IVREA. Among all the books that, in various ways, deal with wine and those who produce it, I have always heard experts and connaiseurs speak with the utmost respect for one title above all: Vino al vino. In search of Mario Soldati’s genuine wines. Writer, novelist (it is his The Green Jacket, for many the best story of Italian literature of the twentieth century), director, Soldati was the first to talk about food and wine on television.
Passionate interpreter of Italian identity and often abroad for work, he identified food and wine as the best way to make Italy known to Italians and foreigners. In Vino al vino he places three accounts of three journeys in the Italian provinces of wine: he meets men of that world, favoring small producers and family businesses to the detriment of large wineries, faithful to the very Pasolini idea that progress will standardize products and will betray the tastes. The protagonists of “Italian mastery” tell each other that country after country – thanks to Soldati’s undisputed maieutic talent in dealing with simple and concrete people – abandon their traditional confidentiality and allow us to enter their world, made up of knowledge handed down from generation to generation. generation and passions that time specifies and reinvigorates.
In this book Soldati dedicates exciting words to Carema: “Carema, the vineyard city that we saw for the first time, about twenty years ago, in harvest time and in the rain … Until we understand the reason for our joy and we tell ourselves that minute we are experiencing that same violent and unrepeatable sensation that seized us the first time we arrived in Venice, in New York, in Paris, and for the first time we saw the gondolas, the skyscrapers, the subway. Carema has a strange and wonderful structure, which derives from its location and its function, just like Venice and New York. Not unlike these cities, its beauty is unique ».
One wonders why we do not allow these words to educate us and educate our children. Why do we not believe them, or why do we find them too demanding, since they remind us of the responsibilities we have towards our land? –
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