The devil

The figure of the devil takes its cue from Igor Sibaldi's beautiful book "Il frutto proibito della conoscenza" which took me back to my youth and the many years I spent in a religious college.

Years where the concept of the "Devil" was well defined and widely represented.

But also years where (perhaps due to my good fortune or a great open-mindedness of my teachers) I had been spurred to "look beyond," to not stop at appearances but to always ask new questions.

So I had then approached the image of the devil from different points of view, some even not really ordososso, if I must confess.

So the image of the Devil, not as the "Prince of Evil," but rather as the very ancient "Lord of the Gates," the embodiment of fear of the unknown and consequently of the "new" that we inevitably face, was familiar to me.

Even the Christian theological view of the heavens, from the esoteric and hermetic Ladder of Jacob narrated in Genesis, to the heavens of Dante in the Divine Comedy, I had dealt with it several times, but Sibaldi's book had brought me right back to the view of the Devil as a product of our fears, our deepest and most hidden desires.

So it is in this context that he appears in the book, generated by the fears and passions of one of the novel's protagonists, Michele Barovier.