At the tip of a pencil, Lorenzo Mattotti interprets the story of the two young people who for centuries have embodied the very essence of love, choosing not to recount its tragedy in order to imagine their gestures, lines and expressions and offer the lovers a happy ending.
The light veil of an alcove — or perhaps a silk curtain, as a subtle theatrical reference — rises to reveal a boy and a girl who, clasped to each other, smile, take each other’s hands, kiss, and return to look at each other, to hold each other, until they are overwhelmed by passion. Completely immersed in each other, they do not care about their surroundings, but appear as if suspended in a dimension of two, separated from reality, in an atmosphere saturated with sweetness and desire. In contrast, the images that frame them as in a close-up invite us to spy on them (as if we were a third wheel), following them from the intimacy of the bedroom to the stolen embraces in the palace halls and gardens. Their gestures, their attitudes, taken care of in every nuance, in every minute detail, will lead each of us to empathize or to remember, or perhaps to dream. All this might make one think of any couple, but the clothes they wear and the quickly sketched furnishings bring us back to two ancient lovers, who nevertheless still embody in our imagination the very essence of love.
Interpreting the famous story of Romeo and Juliet, made immortal by William Shakespeare, Lorenzo Mattotti chooses not to tell the whole story but to explore it spontaneously, forgoing the tragic conclusion to allow the two lovers to realize their dream. Thanks to Romeo and Juliet, the author can return to explore what, in his words, is “the most important subject in life”: the magical moment of exploring the other. He can return to the two young people who are the protagonists of The Room (#logoseditions, 2010) and Rooms (#logoseditions, 2016), to their pure, direct, spontaneous love. The two young people then intent on discovering each other for the first time have now become two souls who have known each other for a long time and who, looking at each other, recognize each other. Thinking back to the marvelous costumes made by Danilo Donati for Zeffirelli’s film adaptation, Mattotti decides to clothe the couple in sumptuous period clothing so as to offer, along with the furnishings, a spatio-temporal framing to his story in images. And it is precisely his choice to design the costumes that leads him to forgo color to avert the risk of falling into the trap of frivolous elegance and mannerism. Thus the artist takes up the style already experimented with in the notebook The Room to improvise and capture, at the point of a pencil, the movements, jokes and expressions that come to his mind as he thinks back to the two former lovers, united by a feeling so strong that it fears no obstacle.
With that page left blank between tables inviting you to write your own thoughts, the book is a perfect gift with which to make your loved one happy on Valentine’s Day, an anniversary, or any other time, because love should be celebrated every day. Or a gift for oneself to continue or start dreaming again.

The protagonist of this poetic and hallucinatory graphic novel, evocatively named Spartaco, is a sort of early twentieth century futurist scientist, an elegant, calm and somewhat shy man who travels by train to visit his aunt. He soon falls asleep and begins to dream while his subconscious gradually takes over. Thus, what could be an ordinary journey loses his space-time boundaries by welcoming the incursions of a series of surreal characters such as the Doctor and Mister Blu, and continually giving rise to dreamlike visions which bring back episodes of the protagonist’s life, from childhood to adult age, in Italy between the 1950s and the 1960s. Spartaco, as the subtitle suggests, therefore becomes the epicentre of a succession of inner earthquakes that lead him to constantly oscillate between past and present, dream and reality, and ultimately between life and death.
A turning point in the artist’s career, Il signor Spartaco anticipates several themes of Mattotti’s future works, such as dreams, memories, the descent into the abyss of the human soul and the traumatic farewell to childhood and adolescence, followed by the conquest of light. In this sense the travel by train becomes a symbolic initiation test into adult life.Using mixed media – pastels and felt pens – the artist visually represents the whirlwind – or earthquake – of the protagonist’s subconscious through a plastic dynamism inspired by Futurism and a kaleidoscope of dazzling colours that sometimes seems ready to come out of the pages, whereas the evocative and often rhymed texts, also take us back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and in particular to the rhymed comic strips of the Corriere dei Piccoli.

When his only son Tonio is captured by hunters, Leontius, the bear king, rallies his people and descends from the mountains to find him. With the help of a strange magician, Professor De Ambrosiis, he defeats the army of the Grand Duke, a cruel tyrant, and faces numerous dangers. Leonzio is ready for anything to find his son, even to invade Sicily. Reading Age: 8 and up.

