Reading time: 3 minutes

Read and listen to the story "The Bricklayer of Valtellina" by Gianni Rodari

Indice dei contenuti

Summary

Hello friends and dear friends from your Francesca Ruberto

Giovanni Francesco Rodari, known as Gianni[1] (pronounced Rodàri, /roˈdari/; Omegna, 23 October 1920 – Rome, 14 April 1980), was an Italian writer, pedagogist, journalist and poet. He is the only Italian writer to have won the Hans Christian Andersen Prize (1970). (read again)

Today I'm reading you this fairy tale from a book "Tales on the phone" by Gianni Rodari

Let's read together

A young man from Valtellina, unable to find work at home, emigrated to Germany, and it was precisely in Berlin that he found a job on a construction site as a bricklayer. Mario – that was the young man's name – was very happy about it: he worked hard, ate little, and what he earned he put aside to get married.

One day however, while the foundations of a new building were being laid, a bridge collapsed, Mario
he fell into the reinforced concrete casting, died, and his body could not be recovered.

Mario was dead, but he felt no pain. He was closed in one of the pillars of the house under construction, and there
it was a little tight, but other than that he thought and felt as before. When he got used to his new situation, he could even open his eyes and look at the house growing around him.

It was just as if he were the one bearing the weight of the new building, and this compensated for the sadness of no longer being able to give news of himself at home, to his poor fiancée.

Hidden in the wall, in the heart of the wall, no one could see it or even suspect it was there, but Mario didn't care.

The house grew to the roof, doors and windows were put in their place, apartments were bought and sold, and peopled with furniture, and finally many families came to live there.

Mario knew them all, from adults to children. When the children pawed on the floor, studying their first steps, they tickled his hand.

When the girls went out onto the balconies or looked out the windows to watch their lovers pass by, Mario felt the soft rustle of their blond hair against his cheek.

In the evening he heard the conversations of the families gathered around the table, at night the coughs of the sick, before dawn the trill of the alarm clock of a baker who was the first to get up.

The life of the house was Mario's life, the joys of the house, floor by floor, and its pains, room by room, were its joys and its pains.

And then one day war broke out. The bombings of the whole city and Mario began
he felt that the end was approaching for him too.

A bomb hit the house and brought it down. All that remained was a shapeless pile of rubble, of broken furniture, of crushed furnishings under which women and children caught in their sleep slept forever.

It was only then that Mario really died, because the house born of his sacrifice was dead.