Description
Abruzzo, 1938. A town on the coast of the trabocchi, three hundred steps above the sea. Emma is a “twice shamed” girl, with hands and eyes laden with some dark ability. She gives birth to a child in the stable where she has lived since being disowned by her family, but she knows she cannot keep him with her. At the registry office works Olimpo, who has not become a shoemaker like all the males in his family, but wanting to be a poet, he preferred to work there to earn his bread. He is the one who names Emma’s son before he is taken to a convent. Olimpo is married to Anita, the only blonde woman in the whole town and ten years older than him, who lost her left arm in an accident. They have just become parents for the second time to a girl, Bianca. But Anita is still weaning their first child and does not have enough milk for both creatures; for this reason, Olimpo asks Emma to come live with them and take care of Bianca. Anita will never hide her disdain for Emma’s presence, while Bianca will grow up with two mothers, feeling that perhaps neither truly belongs to her. All of this is just the beginning of a family saga that becomes a choral tale of an entire town, where private stories with an ancient flavor intertwine with great History, from the occupation during World War II and the clashes on the Gustav line to the rebirth in the Sixties. With a magnetic and visceral voice, full of suggestions, Vito di Battista composes a fresco in which events that touch us closely are tinged with a visionary charm, and the real and the invisible come to merge into a single horizon.
