Il sapore del tozzabancone is a 3,000-word short story published in November 2012 on the magazine “Toilet” #21. Despite its name, “Toilet” is a respected magazine or, to be more precise, a periodical collection of short stories. For every issue, the editorial staff select 11-15 stories out of the hundreds submitted by as many writers. It has a print run of 1,200+ copies and is available in a fair number of bookshops all over Italy.
Il sapore del tozzabancone is set at the turn of the Eighties and is about Marinella, a 9 y.o. girl who is often sent out to buy, with a small coin in her hand, the mysterious, unobtainable “tozzabancone”, which is most likely some kind of food or ingredient… Indeed, shopkeepers keep saying they’ve run out of it, therefore she always gets back home disheartened, wondering what the hell the “tozzabancone” is, and what could it taste like. It will take her a couple of years to understand that she’s being the victim of a sort of “snipe hunt”, that it’s just a way to get rid of her for a while when her colourful household is too busy and she’s in the way. The very moment she realizes that, she reckons she’s become a woman. But being a woman is much more than this…
The images in this post show the cover of this story as (self)published on Meetale.com (left) and the cover of “Toilet 21”.
B R I G H T A L I A N 