“One thing you can only find in Rome and nowhere else is that color. And that light, so soft and diffused. Photographers call it ‘the golden hour.’”

There are lives so grand that they seem invented, like certain eras in the world. Like the light that spread over Piazza del Popolo in Rome at sunset in the late 1950s. Bathed in that light, a group of young people sitting at the tables of Bar Rosati—with trendy hair, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, Clarks on their feet—gaze sullenly at the city reborn from the rubble of war. Their names are Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, Tano Festa, and Francesco Lo Savio. They come from the people and are about to take over the country's cultural and social scene. Soon, in fact, they will become the communist painters who frolic with princesses, succulent morsels for the paparazzi and inventors of new pagan mythologies. But in the meantime, they live their youth, challenging artistic geniuses from across the ocean – Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns – and frequenting Ungaretti, Moravia, Guttuso, the Agnelli family, and the Rolling Stones.

Mario Schifano is a refugee from Italian Libya who bears the mark of Mussolini's imperialist mirage engraved on his skin. Franco Angeli was born in Rome, in the San Lorenzo district, into a family persecuted by fascism. Tano Festa and Francesco Lo Savio, despite their different surnames, are brothers. The former spends his afternoons on the steps of Trinità dei Monti distributing poems to passersby. The second, fragile and restless, developed radical ideas that soon led him to isolate himself from everything and everyone. They were ‘the masters of pain’, as a Roman gallery owner called them, misquoting the title of a famous series of artist monographs. Each lives his “golden hour” passing through the café society of the 1960s in a Rome that has returned to being the center of the world. They conquer the most sought-after women, go to live in luxurious aristocratic palaces, travel to every continent, earn and spend compulsively, betray each other to the point of trying to kill each other, start families and destroy them, and above all, paint like obsessives, without respite, signing works that mark the Italian iconographic imagination of the second half of the 20th century. But the ‘golden hour’ – that particular type of light that only exists in Rome at sunset, making the buildings look like velvet – lasts very little, then comes the ‘blue hour’, the shadow that precedes nightfall. The climate of the country changes and their names sink into oblivion. They face years of decline, of sliding into madness, arrests, drug addiction, blackmail by the underworld, and hospitalizations in hospitals and mental institutions. Shaping an epic that unfolds over half a century of Italian history, Andrea Pomella writes an adventurous novel about four unforgettable lives, capable of touching – and restoring to us – the defenseless beauty of life.

«The lives of Mario, Franco, Tano, and Francesco, explored to the core, represent their respective masterpieces, with their relative ecstasy and inevitable torments. Vite nell'oro e nel blu invites us to go to Piazza del Popolo and there, closing our eyes, imagine that Mario, Franco, Tano, and Francesco are still sitting at a table at Caffè Rosati reading that poem by their friend Sandro Penna: “Life is remembering a sad awakening on a train at dawn: seeing the uncertain light outside: feeling in your broken body the virgin and harsh melancholy of the pungent air".» (Massimiliano Castellani, L'Avvenire)