The private, secret world of Sardinia is unveiled through the temporal ambience of characters and lives through them; characters, in turn, are reflected by Sardinia, being its most direct emanation and expression.

Sardinia and Villacidro, in particular, stand as the main Character rising from Dessì’s pages as a primal component. As a constant factor, such places, time after time, accompany the protagonists’ lives and events, in an ever-different appearance: sometimes they are a shelter, sometimes they are the only place to go, searching for joy; or else, they are a vital space to restore one’s peace or lost balance. Only being immersed in the island can time be forgotten, to experience a historical insight beyond things; to feel at safe, like in mother’s arms.

A perfect harmony sets between time and place; this is the case of Michele Boschino. After his father’s death, he feels bewildered, deprived of his chief master of life, in whose light he had grown up. Michele wishes to be alone, so he takes shelter in the mountains, in Ulia. Love for the land and its produce will help him to recover his interior peace; he lives in symbiosis with nature, measuring his own time against the passing seasons, the farming toil and the fruits that the land will yield to repay his efforts in the fields.

Despite years going by, the second part of the novel describes Boschino, now as an aged man, who managed to preserve this intimate, exclusive relationship with his land. To the eyes of a young friend of his, he appears as ‘an old, steady, unalterable tree’ – like an element of his own land that cannot be parted from it.

Excerpt from Michele Boschino - (Chap. VII, pp. 77-78 - Edizione Ilisso)