A literary tour through the village streets. Vitali is your exceptional guide.

A literary tour through the village streets with Andrea Vitali . The writer will meet tomorrow at 9 pm at the Parco delle Rimembranze in Bellano with " Places Are Real ." In Vitali's books, the cluster of houses nestled around a small square on the Lecco shore of Lake Como is as much a protagonist as the characters. In all of Vitali's novels, the seamstress, the provost, the sergeant, the mechanic, the mayor, the teacher, the party secretary, the doctor, and the milliner inevitably cross paths after the first two or three chapters. The problems come to a head in the cemetery or in the retirement home, on the Savoia ferry that shuttles daily between the towns along the lake, or in the Carabinieri barracks.

The author of these "choral" novels is a doctor who has heard a fair amount of stories in his thirty-plus-year career. Because it seems that, when you have to describe an ailment, you can't resist the temptation to offer an explanation, even while sitting across from the doctor awaiting a diagnosis. And between one chat and another, a prescription and a wish for a speedy recovery, Vitali has collected an archive of tics, anecdotes, and expressions useful for defining the carousel of characters who inhabit the town where he was born and which he knows like the back of his hand. Tomorrow, Vitali himself will lead the tour of Bellano, where " places are real ."

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