CASCINE – FARMHOUSES

Cascine – Farmhouses was our destination last Saturday for the Libri e Caffè reading group in Pavia. 

We promised ourselves we would return soon to Nicoletta’s café, and the magic happened again!

This time, we had the pleasure of meeting the writer Aurora Elena Bettio.

Cascine – Farmhouses is published by Gruppo Albatros Il filo and the preface is by Barbara Alberti. 

The author’s initial premise, in telling her story, was to say that the book is a small dawn: dawn in Italian is Aurora, her name.

In reality, we met a great dawn, a woman who crosses time like a bridge between past and present, whose foundations rest on a solid family built with her husband Pino.

Born in 1954, Aurora is a mother and grandmother, but she will always remain a daughter, a daughter of our land, of that flat plain that is anonymous to those who do not know it well.

Cascine belongs to the New voices series, and Aurora’s voice, enthusiastic, sparkling and at times broken by emotion, expresses an instinctive, intense and sensitive connection with the countryside.

Even before telling her story, the author brought small symbols to visually represent the land where she grew up.

I always say that I care deeply about my roots, so I immediately understood the important message that Aurora conveys, together with her testimony of an era that now seems very distant.

Oral tradition takes shape in the words written by a “cascinara”, the affectionate nickname given to her husband, who fell in love with reading when he discovered a wonderful library when she was a child.

How could I not embrace her?