L’altra collina. Cesare Pavese tra Reaglie e Pino

Born by chance in Santo Stefano Belbo, and often reduced by his critics to a “Langhe writer” lost in his own imagined provincial Middle West, Cesare Pavese was in fact an intellectual deeply rooted in the city where he spent almost his entire life—Turin. The very hills that form the backdrop of his works are not, in many cases, those of the Belbo valley, but rather the nearer elevations that close off the eastern side of the Piedmontese city (most notably in his masterpiece The House on the Hill). Here, in one of the villages scattered across these hills, the young student spent his adolescent summers, only later discovering in those memories the “roots” of his poetics of myth. Never previously identified, “Villa Pavese” was located during the research that led to this volume and is described here for the first time.
From biography to works (and vice versa), The Other Hill thus seeks to redirect the reading of the Turin writer away from regionalist stereotypes, through the exploration of that liminal landscape—almost a trait d’union between the industrial city and the wildness of the Langhe—represented by the low hills along the Po.