Zombies have belonged for decades to an imagination shaped above all by America: suburbs, highways, shopping malls, isolated towns and major cities turned into hostile territory. It is a language I know well and one that has influenced the way I approach the genre, but that is also why I wanted to move it elsewhere, into cities, settings and sensibilities closer to my own experience.
That idea led to three very different stories: Quello che resta, Palermo: zona rossa and Protocollo 19, now also available in English as What Remains, Palermo: Red Zone and Protocol 19.
They are not a trilogy, nor do they share characters or a single storyline. They are three independent stories that use the zombie apocalypse in different ways, moving from a more intimate and melancholy tale to urban settings where the city itself, the emergency and the gradual collapse of normal life carry more weight.
What links them is not only the presence of the living dead. It is the attempt to look at the same genre from three different angles.
What Remains: a More Intimate Zombie Story
What Remains, the English edition of Quello che resta, is probably the least conventional of the three.
Although it begins in a world overrun by the dead, it is not built mainly around action or siege. I was more interested in something harder to define: memory, identity and the boundary between what we once were and what may survive after almost everything else has disappeared.
The title comes directly from that idea.
What remains?
Not only of society or the world that came before, but of people themselves.
It is a story in which atmosphere matters as much as events, and in which the zombie is not used only as a threat. The genre remains recognisable, but it moves towards a more reflective and melancholy tone.
Of the three stories, this is the one least concerned with the apocalypse as a whole and most interested in what it leaves behind in the individual.
Palermo: Red Zone and a City That Becomes Part of the Story
With Palermo: Red Zone, the perspective changes.
Here the setting plays a much more visible role, and the city’s name in the title is deliberate. Palermo is where I was born, and using it as the setting for a zombie story meant bringing the genre into a place with a clear identity rather than turning it into a generic Italian city.
I have always been interested in what happens when the imagery of apocalypse enters recognisable places.
Zombies change the way we perceive space. Streets, neighbourhoods and places that once belonged to everyday life take on a different meaning the moment ordinary safety disappears. A city is no longer just the background to the action; it becomes part of the problem, with its own geography, distances and limits.
That is the feeling at the centre of Palermo: Red Zone.
I did not want to Americanise Palermo or use Sicily as an exotic detail for international readers. The English edition needed to preserve that specific identity.
Protocol 19: the Apocalypse in Rome
Protocol 19, the English version of Protocollo 19, moves the story to Rome and approaches the genre from another direction.
The title evokes the language of emergencies, procedures and systems designed to respond to crisis. That contrast is what interested me: the idea that rules exist to maintain control, and that something can arrive capable of putting those rules under pressure.
Rome also offers a very different urban scale from Palermo. It is vast, complex and difficult to cross even under normal conditions, which makes it a fitting setting for a story in which the sense of order begins to fracture.
Here too, the city is not meant to be decoration. Setting a zombie story in Rome means working with a place readers can recognise while asking them to imagine those same streets under a very different light.
Three Stories, Three Ways of Using the Same Genre
The risk in writing several zombie stories is obvious: change the characters and repeat the same structure.
Outbreak, escape, shelter, attack.
That was not what I wanted.
What Remains, Palermo: Red Zone and Protocol 19 begin from the same imagery but search for different tones. The first is more contained and introspective; the second ties the apocalypse more closely to the identity of a city; the third looks at crisis through a larger metropolis and through the idea of a system being forced to confront something beyond the limits of normality.
That flexibility is one of the reasons I still find the zombie genre so interesting.
The basic rules may be simple, but everything around the dead can change from one story to the next.
Why Italian Zombies?
Italy has a long tradition connected to zombie cinema, but for many years that tradition existed in a particular relationship with American imagery. Even some of the great Italian films in the genre often used international settings, foreign characters and places far removed from Italy.
In fiction, I am also interested in the opposite possibility: allowing the apocalypse to arrive here.
Rome and Palermo do not need to pretend to be somewhere else.
Bringing a zombie story to Italy changes many elements at once, even when the text does not stop to explain them. The cities are different, the architecture is different, movement works differently, and even the way we imagine escape or shelter changes with the setting.
The genre remains the same, but the environment gives it another character.
Translating Without Moving the Stories
Publishing the English editions raised another question: how do you make these stories feel natural to an English-language reader without erasing where they come from?
I did not want to turn Palermo into an imaginary American city, nor hide Rome behind a neutral setting. International readers should enter the stories as they are, not through an adaptation so broad that it strips away their identity.
For me, translation should remove the linguistic distance, not the cultural one.
With What Remains, the main issue was preserving the tone; with Palermo: Red Zone and Protocol 19, it was also important to preserve the relationship between the stories and the cities in which they take place.
Three Entry Points into the Same World
I do not see these stories as shortened versions of longer novels. Each one was written to work within its own space, with its own pace and atmosphere.
For readers who have never read anything of mine, they can also serve as three different entry points into the way I approach the zombie apocalypse.
Readers looking for something more introspective may want to begin with What Remains. Those drawn to the idea of seeing the genre move into a recognisably Italian city may find something different in Palermo: Red Zone. Anyone looking for a broader urban setting and a story shaped by emergency can start with Protocol 19.
Three independent stories, then, linked by the same underlying question: how many different stories can still be told starting from the dead walking again?
For me, quite a few.
What Remains, Palermo: Red Zone and Protocol 19 are available in English on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
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