Barcazza is Francesco Cattani’s first graphic novel. He is a young and promising author on the scene in Bologna with his subtle but decisive drawings. This is a story created with subtle psychological capacity, through essential and brief moments of a summer at the sea, in an indefinite and immobile time. Using elements that place him near autobiography, Cattani investigates fragile and delicate situations, between the words left unsaid and quiet tender moments, in which the words left unsaid leave space to understand the characters. The incredible force of Barcazza is also remarkable in the utter absence of color and shading; everything seems drowned in a sea of white light. The reader is immersed in a suspended and strange world and remains blinded in the sensual whiteness in which the characters move.

Francesco Cattani was born in Bologna in 1980. He began in 2004 with his comic Inizio in the magazine “RES-ISTANZE” in which he tells the story of the hardships faced by a group of partigiani dispersed throughout the mountains of Modena in December of ’43. That same year he began work on a series of illustrations entitled “I Sezionati” which was shown at the Modo Infoshop in Bologna. His work has also been published in the journal “Hamelin Storie figure pedagogia.” He also was a winner in the illustration division of the Concorso Baraccano for his comic “Occhi Vuoti” the story of an Ikea employee. He is among the founders of he ernest label, which published sixteen pages of Barcazza in 2007, which then won the Micheluzzi prize for a short story in 2008. Expanded and revised, the graphic novel was published in 2010 by Canicola in Italy and by Atrabile in France.