The Burning Origin 🔥

By Daniele Mencarelli.

The Burning Origin is a powerful and deeply felt book about returning home and discovering that the place that shaped you still holds you in ways you cannot shake.

Mencarelli takes us to the Tuscolano neighbourhood of Rome, where Gabriele Bilancini grew up with his family and a close circle of friends. Now in Milan, polished, successful and celebrated as a designer, he returns after four years and realises that nothing has changed at all. The streets, the habits, the people, even their conversations feel suspended in time.

What has changed is Gabriele himself. In Milan he has learned to present a version of his life that sounds sophisticated and worldly, yet the moment he is back in Tuscolano he feels swallowed by the place that formed him. He is ashamed of where he comes from, yet unsatisfied with who he has become. This tension sits at the heart of the book. Mencarelli captures it with remarkable clarity, offering a portrait of a man stretched between pride and longing, belonging and distance.

The neighbourhood becomes a character of its own. Warm, familiar and at times stifling, it draws Gabriele in even as he resists it. His childhood friends remain rooted in the routines and beliefs he left behind.

When he speaks with his girlfriend in Milan, he feels the crack between the two versions of himself widen. He cannot bring himself to show her the simplicity and silliness he has rediscovered at home, yet he aches for it all the same.

Mencarelli writes with striking emotional precision. He gives voice to a very modern feeling, the inner divide experienced by those who leave their home to chase a dream elsewhere. The past pulls at them with a mixture of affection and embarrassment, while the present dazzles but fails to satisfy. The result is a quiet fracture that is difficult to mend.

Gabriele represents many who grow up in small communities and then find themselves in fast moving cities where ambition is celebrated above everything else. There is admiration, yes, but also loneliness and a constant fear of being caught between two worlds.

Mencarelli shows this conflict with tenderness and truth. The shame, the yearning, the fierce attachment to one’s roots, and the unsettling feeling that success comes with a cost.

The Burning Origin is sad, thoughtful and painfully current. It speaks to anyone who has tried to outrun the place that made them, only to find that it lingers in every step they take.

A beautifully written and emotionally resonant book that stays with you long after the final page.

Thank you to the whole team at Europa Editions UK for sending me a copy of the book. The book is out now and available to purchase.

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