Diario di un curato di montagna (2009)

Father Filippo Lanci's parish is not a parish like any other. Going up the narrow and suggestive roads that cut the slopes of the highest mountain of the "Appennino" chain, the "Gran Sasso d'Italia", in Abruzzo, you can get to Pietracamela, Cerqueto and Intermesoli, small and lonely villages clinging to the rocks and, by now, partially unpopulated. As a matter of fact, after the summer holidays, just few old people and some families keep living in the stone houses and, in the winter, when the level of the snow is high, being cut off is very frequent. Therefore the secular churches get more and more empty, the alleys and the roads get deserted, the pastures and the valleys get silent. The wind rises undisputed from the screes and the slopes, along the gullies and the wooded gorges up to the mountaintops and the peaks, while the tolls of the bell towers scan in the silence the everyday life just like the seasons and the years. Sometimes this is the harrowing mystics' landscape. Sometimes the hard exiles' internment, where loneliness strongly hold the chest tight, more than faith does. In this frontier condition where, nevertheless, a simple humanity still resists with its rich traditions, the young and unquiet priest will find, through his own contradictions, the way to understand himself and his own relationship with God.