“The Sugana Valley”

“The Sugana Valley” is named as one of three old songs in Pietro’s family repertoire, carried from the mountains into the family’s life in Milan. Sung by his mother in the car and taken up by the others, it belongs to a form of inherited memory that joins public stories of the Great War to feelings the family does not explain directly.

Identity and setting

The book identifies “The Sugana Valley” as a song set in the mountains during the Great War. It appears alongside “The Troop Train” and “The Captain’s Testament” as part of a shared repertoire, rather than as a separately narrated performance with its own complete lyrics or plot. The evidence does not assign each of the stories described to a particular title, so the song’s place in the group is clearer than its individual narrative content.

The repertoire enters the story through ordinary journeys. The family makes long car trips for Pietro’s schooling, his mother’s work at a clinic, and his father’s work at a factory. On certain mornings, his mother begins a verse amid the traffic, and the others soon join in. The contrast is striking: songs rooted in wartime mountains accompany a family moving through the routines of Milan.

Stories carried in the repertoire

Taken together, the songs tell of departure, bereavement, and waiting. Twenty-seven men leave for the front and only five return. At the Piave, a cross marks the place of a mother who will eventually come looking for it. Elsewhere in the songs, a betrothed woman waits for a dying man, grows tired of waiting, and marries someone else; the man sends her a kiss and asks for a flower in return. These details establish the repertoire’s emotional terrain, though the text does not specify which song contains each episode.

The stories are familiar enough to Pietro that he knows them by heart. Their repetition makes inherited history part of his childhood, even though he has not lived the world from which his parents brought them. At home, the family still speaks the dialect of Veneto, which sounds to him like a secret language shared between his parents and an echo of a life that preceded his own.

Family memory and feeling

Pietro understands that his parents carried the songs from an earlier life, but he also senses that they speak to the two of them personally. That meaning is never made explicit. Instead, it registers in the emotion he hears in their voices as they sing. The songs therefore work on two levels: they recount wartime loss, and their performance hints at private feeling that remains outside ordinary explanation.

The scene gives the family’s past a voice without turning it into a full account. The mother starts; the rest of the family joins; and the old stories pass through the present-day car journey. Their shared singing briefly gathers the family around a history Pietro inherited but did not witness.

Place in the book’s memory motif

Elsewhere, memory becomes legible through material traces: Pietro studies his father’s densely marked mountain map, reflects on the glacier as a store of winters past, and finds his father’s words in a summit notebook. The songs offer a different kind of record. They preserve the past through language and repeated performance, while leaving the parents’ personal connection to that past partly unspoken.

“The Sugana Valley” thus belongs to the book’s broader account of how the previous generation remains present in the son’s life. Its significance lies not in a fully recounted individual lyric, but in its place within a family practice that carries mountain history, grief, and emotional inheritance into the Milanese present.