Marco has just published his novel The Mystery of Easter Island during the Cold War. The story unfolds around a group of archaeologists who, after many years of research on the island, attempt to uncover what the natives simply call “the Mystery”: a sacred object whose meaning is known only to the ancient guardians of the island and which they seek to protect from the outside world.
The central protagonists—young researchers Mario and Alicia —are guided by Patrick, a scholar of Polynesian languages whose knowledge opens the first path toward understanding the island’s hidden past. Their search leads them to an aged sage, Ariki, custodian of ancestral memory, who reveals that mysterious wooden tablets contain encoded clues pointing to the location of the sacred object. As fragments of truth slowly emerge, the archaeological quest becomes inseparable from a deeper spiritual and historical enigma.
At the same time, global political tensions intrude upon the island’s fragile balance. The American administration pressures the Chilean authorities—then sovereign over Easter Island—to relinquish control to an ostensibly independent government led by the ambiguous businessman Sergio Rapu and covertly financed from abroad. Behind this maneuver lies a dark and secret design whose consequences threaten not only the island’s autonomy but the destiny of the sacred object itself.
In response, the native population—guided by King Hotukau and secretly supported by the Soviet Union—organizes a guerrilla resistance that places the newly formed regime in immediate danger. Thus the island becomes a symbolic crossroads where archaeology, spirituality, and Cold War geopolitics converge.
As the investigators draw ever closer to the hidden truth, shadowy forces begin to move against them, determined to seize the sacred object for their own purposes. What follows is a long and tortuous journey marked by deception, peril, and unexpected revelations, in which the search for an ancient relic gradually transforms into a confrontation with power, history, and the limits of human knowledge.
In this way, The Mystery of Easter Island blends adventure narrative, historical imagination, and metaphysical inquiry, presenting the island not merely as a geographical setting but as a symbolic space where memory, secrecy, and transcendence intersect.
On the other hand, Horror Vacui represents one of the most intimate and psychologically revealing dimensions of Marco Di Caprio’s creative work. Written in Italian as a collection of short prose texts, the book explores the emotional landscape of the contemporary individual confronted with loneliness, technological alienation, sensory overload, grief, and spiritual disorientation. Rather than following conventional narrative structures, the pieces unfold as interior visions—fragmented, symbolic, and often dreamlike—where memory, desire, and anxiety merge within a space suspended between reality and hallucination.
At the center of the collection stands the ancient concept of horror vacui, the fear of emptiness, reinterpreted as a modern existential condition: the dread of silence, the impossibility of stillness, and the restless search for meaning in a world saturated with images and noise. Di Caprio transforms this void into a site of spiritual tension, where suffering becomes inseparable from the longing for transcendence and for the hidden presence of God. His prose frequently oscillates between darkness and illumination, echoing the chromatic symbolism that also informs his scholarly research on medieval lyric poetry, and revealing a continuous dialogue between despair and redemption, fragmentation and unity.
In Circles emerges as the English translation and expansion of Horror Vacui, extending its themes through a broader reflective structure and a more explicitly meditative rhythm. While preserving the emotional intensity of the original Italian texts, this new work deepens the exploration of cyclical time, repetition, and return as metaphors for psychological healing and spiritual reorientation. In this sense, In Circles does not merely reproduce the earlier book but reopens it, transforming personal fragmentation into a movement toward coherence, silence, and inner reconciliation.
Together, Horror Vacui and In Circles form a unified literary project situated at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and musical sensibility—an attempt to give language to the invisible movements of the soul in the modern age and to trace, within contemporary emptiness, the possibility of meaning, grace, and renewal.
Marco Di Caprio 