I have mixed reactions to this book, which is about a subject that has long interested me. Mostly I appreciate the good points. It is basically well-written and recounts with interest, sensitivity and empathy something of the lives of the last generation to have lived a 'peasant life' in remote mountain communities in Liguria (northwest Italy). The prose is mainly direct and simple, with vivid and imaginative depictions of the landscape and wildlife. Then the bad points, as I perceive them, bother me. It is at times a bit superficial, occasionally has a rather twee 'Country Living' flavour, is sometimes too much centred on the author herself for my taste, and has a few other irritations.
To be clear: the author has performed a real service in talking with the old people she met and recording their stories so generously revealed to her. They show a world of poverty, toil and hardship that had changed little in centuries - a world shaped by mountain geography and stone-hearted landlords. It is a way of life now more or less vanished, the clues to which are rapidly disappearing as the older generation dies, the young leave for more benign surroundings, and the old houses are abandoned. Many of the old people remaining are scarred by terrible things seen in the war and the impossible choices that had to be made. The pace of change since the 1950s has been extraordinary. In one mountain village I know quite well in the north Apennines (about 150 kms east of the author's site), when I first stayed in the 1960s, people would keep the milk cows on the ground floor of the farmhouse and would bring hay and wood down from the mountains on wooden sledges drawn by oxen. Now, nobody keeps livestock (except chickens), tractors work the tiny fields, the number of shiny 4 x 4s seems to increase every year while the number of inhabitants declines year by year. The old woodsmen have retired, bent and battered from their labours, and most younger people commute down to the plains to work, or have moved there.
The irritations? It's a bit frustrating not to be told more about present life in the area; occasional comments about foreigners and other second home owners diminish the impression given of untouched remoteness. Then there are the zoological inaccuracies, which might be trivial in themselves but make me wonder how accurate other statements are. For example, on p55, the author describes how her dog caught a "peregrine falcon" by the wingtip, and the bird watched her "with a yellow eye"; but this leaves me confused because peregrines (and other falcons) have dark eyes, not yellow, and the most likely yellow-eyed raptor would have been a sparrowhawk. So when she says (p13) that she became able to identify eagles and peregrines, the reader actually doesn't know what species she was seeing. Page 68, there's a section headed "Reptiles", which is all about toads and salamanders, which of course are not reptiles at all but amphibians. I suppose an author might be forgiven a gap or two in their general knowledge, but don't editors know anything these days, or don't they edit any more? Then there is all the reported speech of the author's friends and informants: it would have been good to know if these written down verbatim, or the conversations recorded, or 're-created' later. But that's enough on the irritations (which only confirm my status as a boring old ----).
This is fundamentally a sincere, fascinating, moving and valuable account that gives some flavour of how life used to be in these north Italian mountains a generation or two ago: hard and simple beyond the imagining of most 21st century city dwellers. Anyone wanting a more academic perspective on society and culture in Italian mountains might find "Long Live the Strong" by Roland Sarti or "Fate and Honor, Family and Village" by Rudolph M. Bell of interest; then, for a less academic approach, there's always Eric Newby's very entertaining "Love and War in the Apennines".
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