Fam,fum,frecc il grande romanzo degli spazzacamini

In the great novel of emigration, for centuries the primary resource of many Alpine valleys, very painful pages were written by chimney sweeps, whose phenomenon characterized the poorest of these lands, where the majority of families, in order to take away a few mouths from miserable daily living, they were forced, until the threshold of the 1950s, to "rent" one or more children to their "owners" during the winter months, when in their villages in the mountains there was not even the slightest possibility of work. These, unscrupulous old chimney sweepers, most of the time cruel and inhuman, hardened by similar experiences, took them with them for the "season to the assa", in the foggy plains of Piedmont and Lombardy, subjecting them to an exploitation that had no equal in the world of child labor in our Alps. The child, given his small stature which allowed him to enter chimneys where adults did not enter, represented the raw material, the "sine qua non" condition for the exercise of the trade . How many of these poor Bocias have spent their six or seven years in the hell of the fog, amidst oppression, suffering, hunger, smoke and cold! How many of them never returned to their mountains! The figure of the child who, with his face covered in soot and tools on his shoulder, wanders ragged and hungry from town to town, from district to district, shouting: "chimney sweeper", begging for a plate of soup and a crust of bread, is now legacy of the popular imagination, of a literature that is often too holographic or superficial, but above all it is an integral part of the history of the Aosta Valley, the Cannobina Valley, the Vigezzo Valley, the Orco Valley, the Non Valley, the Verzasca Valley and the Ticino Centovalli, once very poor lands, where the phenomenon took on mass dimensions. This notebook retraces the hallucinating novel of the chimney sweeps of the Western Alps, from the first emigrations of 1500 to foreign lands to the great exodus of minors in the plains of Northern Italy at the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, through the documents, interviews and testimonies that required the The author has years of passionate research.