Luino and Lake Maggiore are the scenario in which many of the events of Piero Chiara's novels take place.
They are the theatre of an action in which the public takes part and comments on it.
The places, the real characters and their social condition, transformed by the narrative setting ability of the author in the fiction of the novel become picaresque metaphors - sorrowful or ironic - of the human condition.
This certainly seems to be present in the passage which follows, taken from Il piatto piange.
The story, which starts out from the impatience of who feels closed in between the lake and the mountains and looks for relief in gambling, closes with the description of the clumsy astuteness of who has become a little well-off by working abroad.
By placing rascally behaviour and need on the same plane, the narration begins with the desire to escape from existential malaise to then pass on to the description of the colour of the adventures of who has left, of the journeys abroad of the working class labourers to teach a craft, and it ends by taking account of the emigration of the valley people escaping from economic misery.
One gambled in those years, as one had always played, with assiduity and passion. Because there wasn't, there had never been in Luino another way without danger to vent avidity for money, disrespect towards others and, for the youngsters, the exuberance of their age and the joy of living. In the towns life is under the ashes. To live as youngsters would want one needs money. And there isn't very much of it around. So one plays to multiply it and one ends up by making playing an end, a mania in which you dissolve the boredom of the afternoons and the evenings.
You don't realize that at a stone's throw away, outside the windows, there's a lake and countryside. You stay tied to the tables, tight-lipped, and you don't even think about studying, or any type of profession, it could break that shackle which you curse and you adore, and a road is opened in the world to the person who on being born has found himself the water of the lake in front and the mountains behind, almost as if indicating that to get out of the town it's necessary to carry out a crossing or a climb, to make an effort, in other words, without knowing whether it's worth it.
Some who have rebelled or are urged on by need leave to work or to be roguish abroad, or at least outside those limits. The others continued to play, to study each other, to look at each other living. From time to time they find some new distortion of the dialect or they invent a nickname that will torment a family for two generations. They spend one season after another and wait for the return of those who have gone away so as to be able to listen to them when in a circle they talk at the Metropole or at the Caffè Clerici.
Perhaps the only benevolence the Luinese have between themselves is precisely that of listening to themselves in those stories and to accept them for real.
I remember when Monti, called "Tonchino", talked about his adventures in Indochina where on the roads, after the thunder storms, he used to jump over snakes. Lanfranchi when he talked about Paris where he had been a tailor, so much so that he still used to cut following the Parisian fashion of those times of his. And Carletto, called "Còdega" due to the excess flesh he had around his neck, when he described England and the mines where he had worked, or his brother Gianni when he talked about America which he had gone to as a ship's waiter.
On certain occasions someone no one knew or who only some old person remembered by name arrived from far away, perhaps from the Far East or Bolivia: he was immediately surrounded at the caf‚ and ended up by telling us, adding new places and new experiences to our curiosity. Those talks fed the dreams of those who would never have moved, and of the others who one day, without saying goodbye to anyone, would have taken the road of those mirages. One can say that where we were one got to know the world not in books or on maps but from the stories of those who had been outside the town and by way of their adventures. For us there was an England which was the England of Còdega, an America which was the America of his brother Gianni, an Indochina which was the Indochina of Tonchino. And two or three types of Paris: the one of Lanfranchi the tailor or the one of Carlo Rapazzini who had stayed there for ten years as a taxi driver. They were different views of things although more real than those which it was up to me to discover in books, or else going there in person. In Paris, I have to say, it was always very easy for me to find women, streets, the m‚tro and the boulevards of Lanfranchi or Rapazzini, while I had difficulty there in finding the things read or studied.
It was a kind of hereditariness because Luino is a land of emigrants. And even the women have a story of travels and adventures to tell. The Battaglia family, pioneers of the textile mechanical industry, even before the 1915-1918 war supplied weaving machines to Russia, Indochina, Persia and other countries. They used to send the machines but first they sent the master builders and bricklayers of Luino to build the factory. And as soon as the factory had been set up you had the arrival from Luino of the past mistresses at the loom, the warpers and the spoolers to teach the workers of the place. Women from Luino, from Voldomino and from Germignaga in this way went off into distant lands for years. And during the last war our soldiers who were in Smolensk or in other cities along the Don refound the places described to them in their childhood by their mothers and, sometimes, worker families who still remembered those women from Luino.
Then - and especially in the small towns of the valleys which come down towards Luino - there were the bricklayers, the whitewashers and the plasterers who for centuries had gone to France, Switzerland and Germany to work, following family itineraries. And so many cooks and waiters, almost all from the valleys of Dumenza, or Colmegna and Maccagno, who arrived as far as England. A few of these who returned with money and bought a restaurant or an hotel fitted it out with cutlery bearing the engraved name of the biggest, most important hotels of Europe. They had stolen with great patience, a little at a time, already with the idea of setting themselves up one day as their own bosses in the profession. [...]

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