It was a rainy day and I started to read

I bought Biamonti's "Le parole la notte"in a Dutch translation. I had never heard of him. The title intrigued me. I opened it and thought: yes, I like this. It reminded me of Pavese. - It was a rainy day and I started to read. I could not stop. And as I read I seemed to find myself in a trance. When I finished the book the trance remained, for several days even and I decided to re-read it. Why? Can one explain magic? I shall try. - The sun, the moon, the sea, the sky, the wind, the clouds, the birds, the flowers, the rocky mountainous coast, the old neglected olive groves, all lost in an infinite deep blue. The writer who wanders along the "sentieri ripidi". A sense of danger, who wants to harm him? He observes, he contemplates. He has brief encounters along the way: an ancient shepherd with his flocks, an old woman gathering fire-wood. But also newcomers, rich foreigners seeking a safe haven. What are they fleeing from? And by night the furtive passage of asylum-seekers, homeless people lost between two worlds. Violence, but also compassion. His characters are like insignificant, vulnerable travellers, whose brief journey leads them through a timeless landscape. Nature and the elements are indifferent to their sufferings. Contradictory as this may seem it does not give me an impression of cruelty but rather a sense of consolation. The kind of feeling I get when I am gazing at the nocturnal sky and seeing the bright light of the stars. He has a unique gift of expressing a maximum of meaning in a minimum of words. - But I still haven't been able to explain why he casts a spell on me, his reader. Why his words seem to grow wings and fly straight to my heart. I cannot explain this experience, I am back where I started. It remains his secret. It is magic. He is a poet writing in prose. Tante grazie, Francesco Biamonti!

Yvonne van de Pitte

11 luglio 2006