The Nose of San Januarius

About the Book

Missing! A grave international crisis! The newly appointed ambassador to Italy, the Italian American Giuseppe DeSantis never debarked from the ocean liner at Naples. Helicopters from the Mediterranean fleet are searching adjacent waters. American intelligence is alerted, the CIA in full force in Italy, the bay of Naples is being dragged for a body that may have staggered overboard. Theories abound in the I1 Mattino: he is a captive of the Cammora, the Red Brigade is holding him for political ransom, he is a pawn between the two rival parties in Italy, etc. A special mass is being said by the Archbishop of Naples for the safety of the Ambassador and comfort of his family, now gathered in Naples.

THE NOSE OF SAN JANUARIUS tells the story of an Italian immigrant who makes it big in America. He is a prominent builder (an Iacocca figure); deep in politics and charities, and married to a Wasp woman who bore him three children. During a crisis in his life, when he is an alcoholic and suicidal, he is offered the Ambassadorship to Italy, his homeland, that expelled an orphaned eight-year-old to labor for his bread in a friendless country.

The once ragged eight year old immigrant from Southern Italy, millionaire road builder, would save Venice and its moldering Carrara only if allowed to sink Naples forever, that dark dispatcher of dreams. Confidentially, he is an alcoholic and suicidal unconsciously bowing to an urge to seek a healing of his split psyche in a motherland which divided him, or better to be found dead on his mother’s unmarked grave of red poppies.

What follows in confessional and revelatory episodes induced by a Magus, monk Abbot Batorian to save his own soul, leads instead to a healing and gaining of insight for the Amassador Giuseppe DeSantis, that takes place in and about a monastery, and reconciliation with his wife and children—and himself. A wholeness of his psyche.

About the Author

Frank Palescandolo is a novelist, poet, translator, dramatist, and memoirist. Under the sun of Sorrento, in the tradition of writers such as Francis Marion Crawford, Axel Munthe, Norman Douglas, Compton Mc Kenzie, and Harold Acton he has written novels set in that golden clime—Italy: The Romantist, Under the Blue Skies of Naples, La Sirena Straniera, The Nose of San Januarius, and Phallos Dionysus.