About the Novel
In 2004, when my wife and I visited Italy, we stayed in one of those ubiquitous farmhouses in the Tuscan hills that now welcome tourists. This one, though, had a special meaning. More than a hundred years ago, my grandfather, a tenant farmer, lived there. The place had subsequently been abandoned and only recently restored.
In the village at the base of the hill, my 80-year-old cousin told the story of the farmhouse. During World War II the Italian resistance fighters were fighting the Germans heavily in this area, and villagers evacuated to the hills. I asked her if her family had fled. Quietly, she said they did, and then began to recount stories of how people argued with each other, how they cowered when they heard the fighting and the bombing, and how some of them didn't survive.
When I returned home, I couldn't stop thinking about those brave people and was determined to write a story about them. In the course of the research, I discovered the horrific event that had taken place close by, in a village called Sant'Anna di Stazzema, in August 1944. That research required return trips to Italy to talk to the survivors in what remains of Sant'Anna.
This book is dedicated to the brave people who suffered for so long, and with such courage, under the heat of the Tuscan sun.
-- Paul Salsini
Advance praise for The Cielo:
"Paul Salsini has the gift of thoroughly knowing and deeply understanding the people and the region in which his drama is set, and so the sky literally is the limit for this moving debut novel of a luscious country too often forgotten when we consider the ravages of the 'Good War'."
- Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Cage of Stars.
"In the opening paragraph of Paul Salsini's The Cielo, the reader sees an Italian woman looking out her window and putting aside her rolling pin when she finds three German soldiers running toward her house. And there we have the theme and the power of the novel.
"The main characters, the people of a Tuscan village, are trying to keep alive a semblance of the ordinary amid the grinding, machine-like terror of Nazi occupation. As the novel moves towards its climax, the problem changes. Now they are trying simply to live.
"Salsini's style is plain, his choice of detail unerring, his scenes vivid, his control of the narrative superb. Because of all this, The Cielo is a memorable novel. Its events and people live in the reader's mind as a paradigm of the civilian experience of modern warfare."
- Donald Pfarrer, author of Neverlight and The Fearless Man.
"Salsini's beautiful novel of Italy during World War II, peopled with a wide range of characters, deepens our knowledge of both Tuscan hill towns and the terrible effects of war on civilians."
- Martha Bergland, author of A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity.
Paul Salsini