La Casa De' Colli

Description

A story needs a reason for being written. The reason for this one lies on the American side of the Atlantic, where large and thickly spreading branches of the Colli family tree have contributed their share to the diversity of American society. A visit punctuated with a great many "family days" convinced me that I was probably the only one in a position to gather together the fragments of a family history and organize them as a shared heritage for a clan, loosely knit and widely dispersed, that nevertheless still shares an affection for its roots. The story unfolds through the testimony of eyewitnesses, and from a few documents that have surfaced out of a past in which paper was of secondary and sometimes even negligible importance. All the events reported here really happened. Aside from some minor characters, the people really existed. For discretion's sake some names have been changed. To lend it a certain cohesion and weight, this history has been presented as a narrative, colored with the details I recall hearing from the old people who belonged to the universe of my childhood. Many of the events take place against the backdrop of the Canavese mountains and the hamlet of Crest in particular, as they were when I saw them as a boy, before floods of concrete altered their physiognomy for good. Other scenes are set in the fabled American West, a frontier land and the melting pot for many Italian emigrants during that formative period when the population of the United States was taking shape.

First Sentence

Each time Titta, the eldest of Menico Colli's sons, went up the mountain with the livestock or to gather wood, he stopped at Arsignöl or Pianturn to look back on the village from above. He knew every one of the houses and the people who lived in them. He knew the stables and the animals, who were almost considered people. He knew whose goats gave the most milk, and whose cows were most talked about in the neighborhood. He knew the little squabbles of every household, and also the deep conflicts that sometimes divided families and caused lasting tension. The young man liked pausing on these natural balconies to scan the village, trying to recognize its busy people from afar and imagining the women indoors, around the fire. He liked the transitional seasons best, when the countryside was richest in contrast and changed day by day.

Subjects