Volevo essere Odifreddi: The Name That Became a Prophecy
June 11, 2026
Filippo Bonacci · June 2026 · Hanse Media · Fiction Line
A television repairman from Borgo San Dalmazzo tells forty years of life running parallel to Cuneo’s most famous mathematician. Volevo essere Odifreddi (I Wanted to Be Odifreddi) is Filippo Bonacci’s apocryphal autobiography, a novel that walks the line between documented biography and the quiet memoir of a non-protagonist.
Bonacci was born in Cuneo in 1950, the same year as Piergiorgio Odifreddi. His surname, counted by syllables, spells Fi-Bonacci: Fibonacci. His parents, a surveyor and a seamstress, never noticed. His mathematics teacher did. From that day, Filippo carries a prophecy that never comes true: he becomes the technician who never became the mathematician his name promised.
For forty years he watches Odifreddi from a distance: from books, from newspapers, from the screen of the Mivar television set he repairs for his father one October evening in 1988, while on Rai 3 the man from Cuneo with the glasses explains Gödel. The real, verifiable milestones of Odifreddi’s career appear throughout: the Istituto per Geometri Virginio in Cuneo with Flavio Briatore as a classmate, the University of Turin, Siberia, the asteroid 108072 Odifreddi, the “Uomo di Mondo” prize at the Fiera del Marrone in 2022.
The narrative voice is that of the Piedmont that speaks little and repairs everything: ironic without ever being bitter, concrete without losing the poetry of details, capable of telling an entire life through a faulty electrolytic capacitor and a VAT number opened at the right moment.
Filippo Bonacci is a pseudonym. The book is a work of fiction. Piergiorgio Odifreddi exists. Everything about him in this book is verifiable.
«An Italian story of the provinces told from the wrong angle, which is always the one from which you see best.»
