Casalvento in a book by Raffaello Massi
< Raffaello Massi is a surgeon and psychiatrist by profession who lives, works and writes in Florence. Casalvento is a sober and luminous exercise of memory. It is a lucid look at the passions of youth and its deceptions. It is the delicate reconstruction of an enchanted world. It is the world of the Tuscan countryside: wheat, vines, cypresses, barking dogs, the moon and silence. It is the simplicity of an existence nailed by fatigue to its essential jobs. It is the hardness of relationships hardened over the centuries. It is the yearning song of a female voice at sunset, it is the seduction of a face or the distant mirage of Casalvento.
Massi’s prose is dry, intense and precise and revisits a world that knows how to narrate with wise irony > Danilo Zolo
The cover is the 1865 oil on panel painting by Giovanni Fattori: “Houses and haystacks in Maremma” which incredibly resembles the photos of Casalvento in the 1950s. The roots of our history.
Casalvento, by Raffaello Massi. Publisher: Ponte alle Grazie. Florence 1993. ISBN: 88-7928-083-X