This award, a nail in the coffin of my career

It has a sense of the human, because if there is no care for the other, there is no more human, there is the triumph of the inhuman. Just look at what is happening in the world.

Along with the cure, the theme of madness emerges strongly in this novel. That of Palasciano at the end of his life, but also that of Olga's mother who had influenced his childhood. What does madness represent?

Paradoxically, madness was a method of knowledge for Palasciano, it is as if Ferdinand were saying 'I may never be able to erase this pain, but I can overcome it and preserve it as extra knowledge'. What really fascinated me was the ethical will of this man: a hero who did not shout, a hero of intelligence and heart. Ferdinando Palasciano was a Gino Strada. I was struck by this professional rigour continually linked to the moral gesture.

What is your idea of Ferdinand's psychic pain?

I also drew on my own life to tell the story. You can guess that the experience of the psychic fracture was somehow close to me. Then I studied and coming from the theatre, having a strong poetic instinctuality, this allowed me a very strong process of identification.

What kind of man is Ferdinand at the moment he is admitted to the asylum?

This is a man who for years forced within himself the pain and disappointment he felt both in his practice as a doctor and in his work as a politician, a militant senator on the liberal left. The clash with the iniquities of history and the envy of the medical and academic world weighed heavy on this sensitive soul. There seems to be something breaking inside him.

With regard to professional disappointments, the novel relates that Palasciano had opposed the creation of a hospital in which the infectious diseases ward would have been next to the maternity ward, thus with the risk of very serious infections. For this he suffered retaliation, such as the dismantling of his operating theatre. Was there a mechanism of abuse of power?

Absolutely, they are overtly political games and of great envy because this was an extraordinary doctor, whose fame was not just Italian, but European. He had treated enemies in battle, the Geneva Convention did not yet exist, he had been a forerunner. When he was interned one of the doctors, a friend, told him that he must stay just long enough to investigate the pain. Here, I found this sentence very effective because it gives the idea of a possibility of healing, of getting out of the emotional and mental disaster he is in.