Customer Reviews

THE CIELO: A Novel of Wartime Tuscany

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the summer of 1944, members of the Italian Resistance fought against German troops in Tuscany. When the SS heard that the Allies were fast approaching the area, they began to commit ghastly atrocities against the citizens of Tuscan villages, killing all those that could not flee from their farms into the hills for safety. In "The Cielo", author and journalism teacher Paul Salsini (a writer, editor and writing coach at the 'Milwaukee Journal', and the son of Italian immigrants) provides a fact-based but fictional account of some of those villages who resisted the Germans while having to overcome their own petty differences, endure deprivation, deal with betrayal, sheltered an escaped POW, and survive a raid by the SS. Not all of them would survive their ordeal. Enthusiastically recommended reading and a welcome addition to any community library fiction collection, "The Cielo" is a superbly crafted, deeply engaging, positively gripping story of courage, endurance, and testament to the Tuscany peasantry who suffered the scourge of war upon the gorgeous landscape and peaceful people of Tuscany.

Paul Salsini's intriguing novel about an Italian village during WWII captures from the very first page till the very last, as we follow this group of newly displaced citizens through anxieties and defeats, while retaining their united will to fight to the finish in order to return home.

The villagers have evacuated to the hills to avoid the fierce group of German soldiers arriving to take over their beloved village. They move to The Cielo, an old farmhouse. In these cramped and meager quarters, their mundane lives explode in varied dramas as encounters with friends, relatives, partisans and the ever present enemies criss cross their lives daily. There is young love, old heartaches, births and deaths. But throughout, humanity prevails, rejuvenated from their past, strengthened by the present.

Characters are described in colorful, vivid depictions. The dialogue is excellent, with splashes of humor and Italian wordage and songs. One learns much about Italian life and families, while rooting for their redemption, which finally takes place, midst remnants of horrible destruction. Some of the horrors of war are retold in grisly detail, bringing tears to your heart. One knows who won, but it's these villagers, who fought their own private war, who deserve special honors. This book fulfills that tribute.

Ludmilla Bollow, author: "DR. ZASTRO'S SANITARIUM-- for the Ailments of Women"

Courage and passion meld with profound struggle in this engaging, well crafted story of survival in a Tuscan town. As the war moves towards its end in Europe, villagers refuse to give in to the dictatorial, controlling hand of occupying Nazis. Everyone's existence is profoundly changed, lives are lost, and - in the end - those who survive stand as testament to the strength of the human soul.
Paul's breakthrough novel captures moments, creates characters, and shares the story in descriptive and captivating prose. Readers who are drawn to this book because of a passion for Italy will not be disappointed; life in a small Tuscan village is perfectly captured, and there is a certain disappointment when the story comes to a close.
I, for one, excitedly anticipate Paul's next novel.

A couple of other reviewers have already given enough details to show what this novel is all about;so I won't repeat that.
This is a historical novel in the truest sense;and gives an intimate insight into what these ordinary people went through in 1944 ,at the time the tide was turning, and the end was approaching, when the Nazis were finally being defeated.
Similar situations went on throughout Europe and many books have been written to show how the people coped and struggled to survive and at the same time helped others ; even when they full well knew any resistance or collaboration against the oppressors meant instant death for ,not only themsenves,but wholesale mass murders of innocents "to teach them a lesson."
A long time ago ,in 1942,John Steinbeck,in his classic "The Moon Is Down" wrote about similar events in a small town in Norway . The themes of these two novels are alike in that they show that no tyrant can ever stamp out the fire of the human spirit.
In this novel ,even though the people realized their lives were held by only a fragile thread,that could be cut by their oppressors at will;they never lost hope.
The characters are fictional,and some may even be based on real people;but we come to know them intimately. They all have different personalities,problems,desires,and yes, even long held differences;they all grow immensely during these short,though seemingly endless months;and put their differences aside ,in their common desire to survive.
The old adage of "strength throuh adversity is demonstrated over and over again.
An excellently constructed story that moves quickly and is engrosses the readerfrom the beginning to the end .

