Ilaria Tuti quetioned (again)

Copyright: Beatice Mancini

After her first book Kind 39 (Dutch title) with commissioner Teresa Battaglia, this year her book The sleeping beauty came out. The book already received great reviews and our book critic is also impressed by the beautiful poetic phrases.

We were allowed to ask her some questions.



Is The Sleeping Nymph based on an existing painting?

Actually, The Sleeping Nymph has the face of two photos shot by a Chinese photographer, Zhang Jingna. When I saw those portraits, I started imagine a new story to write.
If not, why did you choose a painting as starting point for this thriller?
I love visual arts and painting was my first passion: since I was able to hold a brush in my hand, I started painting and I’ve continued my whole life. Later I realized that the portraits and landscapes that I was painting were the characters and settings of the stories that I was already telling myself, they were growing in my mind. Visual arts were part of a path that was leading me to writing.


The book reads like a painting. The real life, beautiful and detailed words that describe nature makes you want to be in those woods yourself. Did you ever have the ambition to turn word into image?

Thank you so much. So, yes, I try to turn words into imagines and imagines into words. I love mixing arts, contaminating the territories of creativity. I think my love for painting and photography feels a lot in the way I write: I use colors, lights and shadows, transparencies to create suggestions, to bring the reader into the world I am telling, to give depth to the illusion.

While reading, the reader goes from one beautiful description onto the next one. Real poetry. Is poetry a passion of yours?

Yes, it is. I read a lot of poetry while I’m writing my novels. It helps my feelings to arise, I have to be touched by words. I love haiku poetry, Alda Merini,  Wisława Szymborska, Mariella Mehr…
Do you write based on an example of an author that you admire?
I respect and love many authors, they all are references that I study day by day, but the one that most of all influenced me is Stephen King, wrongly considered by many to be a horror-only author. Actually, he can describe the human being and the world like few others.

While writing a book, do you have a pretty good idea from the start what the story is about and how it will evolve, just like Battaglia describes it in The Sleeping Nymph: a thread that you follow that leads to the conclusion, lead by lead?

I write following a very precise lineup. I spend many months building the story: chapter by chapter, I mark all the junctions, excerpts of dialogues, suggestions that I want to create ... Like Teresa Battaglia, I'm afraid to forget, so I write down everything that comes to my mind. I do this from the prologue to the epilogue and I check that everything works, before starting writing the novel.

In Child 39 a gruesome murder happens in an Italian mountain village in the Alpes. In The Sleeping Nymph another distant mountain village Val Resia plays a part. Slovenia also isn’t that far away. Is this choice influenced by anchor points in your life?

My land – Friuli – is very important to me, the feeling of belonging is very strong. My mountains, the nature are arcane symbols through which I speak to the reader. The forest was the first cradle of humanity and preserves ancestral memories. I try to describe all this with the sense of wonder that I felt when I was a child.

Why did you choose an older detective like Battaglia that also deals with health and memory issues?

I wanted to give voice to a type of woman who generally doesn't have one.
Teresa Battaglia is a thousand real women in one. She represents the beauty of normality, the strength that it takes to face life when things are not going well. She does not correspond to the aesthetic standards that society imposes and struggles every day to assert its competence in a world that has not yet achieved gender equality. She fights against disease, loneliness, advancing age, like millions of people. But she has the inner fire to get back into the game day after day.

Did you have someone in mind while you designer her character?

For her face, for the desire for freedom and for the magnetic charm of a leader, I was inspired by Letizia Battaglia, one of the most important photographers in the world. Letizia Battaglia was the first woman in Italy to be a photojournalist, in the Palermo of the 70s, a city devastated by mafia crimes. But she is also an exceptional and highly refined photographer, an artist who captures the heart of the world in her black and white shots.

While she uses all sort of tricks to get a grip on her bad working memory in order not to lose her present and her past, the present and history of a people plays an important part in The Sleeping Nymph. Is history another passion of yours that you use in your books?

History is a great passion of mine. I often investigate it through people's memories: personal memory that becomes collective, and finally historical. It encloses mystery, it implies also emotional investigation. History tells us about our origins.


Copyright pictures Beatice Mancini