‘A month in Siena’, Matar’s latest book, cannot be defined as a touristic guide of the city, nor a simple critical description and appraisal of some of the finest paintings of Sienese School, to which Matar has been attracted since the 90s’, when he first saw some of them in the National Gallery in London.
It is more an experience, a path, which the author follows in solitude, along the alleys of Siena, inside the buildings which have marked the history of the city and its surrounding landscape.
Yet, the images of the traumatic episodes which have left deep scars in Matar’s life, as the disappearance of his father ‘imprisoned and gradually, like salt, dissolving in water', pervade the book. Moreover, in the works the author describes he finds something of himself, of his Country, of his affections, for his wife in particular. In the Sienese paintings he perceives ‘a feeling of hope’ and the conviction that ‘what we share is more than what sets us apart’.
The city of Siena seems a ‘living organism’, rich in narrow alleys, where cars are banned, whose friendly inhabitants he meets while walking in Piazza del Campo. He recognizes the sound of the Arabic language in a man, whose family was welcomed by the people of his ‘contrada’. This meeting enhances the sense of solidarity and humanity Matar perceives everywhere in the city, even in the paintings of its Sienese artists.
In one of his wanderings he reaches a cemetery which he passes through hoping to find an end facing the landscape. Looking at the headstones, he feels he is ‘a mourner without a grave’, his father has disappeared and he is left without ‘ever knowing what happened to him, how and when he died or where his remains may be’. Nevertheless, he remembers his father’s voice when he used to utter some sentences in Italian and his face, the only one he knows, ‘the one before his captivity, when he was well and free’, before his imprisonment during Gaddafi rule, whose caricature in Tripoli’s wall graffiti share similarities to the devil of the fresco ‘The Effects of Bad Government’ of Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico.
While Matar is sitting on a bench in the cemetery, looking at the valley and listening to the birds, he realizes that he had come to Siena not only to look at paintings. He had also come ‘to grieve alone’, and to find out how he might continue from there.