BARDI "We are poor people," they say, quiet embarrassing for a stone house and fairy tales, with the Creation around. Three people live in Pianelletto, an hidden hamlet in the mountains between Valceno and Valtaro: two women and a man. Anelina Speroni with her husband Gino Baccarini, and the beautiful, but she is now alone, Rosa Bonasera, who has the last rays of the sunset of an era in the eye, turned into a smiling wrinkles face. They live on what they have, and it is enough for them: a plateau mountain, fruit trees, vegetable garden and some animals. The sky, fresh water, the wind. The great evening silence of the Apennines. We are at 1109 meters above sea level, in a country that has come in the past centuries, seventy, eighty people. And a few years ago? "A few years ago but when?" Asks the old Anelina, the features of the mountains of the East. "About twenty years ago, for example." "Ah, we were still in six." Pianelletto can be reached from Val Noveglia, with a small road across hairpin bends; after a village called Venezia , It leaves the asphalt. The road becomes a dirt road with potholes and ruts then surrounded by foliage of beech forests. The three, live working with driftwood, spinning wool, and gleaning memories of war. They left burning all, the Nazis, and there isn't the historian of the place to remember it , here, but the door of an abandoned house still charred. Baccarini was 15, he was hiding in the woods in the days of raids, he remember memories on the day that "they stole the pig." that there was , they took away: oxen, cows, pigs. No one says the word "partisan" Maybe it's just a case of linguistic at an isolated place where people speak a unique dialect, almost Ligurian: they call them, just unhistorically, "rebels". Among these "Betti", who he knew before he was killed in the mountains of Liguria; Resistance to these places, where they operated detachments "Picelli", in Val Noveglia, and "Betti" near Varsi. Resistance, now, they are working driftwood with their bare hands. The day is long, not alarm but the sun opens, closes and rules. It was working driftwood, after the war; beech logs. The hands of the ladies at the lunch time are getting some fresh with two affectionate little dog on a bench, they are drawn from the job: big, red and full of knuckles. Warm hands, decided that, at dusk, in front of the theater of the ridges arm in arm before the sea, they spin the wool of sheep; they raise and shear the animals by themselves. They make clothes and socks,they use them for the winter or sell - rare - passers. Like the eggs of hens, free between the courtyard and the rest of the world, mushrooms, or other lovely things made with love, and infinite calm. Rosa Bonasera welcomes us at her house. The same house, where she got married: rough stones one above the other, a low ceiling, a sense of freedom. Walls blackened by decades of wood heating; the heater in cast iron, It is in the center. The hours go slowly. There is hardly haze.Once a upon a time they was working with coal, but after the war, everything changed. "Looks like we live from day to day ," glosses Baccarini, who lives, like seventy percent of the other inhabitants, with 400, up to 450 euro per month pension. Is Pianelletto a golden prison? Of Course. For us it is everything. This is the most beautiful place. At least until we aren't forced, we'll stay here. I do not go in cities anymore. Only up to Bardi but just sometimes. "We remember," tell women while they are eating some bread and cheese, and pampering of dogs, "when we were walking to the Messa, down in the valley." School desks, up to the fifth grade, the other third. But they know the herbs. And they wake up at five in the morning to work, to live. Are the rhythms of human beings and not machines, not processors? Or the hidden energy of Mount Barigazzo be divided only into three, now? Farmers and housewives, Rosa and Anelina, for a lifetime: Now friends and companions of afternoons, two-thirds of the population of Pianelletto. "We worked hard and earned little," smile, but, "we live." Every day the soup at noon, several sons and daughters grew, but some legend, do you know? "Ah, it tells of a wanderer ...". And Baccarini: "Yes, there are, for the children, but now it doesn't come to my mind, I should remind them." You can not go back empty-handed, you go down to the bars of Mixage Noveglia with the scents of Pianelletto, and the last sentence affectionate of the two ladies, " you go back in August, we will offer our cherries."