Paul Salsini's debut novel, "The Cielo," inspired by an episode in his Italian family's history, is a marvel of historical re-creation. The pleasure of an artistically satisfying novel is doubled when it also tells you about something you didn't know--in this case, fascinating detail about Italian resistance to German brutality in Tuscany in the summer of 1944.
With the war steadily running in the Allies' favor, German troops, including the Waffen-SS, turn increasingly vicious against Italian partisans and villagers who abet the partisans' actions against the Germans. Because of the growing danger, villagers of Sant'Antonio flee higher into the hills. For two months they remain there, awaiting the arrival of Allied troops as saviors, in a number of abandoned houses, one of which, built around 1500, is known as the Cielo.
Unified by peril, the villagers nevertheless do not lose their natural human quarrelsomeness. The 40-year wall of misunderstanding between chief characters Rosa Tomaselli and Annabella Sabbatini, built upon a feud over a young man (Annabella's future husband) when they were girls, does not fall--at least not right away.
Details of everyday contadini life are well rendered. Some are earthy, some are prim. Nice little individual scenes bring life to the story, such as the villagers' extending help to escaped British POWs--but only after they have deloused themselves.
Related to that is the scene in which they vote whether to hide a POW, an extremely dangerous act because of German reprisals. All vote to do so, except for Fausta (nicely named), a militant "fascist feminist," and a frightened old woman known as the Contessa.
There is a romance, sweet but believable, between a partisan and a village girl. Somehow we know that is not going to go well, just as we intuit the same when Annabella's no-longer-young husband decides to join the partisans.
Salsini's style is direct--not plain or spare, exactly, but direct, sometimes almost reportorial, perhaps the influence of his journalism background.
If any shortcomings are serious enough to merit mentioning, one is that the German characters are less rounded, less imaginatively drawn, than the Italians. Another is that infrequently extended dialogue sounds a bit like speechifying rather than colloquial speech.
But then I should also mention Father Luigi, the foe of Nazis. He joins novelist Giovannino Guareschi's Don Camillo, the foe of communists, as my other favorite Italian priest.

Five COMPELLING Stars!! The multiple-award-winning "The Cielo" by author Paul Salsini is outstanding historically-based fiction! Based on appalling true life events of World War II that occurred in August 1944 in and near the village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany Italy; the actual story was told to the author by his 80-year-old cousin who still lives there and also comes from extensive interviews of many who lived through these events. Indeed the author's family roots run deep in that area going back to author Salsini's grandfather who lived there over 100 years ago. The story recounts how the inhabitants of Sant'Antonio, when forced to flee their homes, which were taken over by the Nazi occupation forces, fled to abandoned farm houses in the steep hills beyond the town instead of taking the Nazi trains to almost certain death. Caught between activities of the Nazis, the underground, and Allied forces, they had to endure many trials while hoping for an eventual Allied victory against the forces of Benito Mussolini and Hitler. With a lively, vivid group of memorable characters, the author builds the story of survival by the refugees and their neighbors living by their wits and inner strengths, as internal confrontations and local difficulties erupt while the war around them increases in activity. A wonderfully written, captivating novel, based on historical fact that gets My Highest Recommendation. Five ENGROSSING Stars!!
(This review is based on a Kindle download in Mac, iPhone, and Kindle text-to-speech modes.
The author has written two additional novels which form a trilogy based on both this time period and the future: Sparrow's Revenge: A Novel of Postwar Tuscany and Dino's Story: A Novel of 1960s Tuscany.)

Paul Salsini, drawing on an Italian landscape he knows well, has written a exciting and gripping novel of World War II in which Hitler's soldiers vie with hostile Italian villagers. The characters are vivid, the situations realistic, and the story moves along rapidly. I believe this is Mr. Salsini's first novel after a lifetime of writing. He has grasped the form of the novel magnificently and I await future novels from his pen.

This is a gripping but flawed story of the impact of war on a group of Italian villagers in, Tuscany in 1943 - 45. It is a fascinating place and time. The effect of World War II on Italian civilians (and on Italian-Americans) was complex. Mussolini had entered the war on the side of Germany; when he was overthrown the government officially joined the Allies; the Germans massacred many Italians; communists, Camorra and Mafiosi took various roles; the Pope stayed in Rome. The author has a firsthand knowledge of these issues, has done his research, and shows great skills in scene setting and building up suspense.
The story is told MPOV with an occasional omniscient narrator interrupting with exposition. It is a difficult technique when there is a large cast of characters. Tolstoy got away with it in War and Peace.
A major problem was with the dialog. Here again Salsini has imposed a difficulty on himself. He has constructed a narrative where the characters are speaking a foreign language. This causes the dilemma of the translator, with an absence of the humor and wit and colloquialisms that enliven everyday speech. A jarring note is that the characters supposedly speaking in Italian interject a "buonasera' or "o dio" into their speech. In the opening scene, which should be suspenseful, we have German soldiers, speaking Italian, with a "raus" here and there, and then speaking to each other. Colin Richards is given a "bloke" or "blimey" to indicate what he is speaking.
. Santini is a talented writer who is wasting those talents on mere fiction for the pastime of a leisure hour.. He has a deep understanding of the people and times of which he writes, but he has been led astray by the cacoethes scribendi, succumbing to the urge to be a novelist. The events that he describes at Sant' Anna are trivialized by being represented as fiction; they become mere splatterpunk and the reader is allowed to put the book down, distancing himself from the narrative with the comforting thought that this is nothing but a story. Salsini apparently plans another novel on the subject. I think non-fiction would be more interesting and indeed is his necessary moral duty..