The house consists of just two locals on the groundfloor level, at the entrance one gets directly into the kitchen/livinq quarters, then a door leads into the inner bedroom. No toilet, no running water, and only very recently a low-power bulb was hung to the ceiling. All over the walls, there are nails where the necessary tools of the afarmer's life were hung, and more tools are hanging from the ceiling. The giant fireplace (one man can stand into it) in one corner was the center of all family life, with a pot always boiling, all the meals were made there, prepared on the table in front, and consumed there. Nothing was thrown away, the ashes and all the cooking waste were collected in a bucket and brought to the fields to be used as fertilizers.
The bedroom is almost bare: a double bed, where all five members of the family slept: the parents at the head, the three children curled at the foot. Near the window, a wooden cradle. Under the bed, a wooden case where clothes were kept. Behind a curtain in a corner, the most precious property, two precious to be left in an outer stable where someone could steal it: the family donkey, whose breath heated the room and whose dumping was picked up in the morning to be used as fertilizers.
How was life for them? Before the sun rose, all the members able to work went down to the fields with the donkey; the mother stayed with the little ones, to care after the house, cook, wash, clean, sweep the ancient floor. The family would come back after sunset a life that was poetically described as "dalle stelle alle stelle" - from stars to stars. No wonder, that the mirage of a better life, far away across the Atlantic, beamed as a promised land in the imagination of the young men and women, at the turn of the 19th century, to find, often, only more hardships. Now, when their 2nd and 3rd generation descendants come back for the first time to Italy, and see the abandoned villages and old houses, they can feel inside themselves the reply to why they left, why they abandoned such a beautiful land. They did not go for themselves, but for the future of their children, and grandchildren.