Piero fa la Merica

Piero dei Gevori is fifteen years old and lives on the edge of the Montello forest, the ancient wood reserve of the Serenissima. In their family they are many and very poor, they have a house that is barely standing, they eat little and have nothing. As if that were not enough, bad luck comes upon them. For some time, down in the village, it has been said that in Merica they give land to those who want to work. After yet another injustice, for the Gevori setting off in search of fortune is no longer a choice, but the only salvation. Yet when they arrive in Brazil along with the tide of Italians fleeing poverty, they do not find the promised paradise. There, in the middle of nowhere, they have to make room for themselves, cut down trees to build everything from scratch: they will have to wrest the land from the mato, amidst the unknown threats of the virgin forest, far from everything and everyone, with no chance of returning to the life they left behind. Piero helps his father and sister to run the fund, raises houses, sows corn and beans: he arrives at night with broken bones, but in the meantime he grows. And as he grows up, he learns two things: that all it takes to die is the bite of a snake, and that first love is more dangerous than all the ferocious beasts put together. In the tangle of the mato, moreover, he will discover what no one had revealed to the migrants. Their land belongs to others, the natives who have always inhabited those hills. In his new novel, Paolo Malaguti brings to life a forgotten page of Italian migration. With the narrative felicity we know so well and a language that has the colours of Veneto, Italian and Portuguese, he projects us into a distant and adventurous world of toil and exotic plants, gold fever and traditions to be guarded an ocean away.