A travel book is always an adventure, like the journey itself and as writing. And as we read in «where the sea begins. The secrets and charm of Portugal “(Castelvecchi) of the journalist and writer Giovanni Valentini, traveling and returning to the places are discovered, as Magris said,” other layers of reality, the concrete possibilities that have not been achieved but existed “and survived, while the physiognomy of a country, with the layers of history that formed it, is measured with the changes, with the spirit. The flavor of Amarcord is a bit of the reporting report of Valentini’s travel, author of several political, economic and social essays, who after having worked for 40 years for “Repubblica” (after contributing to its foundation and having been deputy director of it) and L’Espresso (which he directed from 1984 to 1991), today he holds on the Fatto Quotidiano La Rubrica “The Saturday of the village” (Saint-Vincent Award).
Portugal in the heart, where he lived for 10 years and to whom he dedicated his debut novel, “last night in Lisbon” (SEM, 2017): a country that “begins from the sea”, the first “global village fully, so close and so far”, Mediterranean but also Anglo-American because “his projection on the Atlantic Ocean and his history of Marinaro Empire naturally place him between Europe and England, to which the mercantile control of the sixteenth and seventeenth century competed. ” A journey from Lisbon, a city of the heart, “magical and mysterious city-nation” with its melancholy enchantment and its Saudade, to Porto, from Fatima to Algarve, from Madeira to Cabo da Roca, the most west tip of the continent, with its cliffs and its amazing landscape. The sense of the sea with an almost epic flavor pervades the entire Valentini reportage, marked by short and dense chapters whose titles already give the idea of the author’s way of looking at Portugal: people, uses, traditions, colors, seasons, sunsets, his literature, his fado, his history and therefore his genius loci, but also the cosmopolitanism and the dynamism of a country projected towards the country future. A journey that starts from the sea, but whose protagonists are the roads, people, figures, monuments, beaches, cellars, smells and flavors traveled with a rhythm that keeps the author’s amazement in the face of beauty alive. A tribute to Portugal, a large ship stretched out on the ocean, with pages that open their gaze on a family and magical geographical reality together.