“There has always been a turtle in my life”

Bianca Pitzorno is a writer who loves the world of fairy tales and fantasy. He has always told individual stories and experiences, through metaphors. Naturally, the autobiography entitled " A chi esmeraldi ea chi rane " (Bompiani, 2023, pp. 264) in which the author from Sassari retraces the events of her life through the many animals that have made her part .

«As far back as I can go in my memory, there has always been a turtle in my life» writes Bianca Pitzorno not by chance and alongside the turtles there are mice, dogs, but also animals from the post-war Sardinian countryside, the years of childhood of the writer.

This connection with the animal world emerges naturally in Pitzorno's pages, as an integral part of existence itself. Let's stop and think: from the birds in whose flight the ancients scrutinized the future or from the wild animals that Dante encounters venturing through the dark forest at the beginning of the Comedy, animals are fascinating allegories of our life , but «in their large family to which we too we belong to humans, there are those who feel most similar to us", writes Bianca Pitzorno.

And it is precisely a feeling of profound affinity that runs through the pages of the book. An affinity that has its roots in the land where the writer was born and raised, in a Sardinia where countryside and city, land and sea were still a continuum and a curious little girl could walk in the square at the time of the rutting accompanied by the mallard Quaquarone, keeping the turtle Andrea under the school desk or hatching a canary egg under the armpit convinced that a chick will be born.

“To Whom Emeralds and Whom Frogs” does not, however, stop at the Sassari countryside, but follows its human protagonist during her university years in Cagliari, in those of Milan – where mice and bats are replaced by felines capable of answering the telephone and frogs with a wonderful emerald green color - and on trips to more or less distant countries where you encounter French vipers, Eritrean chickens, Cuban crocodiles.

In the story all the author's sensitivity emerges in relating and empathizing with the colours, habits and mysterious languages of the crowd of creatures with whom she lives incredible adventures, as if Bianca Pitzorno considered herself "an extraterrestrial on par" eager to make friends with the true inhabitants of the planet on which he finds hospitality.

"To Whom Emeralds and Whom Frogs" reveals itself, then, to be a non-conformist and anti-rhetorical autobiography , moving and hilarious which makes us reflect deeply on our human beings.

A delightful volume, a reflection of Bianca Pitzorno's long life and in which, in the background, it is easy to find the changes in Italian society in recent decades.