A return to origins, to life's roots—this is the story Giacomo Poretti (of the comedy trio Aldo Giovanni and Giacomo) tells his child. He traces his life from birth through poetic and ironic narration, tender and sometimes brutal. It reads like an enlarged photograph of a typical northern Italian town in the 1960s: its characters, habits, miseries—without nostalgia, without distance.
The result is a hymn to life, to family love, to the recognition of what truly matters, to goodness itself. A pleasure to read, with an ethical edge. The narrative is light, sometimes uneven, yet remarkably intense.
Rita Massi, 2013