On the Spine of Italy: A Year in the Abbruzzi

by HarryClifton (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $4.56

  One summer, Harry Clifton and his wife moved unnoticed into a village in the Abbruzzi mountains. Unnoticed, because although the village had a normal population of 90, the return of emigrants from America for the summer had swollen it to three times its size. For the months of July and August, they were lost in the flux of coming and going, as temporary as the rest. Their only strangeness in the eyes of the village was that they spoke little Italian and no mountain dialect. But the couple became the first outsiders to stay on in the village, into the autumn and the winter. They become embroiled in the politics of village life and make friends and enemies with the characters which people it. They learn much about modern Italy even in this most rural of settings - about modern Italians, relationship with the Church and State, the effect of emigration on small communities and how an ancient way of life in small pockets of Europe is under constant threat from encroaching towns.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.42

  Beautifully written, this is at once a charming and a raw account of an unusual year, which will appeal to anyone who loves Italy. Intending to write through the summer months, the Irish poet Harry Clifton and his wife took up residence in an abandoned parish house in a village of the high Abruzzo, deep in the mountains of central Italy. They remained an entire year. A silence desends in the autumn as visitors and emigrants return home and the village reverts to its introverted self. Winter comes with an iron harshness, but it gives way to the gentle vivdness of an Italian mountain spring. Against the immense backdrop of the Appenines, the tiny community, resitant alike to church and state, gradually reveals its tensions and its generosities.