Marta Ottaviani with Erdogat.
by Lorenzo Rossi
With Istanbul. Chronicles scratching from the city of emperors (Edizioni Countries, “Geopolitical City” series), Marta Federica Ottaviani, expert journalist of Foreign Affairs, with an acute look at the Near East and the Balkans, gives us a rare pearl in the contemporary publishing scene: a hybrid between geopolitical essay, sentimental diary and urban novel, narrated with a surprising and fascinating literary device – the narrative voice of a cat. Erdogat, the protagonist and alter ego of the author, is much more than a stylistic gimmick: it is a mustache virgil that guides us through the historical, social and spiritual folds of the metropolis on the Bosphorus. From Nişantaşı to Fatih, from Eminönü to Sultanahmet, each neighborhood is told with precision, passion and a sharp humor that never expires in caricature. Behind each joke there is an in -depth study, behind every feline observation there is the disenchanted gaze of a journalist expert in Türkiye and attentive to his metamorphosis.
The real miracle of the book is the balance: between politics and poetry, between irony and denunciation, between the sacred and the profane. The author, who lived over a decade in ancient Byzantium, sharing uses and customs, as well as learning its language, moves easily among the great themes – growing Islami, urban transformation, the disappearance of minorities, cultural resistance – and apparently minimal details but revealing photographed with an agile and captivating writing: the stalls of Eminus, Fatih hairdressers, the perfect fold of veils, cats on the roofs of the Süleymaniye complex. Ottaviani is not afraid to show the wounds of the city, but he does not even give up to love it. Istanbul, here, is a living creature, made of smells, memories, injustices, sunsets and mound skewers. It is a change that changes, which resists, that fascinates and rejects, like certain great loves. And it is precisely this love – painful, authentic, irreducible – that makes this book so powerful. Istanbul It is not a guide, nor an academic essay. It is much more. It is a declaration of love, a showdown, a cultural testament. It is a journey into the city and inside themselves, with the wise, sarcastic and melancholic voice of a cat that has seen everything, and that everything includes. Even the human, disarming nostalgia.
