Most of these stories were written during the covid period when one could only leave the house to buy the essentials for survival, and so, reduced like everyone else to ‘house arrest’, I used the extra time I received to write personal recollections in dialect, which have one characteristic in common: they are short, beginning and ending on a single page.

My main aim in composing them was to include in them dialect words and terms that have fallen into disuse, and then publish them weekly on Facebook.

But to whom could I turn to narrate these memoirs that recounted picturesque, icastic and sometimes shamelessly insolent situations and characters that perfectly represented the character of the Valenzani ? Of course, to the spirit of Dante Alighieri, he who in his time had admirably described events far more scabrous than ours.

The literal Italian version used to facilitate reading leaves something to be desired, since our dialect, like almost all languages, when translated, loses its expressive uniqueness and does not faithfully convey the sense of the terms used.