In “Sono scesi i lupi dai monti” (Mursia, pp. 204, € 17,00) the Author has succeeded in the difficult task of recounting with delicate calm one of the most tragic events in recent Italian history: the horrible death of thousands of Istrians and Julian-Dalmatians, many of whom were thrown into the sinkholes while still alive.

The pages of Piero Tarticchio (Gallesano – Pola 1936) are full of personal memories full of that humanity and pity that only the wise know how to express. 

In the form of a diary, the Author narrates his life from his childhood marked by the atrocities of war and the massacre of seven relatives, starting with his father, by Tito's communists.

The crime of the Tarticchios, like that of thousands of other families thrown into the sinkholes, was their Italianness. The clearest signal that Italians should no longer remain in their homes was the attack, plotted by the Yugoslavian secret police on August 18, 1946 on the beach of Vergarolla, where 110 people died following the explosion of war remnants.

A fact, an episode that convinced a large part of those 350.000 Istrians, Julians and Dalmatians to definitively leave their native places and to begin that exodus that would push them to find refuge in other parts of the world.

"In the years that followed, my dreams were often disturbed by horrible nightmares," Tarticchio writes, remembering Vergarolla. "I felt as if I were sailing in a stormy sea Red with blood and I could not keep my course. As much as I fought with all my strength against the elements, the wind pushed me against a cliff.

I could clearly hear the roar of the waves breaking on the rocks, but I couldn't see them. It seemed as if the whirlwind of the storm had fused the sky and the sea into a single element.

There are passages in the book in which the prose gives way to poetry and the narration, always real because it is relevant to events that have happened, becomes poignant as when Tarticchio recalls a passage from his childhood years.

«The pages of a geographical atlas became platforms from which the dreams of a child raised among war bulletins and proclamations of victories took off», he says.

"As for many children of the 40s, battles were fun to be experienced and invented. Real toys were a privilege for a few. Mine were bodiless and timeless, the product of my imagination. Entertainment made of pure thought, an ethereal material that cost nothing and that no one could take away from me."

The book, a finalist in the 55th edition of the Acqui Storia Prize, has an allegorical title that recalls the nature of the wolf associated with evil, wickedness, to echo that of the evil man who, in certain circumstances (such as those that occurred on the eastern Italian border from 1943 to 1956), has shown a satanic ferocity.

With Mursia Piero Tarticchio, who worked for 42 years in the world of advertising communications, he also published “La capra vicina al cielo” (2015) and “Maria Peschle e il suo giardino di vetro” (2019). 

Alberto Comuzzi 
Source: How Live, Resegone Online, Valtellina News e Varese In Light – 10/01/2022