This is the classic romantic journey of the alienated, solitary artist with a lust to travel life’s uncomfortable borderlands. Tondelli, born 1955, made the journey in the 1970s and 80s so his reports are fresher than most. Here are bad acid trips to make you squirm, a disco so sweaty and loud you’ll want to get out of there very quickly, in fact all the shock immediacy of very current writing, as in this image; ‘a seaside town on the Adriatic coast...and the light is like the light in a studio set for a pop promo...’

Tondelli’s work stands out too in its urgent and convincing honesty. He doesn’t spare his own ego and although the gay essayist James Kirkup called Separate Rooms ‘a beautifully written...homosexual Romeo and Juliet’ Tondelli makes abundantly visible the destructiveness and self-indulgence in the loves of an intellectual with time on his hands. Without a doubt Tondelli worked at the level of honesty that differentiates real writing from the cosy substitute product.

‘Every year autumn ushers in the same feelings. A need for silence and solitude and recollection. A need to sleep. To take stock. A need for introspection. The earth summons him unto her and invites him to gather his thoughts. And Leo, born in the glow of a late summer’s day...hears this summons and follows it.’ p43