Return to Valetto by Dominic Smith
Valetto is a fictional Italian town that is dying and almost abandoned. Due to its precarious and remote location, being prone to flooding and earthquakes and lack of work opportunities there are only about 12 people left living in the town.
Hugh Fisher happens to study abandoned towns. He’s an American professor who has made them the subject of his research. But that’s not why he is heading to Valetto. Valetto was where his mother grew up, and where he spent many childhood summers with his mother's family, the Serafinos. It’s also where his aunts and soon to be 100-year-old Grandmother still live. He has been called back by his aunts as a stranger has taken possession of the cottage on their property next to their villa. This cottage was left to Hugh by his late mother. But this stranger, Elisa, says it was left to her by Hugh’s Grandfather Aldo Serafino, after her family sheltered him during the war. He was a partisan resistance fighter who spent many years away from his family. Elisa claims she has a letter Aldo wrote on his deathbed, giving the cottage to her.
So, the drama of who should get the cottage plays out, but that’s not all that is going on. We find that Elisa’s mother and Hugh’s mother were friends when they were girls. Elisa’s mother came to stay with the Serfinos during the second world war with a group of children sent south by their families to keep them away from the danger zone. The two girls apparently disappeared for a number of days when they were 12 years old, and never revealed what happened to them. When Elisa convinces her elderly mother to come to Valetto and support her claim to the cottage, long held secrets emerge and a family retribution is planned.
I enjoyed the author’s descriptive writing style and the gentle pace of this story. I could imagine the setting of the town, and the characters are quite vividly portrayed, especially the Serafino sisters and their centenarian mother. There is also a delicate romance developing between Hugh and Elisa as well as the intrigue of the lost family secret. If you like literary style books and family stories, you will enjoy Return to Valetto. I’d also recommend Dominic Smith’s previous work The last painting of Sara de Vos, a literary mystery set in the art world.
If you want to see what Valetto might look like, search for Civita di Bagnoregio in Italy which was an inspiration for the town.
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