His name is Leonardo, but everyone
calls him Leon.
Twenty-seven years old, Swiss schooling, master’s
degree at the Bocconi University, a prominent
family, a heavy-duty mother, an absentee father,
a single-minded brother and a stepsister who can
only play with dolls behind closed doors. Houses
scattered around in places that are never incidental:
St. Moritz, Bellagio, Portofino, Ibiza. Leon is
a cliché. And the worst thing is that he
is aware of it, for, as he declares: “no-one
in Milan is more Eighties than me”.
He drinks like a fish, he snorts coke –
which he calls “pizza”– naturally,
he doesn’t work, he is familiar with outrage
but not with courage, he survives in his gilded
cage, in the company of comics, TV and whores,
and he has Anita, a bourgeois girlfriend who has
loved him for too long and who leaves him in the
first few pages of the story.
This is the first big no in Leon’s life
and his reaction is totally in character: deceiving
himself into thinking that everything has its
price, he sends her a pair of Manolo Blahnik heels,
but she refuses to succumb.
In his desperate attempt to win her back, he realises
that the first enemy to be fought is the cocaine,
which he attempts to conquer in his own very personal
way.
In an attempt to escape, Leon instinctively decides
to spend a few days on a farm in the Tuscan countryside,
the Fattoria del Colle, on the eve of what promises
to be an excellent grape harvest.
Sceptical – but above all, pampered –
he decides to measure himself up against a previously
unknown world, populated by hard-working people
who talk from the gut, who speak about grape juice
and horseflies and arrive at work carrying their
plastic bags.
In the country, as well as the mysterious woman
who owns the farm, Leon meets a Cuban lady-killer,
a cellar master(mistress)-cum-dancer and, above
all, a vine harvester with freckles on her chest,
while losing himself in varieties of salami and
glasses of red wine. Will it suffice to atone
for his sins?
In If it’s fine tomorrow, Luca Bianchini
tells the story of the contemporary jet set,
using irony and cynicism to lay bare the idiosyncrasies
of an inimitable scion: handsome, damned and
damnably sensitive, Leon is simultaneously the
victim and the executioner of his own life.
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