Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio: A Novel

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author (Publishers Weekly).

Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building’s elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim’s neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome.
With language as colorful as the neighborhood it describes, each character takes his or her turn “giving evidence.” Their various stories reveal much about the drama of racial identity and the anxieties of a life spent on society’s margins, but also bring to life the hilarious imbroglios of this melting pot Italian culture.

“Their frequently wild testimony teases out intriguing psychological and social insight alongside a playful whodunit plot.”―Publishers Weekly

• Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
• A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge Concise Histories)
• The Question
• Scontro di civilta' per un ascensore in Piazza Vittorio (Italian Edition)
• That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (New York Review Books Classics)
• Little Mother: A Novel (Global African Voices)
• Life and Death in the Third Reich
• God's Mountain
• The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books Classics)
• Remembering Babylon: A Novel