What makes a house a home? The walls that shape it? The people who live in it? Maybe the objects that adorn it? Answering these seemingly obvious questions has been the obsession or dream of many. So, beyond its purpose as a shelter, ideas on the house have ranged from their architectural dimension to their symbolic function. And if treatises were succeeded by essays, stories have not fallen far back, and the dwelling, with its domestic fittings and its species of spaces, has been a lead character in biographies, novels, and stage and screen performances.

Joining the wave is Andrea Bajani, with a book that could take the form of any of the above genres. Autofiction is mixed with musings on existence and decorated with plans of the houses featured. The descriptions of their moods are as detailed as those of the bodies occupying them and the crises unfolding within. From the basement outside Rome to the bourgeois residence on a Turin boulevard, each abode is associated with a moment of the author’s life, but also with a family structure, physical context, and time frame.

Chapter by chapter, house after house, the author tells the story of one we know all about but his name, whilst noting the changes that his cities have suffered and the events that marked his time in them. While readers of the novel may not find answers to the questions raised above (for Bajani also considers home the Fiat Panda where he first felt he had formed a family, or the courtroom where he later dissolved it) they learn to analyze themselves through the houses they have inhabited.