Under The Porticoes

In a city built to forget, one letter remembers everything. Bologna, 1954. Beneath forty kilometers of medieval porticoes, a city that survived the war is hard at work forgetting it. Marco Zamboni - once a man the century had use for, now a private investigator who delivers groceries to the lonely and takes his coffee black as a starless night - has made a quiet peace with doing as little as possible, and doing it beautifully.
Then a letter arrives, sealed in red wax and painted by hand. Inside is the plea of a woman named Yi-Sé, who has spent nine years chasing her vanished husband across two oceans and five countries. The trail has ended in Italy; the fee is a small fortune; and every gorgeous, deliberate line of it tells Marco one thing - it is a trap. Sensing it, he goes to the one man he trusts: Frederick D. Leopardi, at the headquarters of the Melograno newspaper.
But he comes too late. What waits is not an answer but a catastrophe - one that will shatter more lives than his own and open a web of love, vengeance, and buried guilt that no investigation can ever close. From the battlefields of Tunisia to the blue grotto of Capri, Under the Porticoes is a hauntingly beautiful historical noir of relentless love, shattering tragedy, and the devastating spaces in between.