The story of a childhood in the south of Italy, on the Salento peninsula, is at the same time an evocative and meditative treatise on the first period of one’s life. On a time without partitions
and boundaries, made up of lights, voices, reveries and expectations, a time we call childhood. This is a time that lives on in each of us, with its distant reverberations, with its lost splendor, even when surrounded by the shadows and pitfalls of oblivion.

The story offers glimpses of southern life after the Second World War: The harsh reality of peasant life, the industrious atmosphere of craft workshops, the sorrow caused by the high rate of infant mortality, children in the street playing games under the mid-day sun, the animals, the grotesque and bizarre figures that enliven village festivals, the veiled women standing by their front door, the stories of the war veterans telling of distant cities and lands, hiding the wounds and pain through colorful and wonderful story telling. And the music that seeps out of the houses into the streets, the music that accompanies the ritual of the Tarantate. In the background, the blue line of the sea that emerges from the other side of a castle. A landscape of light and affection, with wild plains thick with olive trees, reaching all the way to the cliffs, giant moons that rise from one sea and sink in the other.

The South of Italy, with its astonishing interweaving of poverty and tightrope act, misery and fantasy, is shown through the eyes of a child, through the succession of scenes like old sepia-toned photographs.

This book is a reflection on the first half of one’s life, the part that becomes the secret rhythm of our thinking. A meditation that unfolds as a web of images: a canvas whose threads have the shaded and evanescent lightness of memories.