Pietro's Book by Pietro Pinti
Hardworking, pragmatic, humorous, Pietro is a typical Tuscan peasant. He worked the land with hoe and plough from his earliest youth. Born, he explains, "in the Middle Ages", he has lived to see the world he knew and loved pass into history. Here, Jenny Bawtree provides an account of that peasant culture which is now dying. Pietro grew up during the Fascist regime on a farm not far from Florence. As sharecroppers under often unscrupulous landowners, the peasants lived in conditions of extreme poverty and were thus well equipped to face the rigours of World War II. War or no war, work on the land went on. We learn how Pietro made wine and olive oil, planted the wheat by hand and made baskets and ladders from chestnut wood - skills that are swiftly being lost as Pietro's generation passes on. Storytelling, music and poetry enlivened their days, all seasoned with a salty humour.
Pietro Pinti was born in 1927 in the Arno valley, the twelfth child of a family of sharecroppers. At eleven he was taking the pigs into the woods for acorns, at fourteen he was running the farm and ploughing with oxen. When he left the land in 1969 he worked first as a builder's mate and then came to the riding centre, where at 75 he is still working as cook. Jenny Bawtree was brought up in the Oxfordshire countryside and read languages at Oxford. After teaching at Florence University, she set up the riding centre at Rendola, in the Arno valley. She is now working on a book about the Chianti region.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781841197302 |
| ISBN 10 | 1841197300 |
| Title | Pietro's Book |
| Author | Pietro Pinti |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Year published | 2003-07-24 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |