TO OUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN OF MONTECALVO
WHEREVER THEY LIVE IN THE WORLD

Our home town, Montecalvo Irpino – midway between Benevento and Avellino – is a typical little community in the South of Italy, where the endemic underdevelopment of the economy, and the  emigration ensuing from it, have in the course of time enfeebled the inhabitants’ forces and willingness to accomplish anything relevant. But, however unfavourable these conditions, they have not deprived Montecalvo of the capability to express its voice.
As it often happens, anyone that has been forced to leave his or her homeland cherishes in the mind and in the heart the sounds and the voices that resounded through one’s home, in the town square or in the surrounding countryside. Sounds and voices that are preserved and come back without fail whenever one must square accounts with oneself.
If we succeed in resurrecting and giving form to our people’s founts of memory, and in regaining the pristine forms of our mother tongue, we’ll be able to encourage and, above all, to give back, to whom has lost it, his rightful place in an ancient civilisation, which is worthy of praise as a noble one from ancestral times.
By publishing these few pages we want somewhat to help our countrymen who have been forced to leave our homeland and are experiencing a life condition torn by nostalgic memories of their native town now entering the Third Millennium. As to dear persons not seen anymore, also I – the undeserving author of these lines – still do remember many of them. We were indeed many of us, young boys born during the 1950s and the 1960s, when we played “’ncoppa la chiazza” (in the upper town square). We were a new generation, a joyful one, which unfortunately was later confronted with profound difficulties considered of historic relevance now.
I would like to call everyone of you, but I don’t know where you are. I think we must be thankful for this new technological medium which enable us to reconstruct and recollect more easily moments of life which are unforgettable.
This is a formidable endeavour indeed, but we must pursue it in order to fulfil those promises we, as young boys, made to each other in a station of life we experienced as paradisiacal.
There is not any other goal we desire to attain by writing these pages, except giving new colours to images that time has by now inexorably faded.