Las Hermanas Materassi

Teresa and Carolina Materassi are two sisters in their fifties who have always been together and who earn a comfortable living as embroiderers and seamstresses of fine lingerie in a small town on the outskirts of Florence. The trousseaus of all the marriageable girls from the good families in the area pass through their hands; their reputation as excellent artisans has earned them the prosperity of their business, the incessant parade of ladies from the Florentine aristocracy and curia, and even an audience with the Pope. It was not always like this. The Materasis had to bear from a young age the consequences of having a spendthrift and spoiled father who squandered the family estate. They only had their talent and their capacity for sacrifice to respond to the creditors and maintain the estate, now converted into a sanctuary of work and virtue. But their self-denial and renunciation have also turned them into two beings exiled from life. In this orderly regime, which at times seems like a locked room, a young nephew, Remo, falls like a bolt of lightning, whose care is entrusted to them by another sister who has just died far from the family. The vitality, the mystery, the joyful irresponsibility and, above all, the beauty of the boy provoke a cathartic turn in the lives of the sisters, and the counterpoint between both ways of being in the world will give rise to moments that distill a subtle and incessant comedy. A sharp and mocking narrator recounts the fascination of the women for the beautiful teenager, who awakens in them an agitation that seemed extinguished and drags them to a flight forward with a substantial final turn. A story of seduction told with mordacity and humor, a sharp psychological game of mirrors always suspended on the edge between laughter and melancholy, irony and compassion. Full of modernity and defined by André Gide as the best Italian novel of its time, The Materassi Sisters consecrated Aldo Palazzeschi, one of the most interesting figures of the Italian avant-garde movements of the first half of the 20th century.