Overview

The Patient Wait of the Stones is a memorable meditation on the phenomena of place and the compelling force of history. First published in Italian, this hybrid narrative combines memoir with national and regional history. This literary work is an evocation of the stunning particularity to be found in a tiny medieval village in Northern Tuscany. Antonio Romani, a former teacher and bookseller, discovers astonishing facts about his refuge built of stones and the castle at the center of his village (that once housed Dante in exile.) He finds a place for himself in the great sweep of history that touches both the dry stone walls he painstakingly repairs, and with the human inhabitants, past and present, who are the creators of a sustaining and continuing story. Co-translated into English with Marth Cooley, novelist and author the recently published My Little Donkey (Catapult, November, 2025)

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""A well-made dry-stone wall doesn't need a lot of maintenance. It stays in place, breathing through its stones the way our body does through our skin, so as to adapt to changes in the environment. But if the earth it supports doesn't drain well, getting soaked and becoming too heavy, then the wall can't breathe anymore. It suffers, succumbs, and starts to swell--a decline that's difficult to halt once begun ... I contemplated my own dry-stone wall, tilted because of neglect. It was speaking to me in its own way. Just as you age, it was telling me, and you feel the weight of memory and begin leaning forward until you fall, so it is with me. Better to free your body and mind from the detritus of the past, I thought, and make yourself stand as straight as you can."" ""In the stories told by people in Lunigiana (not unlike elsewhere, I believe), the ancestors' world is often elevated to a myth, a kind of happy agein which needs and desires were sufficiently simple as to be fulfillable and happiness was thus reachable. Strange metamorphoses of memory make many people forget the silent tragedies of their forebears, forced by poverty and migration to resign themselves to lives of sacrifice and exhaustion. Perhaps because I feel a bit of a stranger myself, displaced, I seek a new belonging that binds tradition with an awareness of the sacrifices on which it is based. I seek this while pausing to hear, in the murmur of the stones, the voices of those who knew how to pick up that murmur before me, in literature and in art.""

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