Cristiano, granddad, grandma, mamma, uncle, Giovannona, Don Leo: these are the protagonists of a story that traces a non-celebratory but true-to-life portrait of the character of the people of Romagna. The family’s story serves as a construct of an imaginary place, of a Romagna not as an administrative or geographical space, but as a “state of mind”. Poetry and irony mingle with an unmistakeable levity, in enchanting prose, mature and straightforward, producing “stories” in which readers will revel in Fellini-esque delight.
“I could never have written this book about my region Romagna without having spent years of wildly intensive training at the tables of Bar di Sopra, in Casola Valsenio (Village of the Mad, of Aromatic Herbs and of the Forgotten Fruit). In a land of chatterboxes like ours, populated by people who chat from morning to night, the past and present are mixed in continuation and nothing really ever has a beginning or an end. As a unit of measurement, I used my sweet and completely unruly family. I am one of the last people in my generation to be born into a house where dialect was spoken, among people who spoke only that, and I grew up talking a hybrid of Italian and Romagnola in which things happened differently.”