APRILE È UNA STRANA STAGIONE

This book is dedicated to Nina, one of the most beautiful souls I have ever had the good fortune to meet. Nina navigated the twentieth century with grace and lightness, living across three continents and embracing two different gender identities. With extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, she loved both men and women, and through them continued to love herself, without ever succumbing to life’s hardships. More generally, this book is dedicated to anyone capable of fully accepting their own and others’ humanity, however impenetrable it may often remain.

“The complexity of human love and sexuality has often given rise, in some masterful novels, to unforgettable characters capable of giving voice to their desires and feelings beyond social conventions and prejudices. Consider, for example, books such as Virginia Woolf’s *Orlando* or Jeffrey Eugenides’ *Middlesex*. It is the magic of literature, capable of delving where no psychological or medical investigation can: into the impenetrable complexity of human nature and its desires.

In ‘April is a Strange Season’, a similar magic is at work. Gabriella Ambrosio portrays the life and adventures of a unique protagonist, who makes the duality of his sexuality—his attraction and fascination with both sexes—the fundamental reason for his existence, the real possibility of becoming the architect of his own conduct and of himself.

It is the fictionalised story of a real-life Italian filmmaker who, born in the 1930s, lived through the 20th century, travelling across three continents and, above all, navigating two genders: from his Neapolitan childhood in the post-war years – where the language of Gabriella Ambrosio, a Neapolitan by birth, softens in a poignant way – through adolescence in a boarding school, to adulthood with fatherhood and, at the same time, the most violent swings of the pendulum of his existence, loving men and women and being loved by both, living a thousand lives within a single one.

Thanks to impeccable writing, capable of sculpting the vicissitudes of an existential adventure with vivid words, Gabriella Ambrosio offers the reader a story in which a single rule triumphs: the law of love.”