Return to Valetto
Dominic Smith
Return to Valetto
Dominic Smith
A nearly abandoned Italian village, the family that stayed, and long-buried secrets from World War II.
On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village-and a hub of resistance and refuge during World War II-centuries of earthquakes, landslides and the lure of a better life have left it neglected. Only ten residents remain, including the widows Serafino - three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother - who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a historian, returns.
But someone else has arrived before him, laying claim to the cottage where Hugh spent his childhood summers. The unwelcome guest is the captivating and no-nonsense Elisa Tomassi, who asserts that the family patriarch, Aldo Serafino, a resistance fighter whom her own family harboured, gave the cottage to them in gratitude. Like so many threads of history, this revelation unravels a secret - a betrayal, a disappearance and an unspeakable act of violence - that has impacted Valetto across generations. Who will answer for the crimes of the past?
Dominic Smith's Return to Valetto is a riveting journey into one family's long-buried story, a page-turning excavation of the ruins of history and our commitment to justice in a fragile world. For fans of Amor Towles, Anthony Doerr and Jess Walter, it is a deeply human and transporting testament to the possibility of love and understanding across gaps of all kinds - even time.
From the international bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
Review
Mark Rubbo
Readers may remember Dominic Smith’s 2016 novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. In that novel, the sins of youth come back to haunt the present. It was a beautifully constructed novel of many layers and was embraced by many readers. Those readers, and any newcomers, won’t be disappointed with this new book.
A middle-aged academic, Hugh Fisher, an expert on abandoned towns in Italy, returns to his mother’s family village in Italy. It’s where he spent summers as a child, surrounded by his three aunts and grandmother; it’s a village that is now almost abandoned. Hugh is still grieving the passing of his wife more than five years ago. He’s come to the village to work on some papers, and to spend time with his aunts and grandmother, who’s shortly to turn 100 and planning a big celebration. He plans to stay in the cottage that he and his mother used and that is still full of memories of her.
When he arrives, he discovers that the cottage is occupied by a woman from the north, Elissa. She says her family looked after Hugh’s grandfather, Aldo, during the war when he went north to help the partisans; she claims that on his deathbed, Aldo bequeathed the cottage to her family in gratitude.
The war was a time of great division and its legacy has never been quite resolved, with many things left unspoken. Elissa’s arrival prompts the exposure of those wounds and reveals a secret that haunted both Hugh’s and Elissa’s mothers. Smith’s evocation of a fading and fractured Italy, of a man struggling with his grief yet with a possibility of hope, results in a novel that succeeds on so many levels. It’s a major achievement.
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