Paolo Ganz is a Venetian writer, musician and traveler who dedicated his book to Prague. Armed with a quill and a journal, he describes the city to us as he sees it, balanced on a line between past and present. To understand Prague, you have to discover it by day and night – perhaps more by night than by day – slowly, strolling under its arcades and investigating the cobbled stones on its streets where you might find a coin long lost in a crevice. Characters, places and encounters create a fresco ready to reveal the magic of the city on the Vltava; because Prague is perhaps the place where we can find ourselves and where we can meet our double, the person we have never been or the one we have never had the courage to become. “Prague ‘a literary landscape’, as Claudio Magris defined it, continues to exist in the dream just as the quills of Neruda, Hašek, Kafka or Hrabal had described it; clearer in memory than in actual substance, which rarely deviates from the beautiful city that remains”.
Paolo Ganz,
Gli orologi di Praga,
Bottega Errante Edizioni, 2020
168 p.