In an undefined landscape, dominated by a leaden sky that hangs over a windswept meadow, two small rubber puppets greet the story’s protagonist, a man whose face is marked by a red blotch that sometimes blazes, burning his skin. A mark of sadness according to Zafran, the sinister deer fisherman, or nostalgia, as a sweet and sensual woman with raven hair and a red dress thinks.
The man has been running through the night until he finds himself in that “fatuous zone of consciousness where the world is only a reverberation of our sleep,” and it is Fritz and Hans, the two rubber puppets, who give him a name: Sottovoce. With them, the man will begin to explore the Zone, an undefined place, a phantom territory where the omnipresent wind bends trees and blades of grass, ripples the sea, blows windows wide open. The wind strains a landscape that always seems on the verge of dissolution, as does man, constantly besieged by the desire to disappear, falling asleep in the earth, plunging into the water, disappearing into the air.
In the Zone, the melancholy traveler-one of the outcasts who have always fascinated Mattotti-moves through a dreamlike scenario populated by surreal creatures, in which his memories surface from time to time: reading a magazine, a puppet he had thrown away as a child, the records he listened to, and the park he loved to visit. The world from which he wanted to escape reappears: he revisits the laboratory where research was carried out on his stain, he remembers playing in the water with his brother, he finds himself in his childhood home looking tenderly at his sleeping mother. Over each affair hangs the sense of loss of self, feared and yearned for at the same time, until an answer arrives for him and the stain on his face reabsorbs.
First appearing serialized in Dolce Vita magazine in 1987, The Fatuous Zone is a sequence of visual poems that correspond to as many dreams, a succession of adventures that remain unresolved and ready to open to new developments. Mattotti’s vividly colored images with nervous strokes, whose intention in this book was to explore the relationship between painting and comics, here welcome Jerry Kramsky’s evocative texts, imbued with a lyrical breath and a sense of suspension.
An enigmatic and evocative story, a dream journey punctuated by continuous departures, through which the authors, then in their thirties, recount their farewell to adolescence.

Six short stories developed through Lorenzo Mattotti’s visions and the crystal-clear texts by Lilia Ambrosi and Gabriella Giandelli. Six unusual ‘letters’ sent from an estranged dimension where people are able to reflect upon their lives and relationships, in the end, questioning the meaning of being humans. As in L’uomo alla finestra, these short stories delicately bring to light our frailties and our constant effort to stick to feelings, illusions, and memories in order to keep hold of a life which always seems to be on the verge of getting out of hand. The first and longest story of the volume, “Dopo il diluvio” (“After the Deluge”), is about a woman who is stuck at the airport by a strange accident, unsettling and fascinating at the same time: an invasion of vermillion crabs, so numerous as to transform the runway in a red self-propelled surface. While waiting to leave, she runs by chance into a stranger, who tells her about his difficult love for his ailing wife. Their love gets stronger when they are apart, and the same thing seems to happen to what the protagonist feels for her lover. The second story, “Il ritratto dell’amore” (“Portrait of love”), is just 2-pages long and deals with a painter who is no longer able to paint his partner, since she has stopped loving him. “Lontano, molto lontano” (“Far, far away”) follows the path of a mysterious statuette, handed around by different people, and representing freedom, and all the dreams, hopes and passions that every one of us struggles to preserve, going through the different meanings of the title of the story (a place where you can start a new life or hide, but also a place where the person you love disappears or where the mind of somebody who has lost everything can fade away). “Lettera da un tempo lontano” (“Letter from a distant time”) is a story set in an aseptic and artificial future world: a young woman, travelling on a train heading to Kiev, writes to her great-grandfather who was a cartoonist, possibly Mattotti’s alter ego, to tell him what has become of that future world he once used to try to figure out through his drawings. “How could they enjoy those odourless, motionless and soundless images” the woman wonders as she watches a video of an old comic book; and maybe that’s the same question Mattotti asks himself while considering his own work. Two further episodes, which were not included in the first edition of the book, close the volume: “Il richiamo” (The Call), whose protagonist is a woman going back to her hometown to visit her sister and her nephew, and the short and evocative “Storia blu” (Blue tale), which in four wordless tables captures all the magic of a fleeting encounter.

