A Cure for Serpents

In 1924, the irrepressibly curious Alberto Denti arrived in Libya to work in Italy's African colonies. With a natural ear for a story and a passionate interest in his work, he must have been as good a doctor as he was a writer. Though equally at home in an embassy or a brothel, Denti appears to have preferred the company of Berbers and Eritreans to that of his fellow Italians. He conjures up the dignity of local chieftains, the palpable charms of celebrated courtesans, the excitement of Tuareg entertainers and the love lost between himself and a wounded lion cub with all the charm of a man who boasted of the 'inestimable satisfactions known only to those who have lived in Africa'.

Auteur

During his colonial career in Libya and Eritrea, Alberto Denti di Pirajno was a doctor, initially full-time and later in spirit. Born in 1886, he read medicine in Florence and Rome. He fought in the Great War and was decorated for valour. In 1924, when this book opens, he was posted to Libya, where he ran modest dispensaries at Buerat el Hsun, on the desolate coast of Syrtica, at Mizda and at Misurata. Later he became an administrator in Eritrea, and, back in Libya, his final task, as Governor of Tripoli, was to surrender the city to Montgomery. After the War he wrote a book on Sicilian cuisine and a couple of novels, the last, Ippolita, at the age of 75, a year after The Leopard was published. The juxtaposition is apposite, as both he and Giuseppe di Lampedusa were Sicilian dukes, the Pirajno title dating from 1642. Di Pirajno died in 1968. He comes across as the least snobbish of men, but one with the self-confidence of the born aristocrat.