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Issued by Booknality on September 25, 2026. Source: EIN Presswire.
Maria Rago’s debut, Dear Wall, brings to life Fernando Nannetti, known as NOF4, and the nurse who saved his work, as his real wall goes on exhibition in Italy.
Denied paper, he wrote on the wall. Denied a reader, he wrote anyway. Dear Wall, the debut novel by Maria Rago, is now available in paperback and Kindle editions. It is a fictionalized account inspired by the true story of Fernando Oreste Nannetti, the Italian psychiatric patient who spent more than a decade engraving a continuous book into the courtyard wall of the Volterra asylum using only the buckle of his uniform.
Committed in 1948 and transferred to Volterra’s San Girolamo asylum in 1958, Nannetti was never once visited. Signing himself NOF4, he covered 150 meters of plaster with daily entries: astral colonels, invented ranks, cosmic titles, and, hidden inside the invention, a quiet ledger of grief. His work survived because one nurse chose to notice. Dear Wall imagines that act of attention through Aldo Ferretti, a fictionalized version of the real nurse Aldo Trafeli, who copies the wall into notebooks at his kitchen table, year after year, until the wall is finally recognized as one of the great works of outsider art.
Salvaged sections of Nannetti’s actual wall are on public display in the exhibition Graffi Profondi at the Centro Espositivo Santa Maria Maddalena in Volterra, Italy, running through September 27, 2026, while a cast of his work is held in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
“Fernando asked for a monument, made of stone, not paid for,” said Rago. “The preservationists gave him one in plaster. This novel is my attempt to give him one in paper, and to honor the ordinary people, a nurse, his wife, a sculptor, a photographer, who decided that a man the world had filed away deserved to be read.”
Spanning 1927 to 2026, the novel follows the wall through three generations: the man who carved it, the nurse who transcribed it, and the granddaughter who meets it behind museum glass. An author’s note details where the record ends and imagination begins. Dear Wall is available in paperback (ISBN 979-8-2408-4782-0) and Kindle (ISBN 979-8-2408-4783-7) on Amazon.
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Cover image via Amazon.