For many years Lorenzo Mattotti has been confronting, in a process of continuous reworking, one of the best-known figures in universal literature: Pinocchio. The story of the piece of wood that comes to life and his epic to become a real boy seem to find an ideal sounding board in the illustrator’s work. The result of this exceptional encounter is an artist’s book, which can fully restore to us not only the simultaneously ambiguous and phantasmagorical spirit and profound intent of Collodi, but also the inventiveness and vision of Mattotti — or of Collodi as seen by Mattotti.

Caboto? Cabot? Gavotto? Caputo? Gaeta? He was Chief Pilot of the Kingdom of Castile for thirty years and he is said to have drawn the first globe, yet we don’t even know his name for sure. We only know that the man known as Sebastian Cabot, son of the explorer John Cabot, was born in Venice around 1477–1484, and that he soon moved to England. Throughout his life, he served both England and Spain as a cartographer and an explorer. Some say he was a swindler, a liar and a schemer.
When Jorge Zentner began working on the text for the book, he immediately realised that the “historical fiction” he was dealing with was rather a “mystery fiction”.
It was impossible to write a biography: it was like sailing unknown seas relying on very few, incomplete and inaccurate maps. So both the author and the artist decided to take advantage of the lack of trustworthy and consistent records to base this work around the idea of mystery.
Their reflections on the possibility of telling this story arise from the slow monologue of the narrator, who has to deal with a biography full of holes, the same holes appearing on the maps drawn around the end of the 15th century, where large unexplored areas were left blank or covered with a question mark. Sharing his stream of consciousness with the reader, the narrator tries to explore the darkness of Cabot’s – as well as his crew’s – mind and at the same time he reflects upon the difficulty of telling a story and the need to make choices, deal with contradictory sources, intertwine several, individual destinies, while being unaware of the boundaries between historical truth and one’s own imagination.
The core adventure of the book begins on April 3, 1526, in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, with the mission of finding a way to the Maluku Islands, in the land of spices. The ships arrived to the coasts of Brazil, in the region of Pernambuco, where Cabot gathered his lieutenants to communicate them a change in plans: he wanted to explore the Río de la Plata. The reasons behind this change of course are unknown: some talk about a navigation error, some hint at a secret deal with King Charles I, others see in it the man’s economic ambition, nurtured by the stories told by those who survived previous expeditions.
Yet, beyond the events, what arises from these pages is Cabot’s strong and enigmatic personality, a symbol of imperialism that reminds us of Dante’s Ulyxes, the embodiment of ambition and human thirst for knowledge.
Mattotti illustrates this story with pastels and coloured pencils, recalling 16th and 17th century paintings (especially those by Caravaggio and Velázquez), as well as movies such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God by Werner Herzog. He even combines some images with coloured copies of historical documents, which he retouches to emulate the dusty look of ancient manuscripts. Wide landscapes dominated by dark tones invite us to give up any reference point and dive into the heart of darkness, losing ourselves in a one-way trip to the unknown.

