​​Love and Death on Capri. Every word of this subtitle is a promise fulfilled. The same is true of the title, CAPRI DIEM. It is not merely a play on words inspired by Horace’s famous maxim, a play on words borrowed, as Cecilia herself explains, from the Capri historian Renato Esposito. In this case, however, CAPRI DIEM is the announcement, almost the manifesto, of an idea — of a philosophical reflection that runs through the entire novel.

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Cecilia’s novel is complex and, at the same time, simple. Complex because it operates on many different levels. First of all, there is the mystery. The crime story, or rather the investigation, because here the inquiry is conducted by an investigator for an insurance company who must determine whether the woman found dead committed suicide or was murdered, since a substantial insurance policy is at stake.

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Then there is love, an ingredient that can hardly be absent from any respectable novel, and certainly not from one set on Capri, the romantic island par excellence. And so we have many women moving through the story — perhaps rather too many for one man — yet each has her rightful place in a very glamorous whirlwind: so much beauty, so much wealth, so much intelligence, and also so much simplicity, just as the setting in which they move is itself beautiful, rich and, in the end, simple.

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The island of Capri.

And here we come to the true protagonist of the novel: this extraordinary island where every stone has a story to tell and every place has its own meaning. Cecilia, with her deep knowledge of Capri, spares no detail in telling us, alongside the stories of her characters, the history of the island, of every place she names, every corner she describes.

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For this reason, the novel is complex — though it would perhaps be more accurate to call it rich — because it brings all these different levels together into a single whole. Added to them is the philosophical dimension, a subject Cecilia handles with a light touch. There is talk of faith, religion, Indian philosophy, yoga, mantras, the meaning of life and the meaning of death.

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Does that make you imagine a heavy or pedantic book? You would be very much mistaken.

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The pages flow one after another, each of them drawing us in through the stories, thoughts, doubts and hopes of the characters. It is a continuous emotional experience, helped enormously by an extraordinary translation of the text, which I imagine is exceptionally faithful to Cecilia’s refined English. She told me that she wrote the novel in English because she had lost much of the vocabulary of her native language.

That statement struck me deeply. It cannot be easy for a person to feel that she belongs to many places and yet to no single place in particular.

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And yet Cecilia’s Nordic personality emerges very clearly from the book, and this is another nuance that helps make the novel unforgettable. With a very Nordic sense of objectivity and concreteness, Cecilia describes a world in which many cultures meet and merge.

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I was recently in Oslo and found it a surprising, almost magical place. Bright and cheerful. Young and open to the future. I found that same spirit in these pages, mixed with the spirit of Capri itself: an island that has been the land of emperors and violent practices, of social experiments and of solid peasant traditions, as Mario Martone’s recent and beautiful film also portrayed; a land of dissidents and exiles who mixed their knowledge with that of the local people and themselves became part of the living flesh of Capri.

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All of this is what one might call capresità, or capritudine, as some prefer to say. And perhaps it is no coincidence that it takes an adopted foreigner — or perhaps someone who has herself adopted this magical island — to give this world back to us.

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Anyone who knows Capri even a little will, while reading this book, find themselves transported to these places: the Piazzetta, the bench at Tragara, the police station, or the historic villas clinging to the rocks.

This is the strength of Cecilia’s book CAPRI DIEM. It draws the reader inside the pages, encouraging us to take sides with one character or another and to hold our breath as the mystery develops. And the mystery remains a mystery, building through a crescendo of twists until only twenty pages from the end.

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In those final twenty pages, the other knot is untied: the one involving the characters’ feelings.

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And it becomes difficult — truly difficult — to leave this world, so fantastic and at the same time so real.

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Marilicia Salvia
Deputy chief editor, Il Mattino