Sometimes my packages go to the pizza place across the street when they don’t fit in my mailbox. Then when I go get pizza, it’s like Christmas. The other day one of the packages had postage from Italy on it and the pizza guy, Joseph had to know what was inside. So I opened it in the store and him and his brother and some other kid gathered around the table to look at the book and try to translate it for me. The title translated from Italian is Velvet, The Story of a Thief. That’s about as far as I got with them because everyone just wanted to look at the illustrations which are stunning. In each spread you follow the thief who crawls through a window into a house full of all kinds of interesting furniture and decor. He sneaks past open doors where the residents are always too engaged in something else to notice him. I like the little house tour we get. At the end, someone does catch him- the ghost of the house who makes him leave out a window. I’m not sure what the thief is after or if being able to understand the text would even answer that question. The illustrations have such a nice sense of light and shadow. You know the hallway the thief creeps through is dark from the insane crosshatching over that part of the drawing and bright light shines out from each open room. If anyone wants to share anymore info about this book, that would be great. If you google the book you can find a lot of articles about it- but they’re all in Italian. Thanks to Antonio Marinoni for sending it over!

© Julia Rothman 2007