Foxes Hill

In this novel, I try to lead the reader into an engaging account of a life lived, with an abundance and precision of episodes and experiences etched in my memory. Mine is a journey into a bucolic landscape and environment, which have marked me throughout my life. It is the experience and fortune of those who, like me, found themselves living through the period of transition from the life of the fields, made by toil and sweat of the hands, to mechanization and modernization. To make this journey backwards in my biography fascinating, there is then a succession of affections, of loved ones, of figures all peculiar in character and attitudes. The novel is, so to speak, a story within a story. Characters: za F'lumena, the grandmother with the strong character, the volcano always ready to explode, my father, Aunt Paola, Aunt Lina, Uncle Ferdinando, Uncle Armando, the barber-accordionist, the forester, the baker, the hairdresser, the old vintner (who at first presents himself as illiterate, but...), the traffic cop, the massaro (farmer) Luigi, who teaches me how to ride a horse, and his wife Carmela, an excellent cook, and Cerasella, grandmother's donkey. With Foxes Hill, I offer the reader a chance to open the treasure chest of life's memory, and to relive it. Childhood memories remain indelible in everyone's memory, and it applies to everyone. In this autobiographical account, through an exposition that is as simple and straightforward as ever from the point of view of expression, I recount my real experiences as a boy of just seven years old, who, alone and aboard regular buses (as many as three, for barely a hundred kilometers), in the hot summer of 1955