L’estate dell’incanto

Perhaps I am just trying to retrace my steps back to an elusive season when my family was stillhappy. Maybe that’s it. For in the summer of 1939 nothing seemed amiss as we made our bags for thecountryside. Like we were going on holiday. When in fact we were running away.But at the time I had no inkling of the truth.

It’s the summer of 1939, Miranda is nine years old and her world is facing the abyss. But she has no idea. And that summer will be the happiest of her life. As of many others’. Miranda and her mother leave Florence for Villa Ada, the house of her paternal grandfather – the Marquis Ugo Soderini – on the hills surrounding Pistoia. Her father is “elsewhere”. The farm, the lush countryside, the mystery of the woods are a perfectsetting for Miranda’s adventures with Lapo, the son of the farm manager. For their reckless bicycle rides,their dares, their risky discoveries. For country fairs, dances and their first, innocent kiss. But the woodsare also haunted by creatures only a child can see – or thinks she sees. And those same woods haunt the paintings locked up in grandfather’s studio – a place no-one is allowed to enter. That small corner of theworld is enshrined in a magic light.And in her nineties Miranda shows us that light, penetrating the fogs of memory. To travel back in time,becoming once more a child innocent of all experience, a child who has not yet suffered, not yet found andlost, is more that just a compensation. It is a balm, an antidote. Because there is no wisdom, there is no old age.Possibly not even death.

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