Karavansara

Two days and The Devil Under the Sea hits the shelves (but you can preorder it right now), and I got thinking about the 1950s.
Now, the 1950s are sort of a gray area as far as I am concerned – a gray area for my generation of Italians, really: the history program in school stopped at the Second World War, and we were born in the late 1960s, so the ’50s sort of fell between what we learned and what we experienced. A sort of “ghost decade”.

And yet, with hindsight, it was a pretty exciting decade¹.
It was the decade of bebop and rock’n’roll.
It was the decade of revolutions and uphevals.
It was the decade of the New Look, and of the Dolce Vita.
A lot of stuff happened, and the world was shrinking.

The density of events in the 1950s is both a joy and a horror when writing The Corsair.
I wrote about 20 pages of what was planned as the third story, set in Egypt in 1953/54, before I checked my facts and found out the whole action took place during a coup that basically locked down the nation under martial law.
Oooops.
Scrap the thing, redo from start.

But I already told you I like doing research, and after all the events in the ’50s were quite influential on my life, and exploring the decade is becoming a hobby (another one!) of mine. Continue reading →