The sequel to La Gang dei sogni, one of Luca Di Fulvio’s most renowned works, the Roman writer and playwright who passed away in 2023, hits bookstores.
On the occasion of the book’s release, titled Dove rinasce il sogno, HarperCollins Italia (which publishes it in parallel with the German publisher Bastei Lübbe) organized the “Di Fulvio Day”: a day entirely dedicated to readings, book clubs, meetings, and readings, in which more than thirty bookstores from the North to the South of Italy will feature the characters from the author’s novels.
“To present the sequel, HarperCollins Italia chose to start from the places where La gang dei sogni was rediscovered, read, and appreciated: the bookstores, with their readers,” explain the publisher.
A publishing phenomenon, from Germany to France
The publishing journey of Luca Di Fulvio’s books crosses borders. In 2008 Mondadori published La gang dei sogni, which sells more than 100,000 copies in Italy. But it is the success in Germany that makes a bigger impact: here the book surpasses one million copies sold, as noted by NewItalianBooks. And the partnership with the German publisher does not end there: from that moment on, his books are first released in German translation by Bastei Lübbe, which then sells the rights to other countries, including Italy.
His European fortune does not stop there: in 2016, NewItalianBooks notes, in France the budding Slatkine & Cie (which has since become Istya & Cie), still shaping its editorial line, looks to Germany for inspiration. And thus it notices La gang dei sogni, with which it launches its publications, inaugurating a partnership with Di Fulvio that, book after book, becomes highly regarded in France as well: he himself had said that that country had “adopted” him.
Dove rinasce il sogno: the sequel of a novel that earned its place through word of mouth
Thus, with Dove rinasce il sogno, Luca Di Fulvio—that author of works such as Zelter (1996, Zelig-Baldini&Castoldi) and La scala di Dioniso (2006, Mondadori) and founder of the theater company “La Festa Mobile”—returns to Italy, with an entire day dedicated to his works and their characters.
The author worked on this novel for several years, but illness did not permit him to see it completed. He had, however, already finished the book’s plot, having written several chapters. Gathering this material, Paola Barbato—a comics screenwriter and author, among others, of Cuore capovolto (2025) and Morte in tre tempi (2026), published by Neri Pozza—therefore shaped the sequel.
The plot takes us to 1942, more than thirty years after La Gang dei sogni: on the Lower East Side, a girl named Attila moves through the alleys with the ease of someone who knows every street and every escape. Every evening, with her sharp tongue and broad trousers and a shirt worn like a man’s, she gathers a crowd of ragamuffin kids on the landing of 320 Monroe Street. And for them she begins to tell the stories of Christmas Luminita: Harlem’s clandestine radio, the gangsters, the hopes of the last-placed…
That is what remains of the dream that began in 1909, when a newborn named Natale left Calabria in his mother Cetta’s arms and landed at Ellis Island, not yet knowing that he would become Christmas, that he would found the Diamond Dogs gang, and the first independent radio station in New York. Nor that he would fall in love with Ruth, the girl whose life he would save…
