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This chapter discusses Sebastiano Vassalli's historical novel, The Chimera, which is set in a rural Piedmont village in the seventeenth century. In the work excerpted here, the ever-present fog clouding the Padania landscape parallels the clouding of anthropological memory. The writer, as a time traveler and investigative archeologist, must first of all unearth history or better his story: the story of Antonia, the “witch of Zardino,” resurrected by its late twentieth-century chronicler. Vassalli provides an indirect explanation here for his own later development into a maker of historical fictions accessible to a much wider readership: “I asked myself what on earth can help us to understand the things of the present unless they are in the present? Then it dawned on me. Looking out over this landscape, the nothingness of it, it came to me that in the present there is no story worth telling. The present is hubbub.”
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