Ticino has changed more than any other region in Switzerland over the past hundred years. Once a poor canton, it is now a tourist hotspot. Plinio Martini provides a stark reminder of this divide in “Il fondo del sacco” (1970), which has just been published in German as “Nicht Anfang und nicht Ende”. It is set at the end of the 1920s in Val Bavona, a wild and beautiful lateral valley in Vallemaggia.
Few employment prospects and large families often left the young men of the area with no option but to emigrate. Many of them would sing: “America, America, America, / in America voglio andar!” However, not everyone wanted them to go. The older inhabitants were worried that their children would never return because they would be successful somewhere else, or because they would not be successful and would feel too ashamed to return. Martini’s narrator Gori Valdi is one of the emigrants. He signed an employment contract before he and his sweetheart Maddalena could declare their love for each other. He leaves home with a heavy heart.
Eighteen years later, Gori returns. Maddalena died shortly after his departure. He made money in America but is left disillusioned. Plinio Martini, who stayed in the region all his life, uses Gori to show how poor the people are in Val Bavona. Martini pulls no punches with his vivid and precise presentation of the poverty, always framed within the context of Gori’s quiet longing to return to his roots.
There were some positive sides to being poor: the strong sense of community and melancholy songs, some of the things Gori missed in America. When he returns he finds the place rather stale. One of his first observations: “I’m still cursing the train that took me away.” A deep sorrow pervades his narrative as he yearns for the old days. “I began to realise that happiness can come out of nothing, and that I had lost this nothing that makes people happy.”
Martini’s novel is a wonderful tale of longing as well as a touching romantic drama. However, it is first and foremost a splendid tale of time gone by. The book is replete with marvellous characters, captivating stories and twists and turns of fate, “most of which actually happened”. It was Martini’s prerogative as the author to develop some stories as dictated by his own imagination, and he did.
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