He is taciturn, sweet, ineffably innocuous. For almost a hundred pages Brancati doesn’t let us know what lies behind this oddly quiet disposition. For a further seventy we are not allowed even a glimpse of what the young man himself is thinking.

Antonio is beautiful. Il bell’ Antonio is the Italian title and the novel could be seen as a long meditation on beauty and its position in society. The story opens with a group of young Sicilians, who, like Brancati, come to Rome in the early 1930s to seek their fortune in the Fascist regime. Most of them are ugly and so busy chasing women they do not even notice the great works of art that surround them in the eternal city. Beauty is alien and unnecessary to them, almost invisible. The only beauty they recognize is Antonio’s, and that only because it is a quality which attracts women. In truth, Antonio doesn’t really chase the girls, they simply fall at his feet. They are desperate for him. His friends are in awe. Yet like the Michelangelos and Borrominis that they do not see, Antonio seems curiously excluded from the world of everyday action. It’s not clear what he actually does with the women who flock to him and aside from the most tenuous acquaintance with a certain powerful minister the young man proves quite unable to penetrate Fascism’s halls of power. Eventually his parents call him back to Sicily: it is time for their son to marry.

Stylistically, Brancati loves to oscillate between an almost journalistic realism and a more colourful, narrative voice that takes us right back to Boccaccio’s Decameron, a voice that launches into story-telling with great dispatch and is never afraid of caricature. So these opening pages of the novel are full of comedy and extremity. The two styles overlap in the spoken words of its considerable gallery of characters, Brancati’s dialogue being at once absolutely credible yet full of the extravagance, blasphemy and bizarre earthiness that one does find in Italian speech. So and so “would pick up coins from the floor with his buttocks!” declares Antonio’s father. Or again, so and so “has a dick that could punch holes in stone.”

Antonio, however, is always moderate in his speech, as if he were holding back, and this self-effacing manner is somehow at one with his enigmatic beauty. Again Brancati loves to work with stark contrasts. When Antonio is with his father, he lets him chatter on and simply agrees with him, humours him, even when the older man changes his mind more or less every time he opens his mouth. The two could not be more different, the one furiously, even grotesquely engaged in the world, the other graceful, but inert, limp. Crucially, Antonio allows his parents to choose his bride for him: the beautiful and pious Barbara Puglisi, daughter of a local notary.

Fascism too, of course, enjoyed the extravagant gesture, the swagger of an exaggerated vitality, the cult of bold, determined action, in bed as well as on the battlefield. Mussolini as we know was notorious for his womanising. He claimed to have had thousands of women, although “he never wasted time taking his pants off,” regretted his long-term mistress Clara Petacci. Antonio’s father refers to the Duce as the Proco: the pig, epitome of sexual indulgence, and physical and moral ugliness. Antonio, it seems, comes from another planet. His visit to a Sicilian brothel with a group of Fascist dignitaries is one of the great set pieces of the book. The whores all want Antonio, but he politely declines, allowing the successful politicians to behave like goats. Everybody is in awe of the minister who manages three women in a single evening.

But if Fascism sees life crudely in terms of success and failure, win or lose, the broader and older institution of the church offers the more subtle yardstick of right and wrong, sin and virtue. The position of sex in these two different schemes is problematic.