Casta Diva opens on a man who has already lost everything that mattered. Gerardo Parvis, once a powerful minister in the Italian parliament, has resigned in disgust, hollowed out by political cowardice and betrayal. His servant Prospero moves silently through his rooms, a faithful shadow to a man who no longer believes in loyalty among men. Then there is Teo, the dog, whose joyful and uncomplicated love pierces Gerardo's grief like sunlight through fog. Through Teo, memories flood back of Flaviana, the departed woman Gerardo loved, and the novel unfolds as a tender excavation of what remains when ambition, ideology, and even love have been stripped away. Rovetta writes with quiet devastation about a man learning that the only honest thing in his life is a dog who does not know how to lie. This is not a political novel, despite its minister. It is a novel about loneliness, about how we keep living after we have lost the ability to believe in anything larger than ourselves, and about the strange mercy that four-legged company can offer.
