One Step to You (The Rome Novels #1)(94)
Still today, I owe everything to my enthusiastic readers. The incredible happened, a real story inside a story. They were the ones who started talking about One Step to You and making photocopies to pass it to their friends. They were reading it in secret, and slowly, slowly, by word of mouth, they were learning about Babi and Step’s love story thanks to a novel that didn’t exist as such anymore. Eventually, ten years later, one of those copies fell into the hands of a filmmaker who realized its potential and decided to make a movie out of the story I had written.
That very same year a big Italian publisher acquired the rights to the novel, and it quickly became one of the biggest Italian bestsellers, topping the bestseller lists for three years in a row. My dream had come true.
But more exciting news was waiting for me around the corner. As soon as the Italian edition came out, a Spanish translation was published, and One Step to You’s success was even bigger, when a Spanish film based on the novel was also produced and premiered in Spain.
Babi and Step’s love story has been translated into fifteen languages and sold more than ten million copies worldwide, with the novels never out of print: A bestseller became a long seller. So much so that it has inspired the 2020 Netflix series Summertime.
The edition you are now holding in your hands is beautiful to me because it is the very first time this love story is told in English. You, too, will be able to live all the emotions of Babi and Step’s love story that also continues in the two other novels in the trilogy, Two Chances with You and Three Times You.
I feel so incredibly humble, thankful, and proud of how my love story has grown throughout the years. It was a book that no publishing house wanted and ended up touching millions of hearts. I now hope it will touch yours, too, and that you will fall in love with my story, One Step to You.
Arrivederci from Rome, with love,
Questions and Answers with Federico Moccia
Q: This is the first time that you’ve gotten to tell your story to English-language readers. What would you like to say to them?
A: I’d like them to know this is a true story I wrote when I was still young. This was a love story that was quite similar to one I had lived, and I tried to write about it because, when a love story ends, especially when you are young, you think it’s unbelievable that this has happened, that this love has come to an end…I was trying to find closure and get rid of my great pain. A little bit like when Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle writes a letter full of grief for the death of his wife, puts it in a bottle, and throws it into the sea. One Step to You had all this: my passions, my love for Babi, the bike races, everything I had lived with my ex…
I’d like each of you to find all the moments of happiness and pain in my first love story. Every time my books have been translated in a different language—and it has happened fifteen times—I am very curious. I want to see the effect my stories have, stories thought of and written in Italian and full of our atmosphere, on readers from different parts of the world. When I have seen the response in the countries I’ve traveled to to promote my books, I’ve been left in shock. It has been amazing how each love story I wrote multiplied and transformed according to the contexts, the habits, and lifestyles of the people who have read them. It has always evoked a very strong emotion for me; it has been literally a discovery for me. I have seen how far love can go and how, after all, love is a universal language.
It’s now time for the United States to read it, a country that I love for its many facets, always diverse, always surprising. You cannot tag the US with a single label, definitions fit it badly, and that’s what I most love about it. During college, I spent some time working in New York while I was studying at university to become a film director because I felt I needed different perspectives from the Italian ones I was used to. New York City blessed me with the most wild and amazing gifts and helped me grow a lot despite the short time I spent there.
Thinking now that, in that very same city, there will be people reading my stories and—why not?—growing fond of Babi, Step, and Gin (in book two of the trilogy), and I hope telling me what they think of it, thrills me just like thirty years ago when Tre metri sopra il cielo came out for the first time. Babi, Step, and Gin are not fictional characters but three real friends who have taught me so much during these past years and are now about to surprise me once again in the English world.
Q: Step and Babi have been called a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. What other stories influenced you as you were writing this book?
A: Certainly, there have been many because a writer is nothing but a person who learns by reading more than with writing courses. One gets used to writing by reading, by assimilating other writers, by loving paragraphs, sentences, passages, and scenes told in a certain way that help you find your own voice. It’s like having digested their writing and creating your own as a result. Paul Auster, Truman Capote, and Raymond Carver were influences, but also Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth were my food, with books like Jack London’s Martin Eden, and especially Tender Is the Night, The Love of the Last Tycoon, The Great Gatsby, and The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved every sentence, I read every passage, and I tasted all the moments, the pains, the peculiarities, the characters, his love for his wife Zelda, his mental fragility, everything he loved about her and fell in love with. At the same time, I loved a writer who was his most total opposite, Ernest Hemingway, with his hunting and fishing trips, his strong and extreme ways; all these I loved. I loved his writing and how he loved life. For example, in the beautiful book that is Islands in the Stream, I appreciated how Hemingway loved the beauty of the sea and how this somehow confirmed his love for life, bullfights, and people.