Lina Pietravalle, a little-known 20th-century writer of Molisan origins and deeply in love with Molise, wrote one of the most beautiful declarations of love to our land.
Lina Pietravalle was born in 1887 in Fasano, Puglia, to a Molisan family originally from Salcito, in the province of Campobasso. She lived between Turin, Naples, and Rome, but her “inner homeland” was Molise, to which much of her literary production is devoted.
A little-known writer, unjustly forgotten, yet extraordinarily modern, she deserves to be rediscovered.
Critics began to take an interest in her only when she started writing her Molisan stories: I racconti della terra (1924), Il fatterello (1928), Storie di paese (1930), Le catene (1930), Marcia nuziale (1932).
Her books speak almost exclusively of Molise. Why? “I have often asked myself what binds me to this land in which I have lived so little […] in Molise I spent only all the happy days of my youth” (from Incontri con Lina Pietravalle, Gabriella Iacobucci, 1992).
Lina was in love with Molise; for her it was like “entering a magical world.”
A magical and visceral bond, therefore, bound and enveloped Lina Pietravalle to Molise. A land that the writer described in 1931, when invited to the Liceum of Florence to speak about Molise:
“Molise, Ladies and Gentlemen, has the honor of being one of those elementary, rough, backward places that say nothing to the tourist: there is no scenic arrangement of mountains, lakes, and gardens to be admired from a hotel window […].
Molise walks a small century behind, gentle and stubborn like a placid child who refuses sweets when offered, for fear they may precede bitter medicine. Such is Molise, which does not ask for, does not want civilization, in this universal frenzy […].
The overbearing centuries have not shaken its opaque and sturdy structure as an agricultural and warrior colony, and it wishes to live in its own way, clinging to the spine of its mountains, prospering in the ancient Biblical sense, among woolly and pious flocks, in spacious and tranquil valleys where time pauses to look upon the meek and faithful men who still earn their bread by the sweat of their brow […].
Sannio, Samnu, consecrated. Consecrated then? To what? In a century of economic struggles, in the tight and cold concupiscence of arduous values, what is the worth of this distrust of more and better? And what use is it?
It serves, Ladies and Gentlemen, to fertilize a principle of great human dignity, to keep sacred and constant the first image of man, he who had as his delightful stage the nurturing earth, such red sunsets…”
(From Incontri con Lina Pietravalle, Gabriella Iacobucci, 1992).
Perhaps one of the most beautiful declarations of love ever made to this land— not without contradictions, like all the truest and most authentic loves.
Brunella Muttillo