Northern Chile in the early 1920s was the promised land for a community of Italian emigrants. Miners, who colonized the villages of that endless pampas. Gregorio Zafarone, a worker at the Porvenir workshop, writes letters for his illiterate comrades to send to their families in Italy. His own, however, addressed to Berto Macaluso, a young baker from Palmira, a village in the Lucanian hinterland where they both originated, are never answered, until the day everything changes. Her words reach Berto, sealed in an envelope in which a fly is trapped, and prompt him to leave for Chile.
Alessio Arena is an Italian writer, songwriter and teacher.
