Il pastore che amava i libri (The shepherd who loved books) by Italo Zandonella Calleger

Reading is like flying: you can beat the wings of imagination, but it is the wind that decides where to take you. On the lines of a summer breeze you can discover how wonderful the mountains are.

You fly along a thread of ink, gliding over the images of a memory, over the memory of a time, of a mountain lived, of a distant landscape, of a world where faded people move, people of whom we have only a vague, elusive memory.

We cling to that memory to understand something of our own lives, and instead we discover that it is precisely those people, places, things lived through, adventures and pranks that have made us what we are.

It is the story of little Ial, says the back cover, of how he discovered the mountains (perhaps of how each of us would have liked to discover the mountains)... of a dignified poverty... where what mattered was not so much that it was poverty, but that it was lived, all the more solidly, with dignity, that dignity nobody can ever tear away from you.

A well-written book, so well written that when you start reading it your only regret is having uncovered its secrets; you would like to be able to start again dozens of times as if it were the first time. To be able to live and relive, again and again, sensations or the simple passing of time.

Ial discovers the mountains by living them on the one hand and in books on the other... as I did a long time ago when, unable to go all the time to the faraway mountains I loved, books were the heralds of new adventures.

That Ial is the author himself you realise straight away, and that the “true” book each of us can write is only one, you know because it is the book of your life; the others, after all, would all be invented and meaningless. The book of life lived, read or written, opens a window onto an inner world. The gift of an inner world is the most beautiful present there is.

As usual Edizioni Biblioteca dell'Immagine, with their courage, once again hit the mark with a truly excellent literary offering, for its content, for the pen that writes it, for the intensity of the emotions of human life it offers...

I want to thank them and the author for this splendid work.

Among our other reviews of mountain literature, read Terre alte by Carlo Grande.