Dear Wall - Maria Rago

DEAR WALL

A man the state refused to name spent decades carving his existence into a wall - one letter at a time. The wall still stands.

Fernando Nannetti arrived in the world as two letters on a ledger: NN. Nessun nome. No name. Moved from hospital to institution to asylum, he was committed for something as small as an insult to the wrong official - and it was there, with the buckle of his belt, that he began scratching words into the plaster of the courtyard wall. A name. A rank. A version of himself nobody had ever let him have. He kept at it for years.

Nobody was supposed to notice. Aldo did.

Aldo grew up with an uncle who came back from the war and would only ever talk about the dog he’d had there, never the war itself - so he already understands that some men can only say the true thing sideways. When he finds Nannetti’s wall, filled with an obsessive, oddly beautiful private language, he doesn’t report it. He starts looking after it instead.

Dear Wall follows their unlikely friendship across several decades, through the slow collapse of Italy’s asylum system, and into an inheritance neither of them could have planned for. It’s a novel about attention - about what it costs to keep paying it, long after everyone else has stopped.

Based on the real story of outsider artist Fernando Oreste Nannetti. His wall is still standing.