and insisted that his books’ flaps – precious commercial real-estate for most authors – be left blank. His work was just as eccentric; he eventually abandoned conventional forms altogether and played rigorously with language, manufacturing his own idiosyncratic lexicon. For this reason Landolfi can be grouped, in this anthology, along with authors like Gadda and Savinio: iconoclastic, verbally precocious, linked to Surrealism and experimentation. Landolfi’s writing, filled with archaic terms, can be challenging today even for an Italian reader. His creative output can be divided roughly into two phases, evolving from traditional narrative to deeply metaphysical texts, invented diaries and dialogues. An undisciplined student who nearly failed to finish high school, he excelled at learning languages and was a collector of grammars and dictionaries. A reader in French, Spanish, German and English, he also studied Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swedish and was a lover in particular of the Russian language and its literature, writing his university thesis on the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. He also wrote a celebrated essay about the time Nikolai Gogol spent in Rome. The female protagonist of his first, fantastic novel, La pietra lunare (The Moonstone), published in 1939, is half-human, half-goat. His short stories are long, blasphemous, bitter, attuned to mystery and chance. This story, outlandish on every level, epitomizes Landolfi’s fascination for the circuitous and the irrational. It is an unreal and hyper-real commentary on the writing of literary biography and our ongoing obsession with writers’ lives. Landolfi received the Strega Prize in 1975 for a collection of short stories called A caso (At Random) and won the Viareggio Prize both in fiction and poetry.