Circolo Operaio

Last summer, I went to the village of Bieno in Piemonte, Italia, in order to do what my mother wasn't emotionally able to : to sell the vacant and non renovated house she inheritated from her italian father 30 years ago, before it falls apart. I already had been to this place as a boy and I remembered the sounds of the people yelling and laughing in the house in front of ours, but also their long silences. At the Circolo Operaio, some kind of worker's association's room, a few men come on a daily basis to talk over the news and drink some local white wine. Most of them speak french because they worked in Switzerland or in France for a while. One of them complained about the falling real estate prices. Another one, zio Romeo, 93, is the cousin of my grandfather who moved to France as a young man before the war and died the year of my birth.