Diego is a forty-something car salesman with a talent for telling half-truths. Fausto sells watches over the phone. Claudio manages (barely) his family-owned neighborhood supermarket. The characteristic common to each of these three men is their abject mediocrity. Yet, mediocrity being the mother of outrageous invention, they embark on a project that would be too ambitious in scope for any single one of them, let alone all three together. They decide to flee the city and to open a rustic holiday farmhouse in the Italian countryside outside Naples. Things would have been challenging enough for these three unlikely entrepreneurs, but when a local mobster arrives and demands they pay him protection money things go from bad to worse. Now their ordinary (if wrongheaded) attempt to run a small business in an area that organized crime syndicates consider their own becomes a quixotic act of defiance.

Fabio Bartolomei
Fabio Bartolomei works in advertising and lives in Rome. Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles is his first novel.

• Nov 26 2012
  The Daily Beast: "A story, translated from Italian, that doesn’t take itself seriously but addresses serious topics."
  
• Nov 19 2012
  SusieBookworm: "One of the funniest books I've read in a while."