The wild charm of the village

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A strong scene opens the first work by Sandro Baldoni, “Wild eyes”. It is the raw welcome of an unknown reality where the protagonist, a child, will go to live. In fact, little Marco Primavera, with his family, follows the reverse path of most Italians of the 1960s: from the city he moves to an isolated mountain village.

Here begins an initiation path that the child will make, together with the reader, to discover a new world with its loyalties and its laws, sometimes cruel, sometimes funny and tender: ultimately with its culture so unique and very different from what the child has lived up to then, in the city.

Marco’s heart is formed by learning at the same time from the wild charm of the village, its people and its nature, and, in contrast, from the values ​​and facts that he listens to and lives in the family (the disappearance of his mother, the relationship with his brothers and the paternal teachings first absorbed and then screened in an increasingly adult and disenchanted way). The gentle tone of the first part of the narrative, told by a lonely and observant child, becomes stronger and more mature, able to progressively involve the reader in an empathic and amused way. We then follow the protagonist in this “sentimental education” told in the first person, discovering that we have so much in common with that passing generation that grows up forgetting a certain innocence to make room for a resigned realistic sense of things and facts.

The family

But Marco is not alone, the other protagonist of the book is the family that slowly reveals itself every time Marco, in the evolution of life, opens some curtain for us. It will do so without adding to the facts the weight of judgment in the belief that it is the family, with all its imperfections, our true point of reference, the refuge to go to after having stumbled into mistaken beliefs and having fallen, ultimately when we find ourselves alone. We leave the author Sandro Baldoni (Assisi, 1954) writer with a long career as director and screenwriter, the task of telling himself.

What is the genesis of the book? Was it born from an intuition or is it a project thought up for some time?

«For some time I have often repeated to myself that I should / wanted to tell about that last fruitful period of rural civilization which took place in Italy in the 1960s and which I lived directly as a child. The Italian towns, the peasant villages of the hinterland, were then still capable of generating a type of indigenous culture, alive, original, fruitful, different from that of the cities. Neither better nor worse, only different and bearer of values ​​as important as those of the city. Today the countries, now almost completely depopulated, no longer generate any type of culture. In their place were born the so-called “villages”: agglomerations of second homes that live only in summer. In the 60s / 70s between the countryside and the city there was still an exchange, now the metropolitan civilization has triumphed, everything has become uniform, the countryside undergoes a single thought and is no longer able to offer anything native if not air good and beautiful landscapes as a backdrop for selfies. “Wild eyes” is not, however, a nostalgic “as we were”. childhood and adolescence of a child catapulted into a different reality. The writing began to materialize in the period following the 2016 earthquake, in the mountains between Umbria and Marche, when I started shooting the documentary “La Botta Grossa” (2017). In those winter nights when the houses of the village were no longer accessible and there were about a hundred living together in a large shed, I saw signs of that civilization resurface: a solidarity and a dialogue (even harsh and ironic) between the people who reminded me of the old days. In that emergency situation it seemed to me that the country’s interaction, dialogue and capacity for collective self-determination had awakened and were recreating something ancient and at the same time unprecedented, that physical proximity had rekindled a solidarity capable of creating anew an independent and original thought. So, after having recorded the present in the documentary, I began to write about the past. What particularly convinces in the novel, told in the first person, is that the vision of the world changes, expands and matures at the same time as the age of the protagonist. His awareness grows and we live with him all the steps of this growth: we become adults together ».