The Boys of Via Pascoli—A Review

Pino and his brother Rino are born in Trieste into a house of silence: their mother and father are both deaf. The home is desperately poor, yet the boys grow up happy there. Then a well-meaning aunt interferes, and everything changes. Torn from their parents, the brothers are sent to boarding school. And so the cruel world arrives. Now Pino and Rino are two among three hundred boys living "entirely at the mercy of the staff's hands and moods"—childhood stripped away. These are lives denied, pushed to the margins, existence in an institution. But let life show even the smallest crack of humanity, of beauty, and something begins to flow again. This luminous book by Pino Roveredo reads like a fairy tale, a story told in the light, disarming language of childhood itself. The sensitivity of the defeated has its own radiance here, and the child protagonist's sharp pain is not erased but carries the vitality of someone who still reaches toward the future.