Rome, 1927. A newborn is entered in a ledger with the letters NN, nessun nome, no name. Four other infants receive the same notation that week. What might once have been a small cruelty has become a habit of the hand. But his mother gives him something the record does not.
Thirty-one years later he would reach Volterra and begin a record of himself that could not be reduced to two letters.
Rome and Volterra sit roughly three hundred kilometres apart. For Fernando Nannetti the journey took thirty-one years. At seven he entered a charity institution. At ten, a home for children whose minds the doctors had already decided about. Later, a hospital in Rome. Then, in 1958, a transfer north to San Girolamo.
Entered in the register as NN. No name recorded.
Handed forward for the first time. Nobody asked him anything.
A file decides what his mind can and cannot do.
A diagnosis arrives instead of a sentence. He is twenty-one.
San Girolamo, and a courtyard wall he has not yet read.
At San Girolamo, everything that could be itemized was taken. One object stayed: the buckle of Fernando’s uniform belt.
Soon after arriving in 1958, during the exercise hour in the yard of the Ferri pavilion, he used it to carve directly into the exterior plaster.
He kept at it for more than a decade, until the metal wore thin as a coin.
He described himself as an astronautical mining engineer, a colonel, and a resident of places no ordinary map could locate. In Dear Wall, this vocabulary becomes the astral colonel, Nucleare Orientale Francese, and the intergalactic commands he assigns himself.
The wall could have gone to plaster dust if nobody had stopped to read it. In Dear Wall that person is Aldo Ferretti, a young nurse on the Ferri ward. The character is based on Aldo Trafeli, a real nurse credited in the historical record with helping to document and preserve Fernando’s wall. The public history belongs to Trafeli. The conversations, thoughts and family life in the novel are invented, which is why the character carries a different name.
The wall was photographed systematically, section by section, before the weather could take any more of it.
The nurse’s decades of notebooks were published as a book, set beside the photographs of each panel.
An essay by a prominent Italian writer carried the work to readers who would never travel to Volterra.
For twenty years Maria Rago’s creative language had been music: piano, film scores and orchestral composition. Her work kept returning to the idea of giving voice to people who have none, and to the difference between speaking and being heard. Then she found the story of a man entered in a ledger without a name, who spent years writing himself into a wall, and of the person who chose to read him.
A novel about identity, memory and listening, and about a man whose words survived for one reason only, which is that somebody finally stopped and read them.
Dear Wall is her first novel, drawing on the true story of Fernando Oreste Nannetti and the nurse who preserved his wall.
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