He corresponded with Diderot and Rousseau, become a military strategist, and outstared Napoleon when the Emperor paid him a visit.ĭispensing truth and justice from wherever he might be, the Baron was friend to fruit thieves and noblemen alike.
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Free from the humdrum routine of an earthbound existence, the Baron had fantastic adventures with pirates, women and spies, and still had time to read, study, and ponder the deeper issues of the period. From the trees, Cosimo explained, he could see the earth more clearly. The Baron in the Trees is the wonderfully witty novel of Cosimo's unique arboreal existence.
Unlike other boys, Cosimo never came down. He climbed a tree, as boys that age are wont to do. In 1767, when he was twelve years old, a rebellious Italian nobleman, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, reacted against his father's authoritarianism and the injustice of being forced to eat macabre dishesbeheaded snails among themprepared by his diabolical sister Battista. In fact, Sean O'Faolain finds that the author "has something of the subjective response to nature of Pavese, and the hardness and innocence of Vittorini." Originally published by Einaudi in 1947.
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He sings sentimental songs and learns how to insult and to curse - but all the while he yearns to be one of the gang, "to go off with a band of young companions to whom he could show the place where spiders make their nests, or with whom he could have battles among the bamboos in the river-bed." How he joins the partisans and makes common cause with another "outcast"one of the strangest combinations since Of Mice and Menis part of the story but chiefly this is a tender-tough portrait of a boy living in a world he never made and never would have made and it is told with absolutely no sentimentalism. Pin therefore is "forced to take refuge in the world of grown-ups" in "the smoky violet air of the tavern," where he hears talk which he can imitateto get obscene laughterbut cannot understand. With the other boys who have families, he is an outcast: he has no family except a prostitute sister. Pin is a skinny kid who must keep his wits sharp in order to live. This is the story of Pin, the cobbler's apprentice, who grows up in one of the ancient fortress-towns of the Ligurian coast in the period of World War II when the partisans are fighting back from the hills, and German soldiers are quartered in the town.
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