First published in 1999 in Einaudi’s Stile Libero series and adapted for film by Spanish director Adán Aliaga in 2010 under the title Estigmas, Stigmate is now being republished by #logosedizioni as the second stage of an editorial journey that re-presents the artistic evolution of cartoonist Lorenzo Mattotti in a new guise.
Forty-one years old, an orphan, heavy drinker, occasionally employed, he supports himself by bartending and selling contraband cigarettes under the table. This is, in a nutshell, the portrait of the anonymous man who one day receives a strange revelation in a dream and wakes up bleeding from the palms of his hands. A choleric balk stinking of alcohol, with no definite purpose in life, he would seem to be the last person in the world worthy of receiving the wounds of the saints. He himself rebels when someone mentions stigmata, doctors are convinced he wounds himself, bar patrons complain about the stains he leaves on glasses, his employer considers him sick and looks at him with horror. On the other hand, neighbors go to pay homage to him in a procession with holy cards and votive candles. “What will God’s plan be in all this?” the reader wonders from the beginning, and the protagonist wonders as well after the inexplicable “miracle” brings him to ruin. Because of this “gift,” in fact, he ends up losing his job and his house is destroyed by the fire of candles offered by his worshippers. “We are garbage destined to rot,” mutters the man, defeated, collapsing along the way. A sentence of condemnation that will eventually be overturned. Stigmata is a kind of medieval mystery set in a contemporary urban context that appears gradually more menacing, degraded and terrible, populated by an array of marginal figures, including rapacious, dishonest and violent individuals but also fragile and hapless creatures. In perfect union with Claudio Piersanti’s poetic and harsh text, the story takes shape in Mattotti’s black-and-white illustrations, here as textural as ever, dirty, made by means of nervous strokes of the nib that bring the black to emerge forcefully, often furiously, from the white page, like tangles of lines from which, anticipating the style of Hansel & Gretel and Oltremai, figures, faces, landscapes emerge. A story steeped in religiosity, in which one man’s existence, from fall to rebirth, passing through a temporary happiness tragically lost, rises to a modern parable about the value of every human being. A parable that teaches how, touching the bottom of one’s personal hell, anyone is given to rise up to salvation, even individuals living on the margins of society – evangelically, the last destined to be the first.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s first graphic novel is today republished by logosedizioni as the start of an editorial journey that re-presents the artistic evolution of the most beloved of Italian illustrators in a new guise. A novel made of words and black and white images that appear evanescent and evocative, creating spaces to be filled. The protagonist of the story is a sculptor with “soft” eyes and an elusive personality; from his rooftop window he observes the small universe of the changing city, imagining other lights and distant everyday life. His life is intertwined with that of a series of characters who offer him an opportunity to think and rethink. Prominent among them are three female figures: Irene, his ex-wife to whom he is bound by a tender and unresolved relationship; Aurora, a chance encounter culminating in a moment of passion; and the botanist Myriad, who devotes herself to her greenhouse while waiting to receive the plants her beloved sends her from his travels. Male characters include the philosopher friend confined to a hospital bed, the “ripper” who, unable to sustain the impact of artworks, feels the urge to destroy them, the professor who, out of cowardice, shuns Myriad’s affection. The exploration of these relationships develops side by side with the theme of artistic creation, which, like human relationships, serves not to “bring forth still solidity or other security, but so that more things may brush against each other, and barely rub against each other to create more.” All these tensions take shape in the poetic dialogues signed by Lilia Ambrosi and in the images in which the rarefied fine-pen marks of the figures coexist with accurately rendered urban geometries, while the stroke crumbles, even in the architecture, under the pressure of atmospheric disturbances, and deflagrates in the sequences devoted to nightmares, echoing the style of Jackson Pollock and heralding the Mattotti of Hansel & Gretel and Oltremai.

In a fantastic world populated by imaginary and marvelous creatures, Ippolite – the shaman’s son – sets out after his wife Cocciniglia, who has been missing for seven days now from the Ghirs’ village. He doesn’t know yet that his journey will be much longer and more dangerous than he could expect, because it is the whole country of Ghirlanda that is in danger, threatened by a terrible curse and by the lethal germ of evil. To save his family and all the Ghirs, Ippolite will have to push beyond the borders of the known lands, into the vast and dreadful Terrae Incognitae and even further, where the living are not welcomed, to find the frozen heart of the Hoarse Mountain.
A story about love and courage, loyalty and redemption, that also speaks about our inherent weakness and our readiness to close our minds and hearts and let us be governed by our darkest instincts, charmed by the charisma of false guides towards salvation.
The soft black-and-white drawings by Lorenzo Mattotti mix with the evocative texts by Jerry Kramsky to create a dreamlike and allegoric universe that, in the words of the illustrator, “evokes the original innocence of old comic strips such as Alley Oop and The Moomins, full of strange and gentle animals, who are also able to feel emotions and suffer”.
The extraordinary talent of the two authors will guide us by hand through a 400-page fairy-tale adventure into the deepest parts of their dreams, offering us an epic work which is at the same time a personal research and a journey beyond the limits of traditional comic books.
15 years after Jekyll & Hyde, Mattotti and Kramsky are back for a new collaboration: Ghirlanda, a never-published-before comic book that took 10 years to complete and is now published simultaneously by #logosedizioni in Italy and by Casterman in France.
“Beyond the sighs of the clouds, between the dusk’s horizons, lays the land of Ghirlanda. Its vast plains and soft hills seem to capture the light, and the climate is mild. From time immemorial this is the country of the Ghirs, pacific creatures who love to contemplate the magic of their land with the amazement of ancient children.”