The Caravaggio Syndrome

Leyla is a feral art-historian, whose pregnancy is put at risk by the re-emergence of childhood traumas. Michael is one of her students. Although shy and solitary in appearance, he is a passionate and duplicitous creature. While working as Leyla’s research assistant, he meets and falls in love with Pablo, the inept father of her child. Yet, what unites Leyla and Michael is more than an interest in Pablo. Tommaso Campanella, a maverick seventeenth-century philosopher, whose journal they pored over in order to understand Caravaggio’s paintings, exercises a constant influence on their lives. And while Campanella’s exile and prison notebooks act as a gateway to seventeenth-century Naples, Leyla and Michael engage in their own flights between New York, Naples, and Paris. In the end, Caravaggio’s painting The Seven Works of Mercy reveals itself to be a resonating echo chamber for Leyla, Michael and Tommaso, but also the springboard for a new, more wholesome life.

ALESSANDRO GIARDINO is an associate professor of Italian and French literature at Saint Lawrence University and author of Corporeality and Performativity in Baroque Naples: The Body of Naples. He lives between Montreal, Naples, and New York.

JOYCE MYERSON has had an extensive career in academic and literary translation. She is the translator of numerous books, including the award-winning The Big Score by Irene Grazzini.