An extended joke — an Idiot-Candide wanders through a boggy version of Northern Italy having his leg extensively pulled by a succession of the kind of village wise guys who haunt provincial bars.The faux-naif narrator manages to make lots of lovely swipes at the types who inhabit some of the creaky mentalities of contemporary Italy. There’s the Equine butcher who has grown to understand that ‘horsemeat was my vocation’ and the Prefect of Carabinieri who, dismayed with endlessly rubber-stamping whatever the ‘boys’ have been up to progresses to taking on the ‘invisible legions of evil’, including the millions of malefactors who live inside water taps and take peeks at you when they think you’re not looking.


The Voice of the Moon is a colourful satire, in the long and glorious tradition of Petronius Arbiter and Jonathan Swift. The director Federico Fellini, no mean satirist of contemporary Italy himself, has filmed The Voice of the Moon, to put beside his film masterwork based on Petronius’ Satyricon.

‘This brought to my mind a gentleman from Pieve di Pino: «There was for example», I said, «a gentleman from Pieve di Pino who used to live surrounded by augers. They were spiral-shaped borers, and they were in the habit of extracting his thoughts, as well as pinching him, pulling his hair and weighing down on various parts of his body.»’ p158