Einaudi, 1999.

(Distant Winters)

This is a long story, elaboration of an article for “La Stampa,” an inventory of large colds, the “operating instructions” to prepare for winter and also a framework, a list of voices, faces, friends.

“Now, day after day, winter is approaching and I will have many memories. It will be like to return a child again, like listening to many voices. Seeing again lights in the steppe, friends, loved female faces. Today in rain water gathered in the gutters that hang from the roof I see also a lot of distant snow that the sun has melted away and brought back here.”

In this writing Rigoni Stern is involved in a face-to-face with himself in which memories, past and present, personalities, values, lives, resurface clear, sculpted, compact like the clouds that bring the first snow.