Toni Allais

His childhood, first with his father as a traveling knife-grinder, then as a shepherd boy in service. Youth in the whirlwind of the Second World War and the Partisan Resistance. The risks of smuggling, the death penalty twice escaped at the last moment, the wound caused to a French gendarme, the trial and sentence to ten years of forced labor. The horrors of the prisons of the past and the abjections of the mental asylum criminal, the fortunate return as a free man and the difficult reintegration into society. A dramatic bureaucratic struggle to obtain the long-awaited street vendor license. The return to a free and wandering life among the most remote mountain villages of Piedmont and Valle d'Aosta. Above all, the great sense of humanity that pervades Toni Allais' story makes his autobiography one of the few spontaneous popular testimonies on the life of the Alpine people, before, during and after the last world war.