GenevaBookClub: Small town of Santo Stefano Belbo, in Piedmont, north-west Italy. The main character, known only by his nickname of Anguilla (Eel), has returned to his home town in the years immediately following the Second World War. He left twenty-five years earlier and had made his fortune in the United States. Returning to his home town, he finds many of the same smells and sights that filled his youth, but he also finds a town and its inhabitants that have been deeply changed by war and by the passage of time. “You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you”. The rhythm of rural life and of nature – inexorable despite human efforts The “recherche” of roots. The physical and moral destruction caused by the war (resistance civil war in Italy)