Amerigo Speranza is the narrator of an extraordinary, harsh story, of a novel that tells the little-known story of thousands of southern children who, after the Second World War, thanks to the Communist Party, were taken from poverty and entrusted to families in the North and Center. Amerigo is poor, he lives in Naples with his mother Antonietta, an only child without a father, perhaps disappeared in America, “to work hard”. His mother decides to offer him the opportunity for a better life, she no longer wants to send him to collect the “pieces”; for him she wants school, food, health. The child leaves for the North frightened by rumors about the wickedness and cruelty of the communists; he gets on the train to go to an unknown elsewhere where he will find, they have guaranteed him, a loving family and a welcoming home. Viola Ardone’s novel «has the truly comforting virtue of telling the story of a child in foster care without hiding any aspect of it. And indeed respecting the heartbreaking “doubleness” of Amerigo’s life, the loss of his mother and the defeat of hunger, the severed roots and the new serenity, the unworthy insecurity and the “artificial” protection imposed by the other and at the same time providential » (Michele Serra, «la Repubblica»).
