L’anno della vittoria
Einaudi, 1985.
(The Year of the Victory)
In L’anno della vittoria the year of the victory is 1919, when the young Matteo and his family returned in the places north of Asiago that they have suddenly abandoned in spring 1916, along with the entire population of the Plateau, under the pressure of the Strafexpedition.
On their return from the village of the Pedemontana that hosted them, the country and the whole Plateau appeared as a huge pile of rubble. In the reconstruction of family ties and social relations, in the reappropriation of the places, in dialogue with nature and its cycles, a lost country slowly returns to life. And this, not the one on the enemy during the war, is the victory the title refers to.
The novel ends on 31 December 1919 with the birth of Matteo’s sister, the first birth in Asiago after the war. Together with the “Tönle” and “Giacomo’s Seasons”, it forms the Plateau’s trilogy.