Before becoming a film by Nanni Moretti that will be released in Italian cinemas on 23 September, “Tre Piani” was one of the most successful novels by the Israeli Eshkol Nevo, published in Italy by Neri Pozza. But who is the author who inspired the Italian director, so much so that the film – written together with Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella – is his first film adapted from another work? Born in Jerusalem in ’71 and graduated in Psychology in Tel Aviv, Nevo is a student of Amos Oz (who passed away in 2019) and today he teaches creative writing in the school he founded. Among his most loved novels by Italian readers “Nostalgia”, “The symmetry of desires”, in fact, “Three floors”. In 2020 Nevo released “Vocabulary of desires”, the result of a weekly column, very popular on the pages of “Vanity Fair”. The narrative force of Nevo “is in his voices – according to the Strega prize, Alessandro Piperno – He is an ace in making his characters speak, in distinguishing them from each other, in isolating them, in understanding them intimately”. While the writer Elena Loewenthal recalls that “of all the Israeli writers of the new generation, he is the most ‘traditional’ in the positive sense of the term: his adherence to the canons of the novel translates into wise writing”. Translated from Hebrew by Ofra Bannet and Raffaella Scardi, Nevo’s novel tells the story of three families who live in a bourgeois building near Tel Aviv. Nanni Moretti has changed part of the story, moving the setting to Rome. The parking lot of the small building is very tidy, the perfectly pruned plants at the entrance and the newly renovated intercom. From the apartments come no loud music, nor rumors of quarrels. Quiet reigns supreme. Yet, behind those closed doors, life is not at all of the same tenor. A couple lives on each floor with their life made up of work, desires and passions. For each of them, however, tragedy, disenchantment, madness are lurking. Arising from the brilliant narrative idea of ​​describing the life of three families on the basis of the three different Freudian instances of the personality -Es, I, Superego- “Three planes” goes into the deep heart of human relationships: from the need for love to betrayal; from suspicion to fear of letting go. The work has consecrated Nevo’s talent on the international literary scene, who stages characters ready – despite the blows inflicted on them by life – to get up and fight again.