Book Description

Alberto is the main personage in the novel, and he represents 75 percent of the authors life. He is a young man born from a very poor family. Even so, he is able to get two degrees: a masters degree in French language and literature and an associate degree in business administration. He started to attend the Orintale of Naples in Italy when he was twenty-two years old. In order to earn enough money to pay board, lodging, and the expenses to attend courses at the university, he started to work in a private college. He remained in Naples for two years. Here, while he was studying, he founded, together with other students, a club and a magazine that started a struggle against the magnates of the university for the purpose of improving the teaching methodology. When the struggle moved from the schools to the parliament, Alberto decided to quit Italy and went to France. He spent one year in Lyon as tutor in the Franco Canadienne college, and three years in Nice, teaching Italian language and culture in the Lycee Massena, Ecole Normale, Dante Alighieri Society, and the Chamber of Commerce. While he was teaching, he also attended courses of French language and literature at the university and prepared himself for the exams in the Orientale of Naples. During summer months he went to Spain in order to improve his knowledge of Spanish language and literature, attending courses at the University of Saragoza in Jaca. In France, like in Spain, he was admired and appreciated as a young man able to resolve any intricate matter easily and creatively. He wanted to live his life intensely, without ceasing to love his girlfriend with all his heart. He had experienced several loving adventures that made him fall into a deep moral and spiritual crisis. Alberto said, I do not know anymore who I am. I act against my own principles. Influenced by the French culture, he understood that those principles he called his own were, indeed, not his but only principles accepted by him or transmitted to him by his family, his school, his church, his town. Living in Paris, Alberto understood that the only valid principles in our lives were those that we created or accepted after careful consideration. From now on Alberto will work hard to create his own principles and to resolve his moral and spiritual crisis. In order to succeed, said Alberto, it is not enough to say it, you must do it. Being equipped with a strong dose of determination, self-assurance, and a lot of energy, he began to discard all those principles in which he did not believe anymore, retaining those in which he still believed, and at the same time created new ones. He said, There are some principles that must be saved because they represent the foundation and the understanding of our Western civilization. By now Alberto was aware of being what he always wanted to become: a young man hungry to accomplish what he had initiated. After three years of separation, Alberto went to the United States in order to see Enza, his girlfriend, and he decided to marry her. He returned to Nizza with Enza. They had a first son. They returned to Italy. He completed his studies, getting a masters degree in French language and literature, and went to live in the United States. Needing to support his family, he started to work in a bank, and he remained there for thirty-five years, spending the first two achieveing an associate degree in business administration. The author tells the life of Alberto from infancy to youth. In the entire novel there are many descriptions of landscapes, in particular of his native town. Alberto directly or indirectly lived the horrors of the two world wars: the occupation of his town first by the Germans, then by the Allies. He visited Cassino, a city that had been razed to the ground by the bombers during the Second World War. Alberto also lived through the Fascist period and the political awakening of the great masses and their revolutionary agitations for the occupa