Vincenzo Latronico was hunkering down in his Milan flat when I spoke to him, avoiding the gathering crowds ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.
“The city is completely in gridlock”, he told me. “My wife and I are leaving for the weekend just to avoid the chaos”.
The Milan Latronico knows now is very different from the one he first moved to in the early 2000s.
The author — best-known for his 2022 novel, Perfection (Le perfezioni), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year — initially lived in a squat in the Isola neighbourhood, which he described as “the first in Milan to have gentrified”.
“The squat I was part of fought against this big gentrification problem, and of course we lost”, he told East End Review.
“You know the famous vertical forest skyscrapers in Milan, the ones with all the trees on top? That’s exactly where our squat used to be”.
Themes of gentrification and changing landscapes are central to Latronico’s work. He continued: “My books all somehow deal with housing. In a way, it's a bit pedestrian, right? There are writers whose main theme is courtly love or revolution, and my theme is real estate.
“But in a way, I think that for very lucky, first-world citizens such as ourselves, housing is the first huge loss in terms of rights and liberties that we have experienced”.
Perfection is Latronico’s fourth novel. It follows Anna and Tom, a millennial couple searching for meaning in their seemingly perfect — but dissatisfying — life in a rapidly changing Berlin.
As they navigate the pitfalls of working online, unprecedented gentrification and the realisation that their community of expats is slipping away, the couple find themselves stagnating.
“They've done everything right”, Latronico said of his characters.
“They've received instructions for how to live, and they followed the script very diligently. They moved to Berlin. They have a nice apartment. They have a good job. So why does it feel so dissatisfactory?
“I think what they are lacking, ultimately, is any kind of belonging. [...] In many ways, we are at a moment in which happiness and satisfaction and fulfilment are defined increasingly in individual terms — what you own, what you do, where you live — and not in collective or communal terms”.
It’s a phenomenon many of us are familiar with in today’s world — and one Latronico believes is intrinsically linked to gentrification (a term he finds simplistic), digitisation, and the ebb and flow of hope in a volatile political climate.
He continued: “I wanted to try to make sense of two different things that I kind of vaguely felt were connected, but didn't really know how.
“One was the idea of growing up with the internet [...] and then slowly seeing how this also has negative impacts on your life in ways that you are not so comfortable pinning down.
“And on the other hand, my being part of this — in retrospect — very lucky generation that could, on a whim, take a plane, move somewhere and kind of reinvent themselves somewhere in Europe. Of course, this, too, in retrospect, was a very naive and optimistic idea.
“And this, too, just like our relationship to the Internet, started within years to show its darker side in terms of nostalgia, in terms of feelings of loneliness. And so initially, I just wanted to try to understand how this had happened.
“How did [technology] turn into something that we feel constrained by? How did this dream of freedom in Berlin and reinventing yourself on a whim turn into something that makes your life feel constricted and shallow and lonely?”
Latronico said gentrification, too, has both the power to liberate and oppress. “It’s something that people [...] consider in a negative way. But I think that more interestingly, it's not just negative.
“This is what makes it so hard to talk about. There were stabbings on the streets of Isola when I moved here in 2005. There was a lot of crime.
“So there are many objective ways in which gentrification improves things. And yet, this improvement is a kind of flattening.
“I can walk through [the neighbourhood] here, and it will look almost exactly like some streets in Hackney and like some streets in Berlin and like some streets in Oslo.
“This does not bear comparison with not having crime on the streets, it's more important to not have crime on the streets. But I think that it's misleading to consider it as a tradeoff. And I feel that [this flattening] is very similar to what happened with digital life”.
Next month, Latronico will visit London for two back-to-back talks about his work and its themes. “Perfection has been received much more warmly in the UK than anywhere else, especially than in Italy”, Latronico continued.
“It’s not even comparable. And after spending some time there, I understand why.
“Of course, the same forces that shaped Berlin shaped the East End of London — before Hackney [Central], it was Shoreditch.
“The same forces that shaped the East End of London, that shaped the northwest of Paris, found very little resistance in Berlin. But that kind of phenomenon has been extremely impactful on neighbourhoods such as Hackney”.
Latronico’s first talk, organised by Pages of Hackney, takes place at Hackney’s Palm 2 on 11 March. There he will appear in conversation with writer and journalist Shon Faye.
The following day he will give a talk at the Barbican Centre as part of its Architecture On Stage series.
Book tickets to see Vincenzo Latronico speak at the Barbican here. Find out more about his conversation with Shon Faye here.
