Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Barcelona

As the journalist Gianni Mura writes in the introduction to the volume: «Malatesta's book, punctual and with a bitter aftertaste, takes you into a heart-belly of Barcelona that no longer exists, a piece of a ghost-city that remains alive on the pages but she was marginalized from reality . The Raval has been gutted, its somewhat romantic and murky, somewhat humanly everyday atmosphere is only remembered by the old. The Barrio Chino, as it was better known to foreigners, recalled other tangles of streets in other seaside cities: the alleys of Genoa, the Spanish Quarter of Naples. Local colour: thieves, whores, pimps, easy knives, small hotels by the hour. Even under Francoism the Raval had managed to resist. But it wasn't just this: it was poor houses for workers, students, it was solidarity and resistance, workers and students united, it was struggle and complicity. Now the new poor, the immigrants, live in the poor houses, the ones that remain. Modernization did what the dictatorship failed to do. Modernisation: it seems like a nice word, but instead it is a ruthless broom."

Despite the bitter awareness of the passage of time and things, Giuliano Malatesta tries to recompose, through the endless work of the Spanish writer, some fragments of the ghost city - the cultural climate of the time, the history of the Futbol club Barcelona, the anti-Franco clubs , the anxiety for freedom and transgression of the sixties, when Barcelona seemed much closer to Paris than to the rest of Spain - still alive on the pages but now marginalized from reality. We are thus, at least literarily, immersed in the charm of a city rich in history, art and traditions. A city that is the fruit of a dense, important, even painful past at certain times. A city that is not just fun, sun, carefreeness, but real life, joys and anxieties, past and present