Florence in 2030 offers a vantage-point from which to observe a very changed world: planetary political equilibrium has been skewed, the right to vote has been restricted and has to be earned through socially useful actions, and everyone is monitored by means of microchips implanted under the skin. This is the futuristic setting for the story of Guelfo, of his love for Francesca and that between Francesca’s parents, Giovanni and Laura, and for the relationship of profound intellectual exchange that develops between Guelfo and Giovanni. These are some of the motifs running through the most ordinary and unfathomable plot of all: the life (and hence death) story of each and every one of us. The novel bodies out an attempt to arrive at the meaning of things, probing the most profound passions and impulses, the miracle of being in the world and knowing how to be in the world. And so, goodness is beauty, love, dream, suffering, commitment, generation, belonging to one’s own place, since “being Florentine is a state of mind, an innate sense of grace and proportion”. “A book among books. And there’s Florence, where the characters navigate suspended between imagination and reality, between ambiguity and the desire for death, but always end up rediscovering the positive part of themselves and of the world” «La Repubblica» “A humanistic tale which has found the three-dimensionality of man, using the past as memory, the future as hope and the pre- sent as attention. Riccardo Zucconi’s Paper Heart also boasts a philosophical quality: that of not revealing anything, but allowing men to discover what they are not aware of knowing” «La Nazione» 1 st Italian edition: March 1998,September 1998, March 2003, November 2008 1 st Brazilian edition: Coração de papel , Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro, 2004 (tradução de Eliana Aguiar) 2 nd Italian edition: October 2013, April 2015 1 st English edition: Paper Heart , Mauro Pagliai, Firenze, July 2015 (translation by Aelmuire Helen Cleary)
