St. Lawrence Professor’s Inventive Novel ‘The Caravaggio Syndrome’ Wins Acclaim
Novels tend to take place in a city. But Alessandro Giardino’s inventive and highly acclaimed The Caravaggio Syndrome: A Novel features the city as a character in and of itself.
“In the novel, characters walk around the city and encounter the city, and they have emotional and intellectual responses to it, so the city becomes itself a protagonist,” Giardino says.
The Professor of World Languages, Cultures, and Media describes the novel—which has been praised in The Observer, The Art Newspaper, Publishers Weekly, and The Miramachi Reader, as well as in in leading Italian newspapers such as Il Mattino and Il Corriere della Sera—as one where past and present collide between similar characters from the 1600s and today, and across cities including Naples, New York City, Paris, and even on a remote upstate-New York university campus a bit like St. Lawrence’s.
“The novel attempts to show how the struggles of being an intellectual are similar between the 1600s and today,” Giardino says. “That’s what connects the present with the past: the courage to stick to your ideas and finding the strength to be who you are.”
It’s inspired by the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio’s masterpiece, “The Seven Works of Mercy,” which Giardino uses as a gateway to access the historical Naples depicted in the painting.
That’s in fact where Giardino’s chief interest lies: in imagining and reconstructing certain cities at a point in history.
“I am fascinated by recreating the life, culture, and milieu of a city at a specific time, and to see how cultural circles are created,” he says.
The novel was originally published in 2021, in Italian, where it has been reprinted multiple times, but was translated and published into English last year. The trilingual Giardino, who grew up in Naples and now lives near Montreal and speaks Italian, French, and English, wrote the novel in Italian to see if he was still able to write in the language at a literary level.
He went so far as to study what Italian looked and sounded like in the 1600s to faithfully recreate that period in Naples in the novel. For him, the process was as much a labor of linguistics as it was of writing.
The first draft, he says, took about a year to complete, but the editing process took much longer.
Between his duties as a professor, one might wonder how the author of three books and a dizzying list of academic articles spanning multiple disciplines finds the time to finish these mountainous achievements. But that’s just it, he says: writing is like hiking a mountain. You can’t think about reaching the top, but rather only about putting one foot in front of the other.
And he’s already begun hiking his next mountain of a novel, about a French libertine returning home after a long absence, which takes a sharp look at the shifting contours of French high society and edges into social satire.
This time, he’s writing it in French.
“For me, it’s very important to keep perfecting and maintaining the languages I speak,” Giardino says.
What he's learned from the process of writing these novels has not just been for himself, but also his students.
“Next semester, for instance, I am thinking about teaching a creative writing course on Writing the City, where students try to recreate the atmosphere and culture of specific cities at specific times,” he says.
Giardino is also proud of his efforts to found the study abroad program at The Italian International Institute in Sorrento, Italy, as well as his work in revamping the European Studies minor.
Ultimately, though, he just wants his students to love what they do the way he loves what he does.
“It’s nice to experience reputational or material success,” he says, “but I try to remind students that they should pursue projects for the pleasure of doing them.”
The Caravaggio Syndrome: A Novel is available on Amazon, at St. Lawrence’s Brewer Bookstore, and can be purchased or ordered through any major bookstore nationwide.
