El fons del sac

When Gori Valdi returns to his hometown, Cavergno, in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton, he will no longer find anything he left there, nothing he expected to find there. In that little town in the Alps, life was poor and difficult, going up and down the herds of the high pastures, and he had left very young, like so many thousands of emigrants, with the illusion of making a fortune in the States united Behind were the mountains, the cattle, the school, the family and Maddalena, "one of those creatures that when they walk down the street, people fall over and stop talking".