A Tranquil Star Read online

  *Valentino is the little boy in the poem “Valentino,” by Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), from the collection Canti di Castel Vecchio; Pin di Carrugio Lungo is the hero of Italo Calvino’s The Path to the Spiders’ Nest.

  * A reference to the novel Le Cronache di Poveri Amanti (Chronicle of Poor Lovers) by Vasco Pratolini (1913–91).

  † Dante’s great-great-grandfather, who appears in Paradiso XV, XVI, and XVIII.

  ‡ A reference to the poem “Il Soldato Somacal Luigi” (“The Soldier Luigi Somacal”) by Piero Jahier (1884–1966).

  * Characters in poems by Villon.

  * Ettore Fieramosca is the hero of the eponymous novel of 1833 by Massimo d’Azeglio; Tommasino Puzzilli is the hero of Pasolini’s A Violent Life (1959); Commissioner Ingravallo is a character in Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (1957); Sergeant Grisha is from Arnold Zweig’s Sergeant Grisha (1928) and Lilian Aldwinkle is from Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925); Bel Ami refers to Maupassant’s novel; Alberto da Giussano was a legendary Lombard fighter of the twelfth century and the Roman martyr Camilla appears in the Aeneid; Mordo Nahum is a character in Levi’s The Truce; Baldus is the hero of a sixteenth-century poem; Hot-Blooded Paolo is the eponymous hero of the novel Paolo il Caldo (1964) by Vitaliano Brancati.

  * Semiramis is the Queen of Assyria who had her husband executed in order to become the sole ruler.

  * Chief magistrate.

  * Volunteer Militia for National Security.

  * Fra Diavolo (lit. Brother Devil; 1771–1806) was the popular name given to Michele Pezza, a famous Italian outlaw who resisted the French occupation of Naples and is remembered in folk legends and in the novels of Alexandre Dumas as a guerrilla leader. Popular superstition invested him with the character of both monk and demon.

  * In English in the text.

  † Schifús is a distorted version of schifo, which means disgusting; Struns is a distortion of stronzo, which literally means turd and is used vulgarly to indicate someone who is mean.

  *The Siriono are an Indian people who live in the tropical forests of eastern Bolivia.

  * Actually, Stanevicius lived from 1799 to 1848.

  * Editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Stampa, author of numerous popular science books, and creator and director of a science program on Italian TV.

  * In English in the original.

  * In Italian, the word contraceptive is anticoncezionale.

  * De Rerum Natura I: 615: “[the smallest] bodies will be composed of infinite particles.”