Southern Italy, Naples 

Ann Cornelisen is a born storyteller, a caster of spells. For several years she lived south of Naples in the medieval town she calls Torregreca, shared its honeycombed life, came to know its people in all their vitality and strangeness. Now, in this vivid, humane, and unvarnished account, she tells of her experiences in setting up a nursery there, and of the town and its people - shepherds and shopkeepers, peasants and padroni, Christian Democrats and Communists, the Bishop in his palace, nuns in their convent, aristocratic ladies in their salons, black-shawled mothers, grandmothers, and children crowded into one-room hovels along with the family livestock - all, rich and poor alike, fiercely alive.

The art of the storyteller draws us irresistibly on; we listen with Miss Cornelisen to the Torresi talking to her of themselves, stories within stories leading on to other stories, moving back and forth through time, robust, touching, sometimes appalling. We come to know the town as it was under Fascism, and during the war; the days of outrage, in 1945, when the peasants, long held down, break loose in an orgy of violence; and so back to the present with its schemes and conflicts brought into play by the establishment of the nursery. Miss Cornelisen was an American, Protestant, independent-minded woman in a male-dominated, Catholic, tradition-bound Italian town, yet she triumphed magnificently over differences.

Torregreca, as a book (and as a town) exists on several contrasting levels: past and present; the individual life as it alters from day to day, and the unalterable elements of Torregrecan existence - supersition, poverty and prejudice on the one hand, and on the other a passionate, transcendent determination to live. The sense of life permeates this book. It is an uncommon achievement - a valuable social document, and a work of art.

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Ann Cornelisen was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926. She was educated at the Girs Latin School of Chicago, the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and at Vasser (class of 1948). In 1954, she went to Florence intending to study archaeology; instead, she became interested in the Save the Children fund, and went to work on a semi-volunteer basis for that British-sponsored charitable agency. For the next ten years she helped to set up nursery centers in the mountainous, impoverished regions of Southern Italy, a experience that provides the point of departure for Torregreca. At the present time she lives in an apartment at the top of an ancient palazzo in Rome, and is at work on a second book.

Taken from the inside flaps.

"Miss Ann Cornelisen, who spend years in darkest Lucania, undoubtedly knows more about the mores and mentality of those forgotten villages than any Italian from other parts, with the exception of Carlo Levi. An important difference should be pointed out, however. Levi was exiled there by the police; she exiled herself in the hope of helping the people. Maybe her best contribution to their welfare is this book, this compassionate and humorous effort to understand them." - Luigi Barzini

Taken from the back cover.

Illustrated with photographs by the author.