Family Wardrobe

It's December 22, 2022, when Santa has a fit of "madness" and tries to get rid of all the clothes she finds in her closet. Those items are too painful for her. The family looks at the scene in dismay, the most shocked being Gianni, the eldest son: he can't accept that those clothes should be thrown away. Gianni takes them with him from a small village in Sicily to Rome, to find a new home for them, a new meaning. Since he was a child, Gianni has observed his family's events intertwine and then  unravel themselves, like the warp and weft of a restless fabric.

Now, sorting and packing this mountain of rags, he tries to decipher them as one does with memories or emotions. Through the clothes (and their photographs, which illustrate and punctuate the entire narrative), he rebuilds the story of a family that has endured drama and turmoil (the young daughter's illness, the mother's depression and alcoholism, poverty) but has also managed to bounce back. Delving into the past and present, he will also try to explain her parents' obsession about clothes—and will understand that they are nothing more than a way of communicating, of doing without those words that fail to come out. But the burden of family memory grows heavier and heavier so much that he loses his balance: like his mother, Gianni will also be overwhelmed by the weight of the family wardrobe and touched by the shadow of madness. 

The Family Wardrobe is a novel-archive, a chronicle of family relationships in which clothes become metaphor and symbol, containers of meaning that describe and define people, feelings, and relationships.