This is the story of a journey the author imagines making in his native Sicily following a letter from his father announcing the abandonment of the family home. Vittorini’s fictional double is Silvestro, a typographer who lives in Milan and suffers a disturbing, vague desire for action that has no real outlets and renders him incapable of getting to grips with anything. He reacts by setting off on a journey into his own past, not just to recover it (or, even worse, to relive it) but to find some promise in it, a reason to live in the present that would allow him to escape from his stalemated existence.

From Silvestro’s meetings and conversations with various characters and above all with his mother emerges a portrait of an ‘abused world’, a dramatically awful situation permeated by poverty and sickness and weighed down by blind oppresion. Out of all this though comes an urgent need — which Vittorini feels too — for a new kind of consciousness.

This is Vittorini’s masterpiece, a poetic and moral journey in search of a remedy for the Sicilian malaise and of a real alternative to the deceitfulness of today.

‘That winter I was prey to vague indefinable longings. I can’t say what they were, that’s not the story I have to tell. I only need to say that they were vague, not heroic, not alive; longings anyway, for the lost human being.’