MY FATHER'S VILLAGE

Il Paese di mio Padre

Greenbanks Books presents a journey into the Italian heritage of writer and Borges translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni. With an introduction by Paul Theroux, the book uses an innovative binding method which allows Ken Griffiths's images to be removed and replaced as the reader wishes. Designed in London by Fred Birdsall and printed to the highest quality in Verona, Italy, My Father's Village is a work of art in itself.

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Norman's father fled fascist Italy in 1926. He emigrated to America and made a new life in an Italian community near Boston. Not until the age of thirty did Norman first visit his father's village, Sant'Eusanio Forconese in central Italy. Arriving in the hill top village he feels instantly a shock of recognition and familiarity. In the people he meets he sees his own hand gestures and hears his mother's dialect, endearments and scoldings, phrases he hasn't heard since childhood. He is moved to tears by a home he has never been to before. Eventually he buys a ruined house and sets about restoring it and his own Abruzzi identity. As a postscript, his dream was never to be fully realised. The village was badly damaged by the catastrophic L'Aquila earthquake of 2009, making Ken Griffiths's turn of the century images all the more poignant.