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by Giorgio Romi (Author), Bruno Boccini (Narrated by), Samuel Hilt (Translator)
Bruno Boccini was born in rural Tuscany in 1931 into a large peasant family that subsisted through sharecropping under a feudal system known as "mezzadria" which wasn't abolished until the 1960s. Before he died in 2018, Bruno was determined to record and transmit his recollections of peasant life in the pre-industrial world of rural Tuscany. Given the challenges faced by an illiterate peasantry simply to survive, first-person memoirs of peasant life are as rare as hen's teeth. And the fact that Bruno's style is so thoroughly engaging makes this document all the more remarkable.
Bruno Boccini's anecdotal reminiscences of peasant life range from walking to school in rough, wooden shoes to hiding in a grotto when American fighter bombers flew overhead, from sheltering a deserter from the Fascist army to hosting chairmakers from the Veneto as they walked through the countryside, stopping at farmhouses along the way to build furniture by hand. There are discussions of the harvesting of grain and of the seasonal slaughter of the family pig that show the same concern to faithfully represent a vanishing world that Melville displayed in depicting the whale hunt or that Phillip Roth demonstrated in his discussion of the leather glove industry in Newark, New Jersey.Bruno's skill as a raconteur passes almost unnoticed as he takes you on a tour of a whole way of life which has virtually disappeared. At some point I realized how unusual it was to have a document like this in hand. So, I felt inspired to translate Bruno's stories into English and make them available to a wider audience.
