Diario di un curato di montagna

Diary of a Mountain Curate
by Stefano Saverioni

58’, Italy, 2008

Pietracamela, Cerqueto and Intermesoli are the small hamlets in the parish of Don Filippo, on the slopes of the highest mountain in the Apennines, the Italian Gran Sasso. After the summer tourist season, only a handful of old people and a few families live in the stone houses and in the winter with the high snow it is easy to remain isolated. And so, the centuries old churches are increasingly empty, the streets and alleys become deserted, and the pastures and valleys seem mute. These places might seem a romantic, mystic landscape, but also a difficult confine for the exiled, where solitude is stronger than faith. In these frontier conditions, the young, restless priest finds, through his own questions and dreams, the best way to understand himself and his relationship to God. “The people of faith have a kind of inexplicable, fleeting quality, a certain stubbornness of spirit and “unreasonableness” that makes them in some way poetic and fascinating, almost like solitary Don Quixotes of modernity.”