Lorenzo Mondo's library

«We couldn’t hope for anything better: – his daughter Monica confided to us in a video interview – that what my father treasured the most beside his wife and children, namely his books, ended in the only place he wished for. Books that he had accurately chosen from the humblest editions found on the stalls in via Po when he was a penniless student who worked to pay for college to all those that he had received from important writers later on, when he was a literary critic for La Stampa. I personally met many of these writers and thus it is really tender to be able to see their inscriptions, to read their letters, so they are not just books, they are always linked to faces who have left traces on the books themselves or in the correspondence […] If I think of the affinity, the harmony, the sympathy between my father and Cesare Pavese, I think of various things: I think of the language, of the history, but especially to the land. This Langa land that for my father had become – through Pavese – a spiritual home». A symbolic reunion, this one between Mondo and Pavese in Santo Stefano Belbo, that makes Fondazione Cesare Pavese a major reference point for 20th-century Italian literature.