The House with the Blackbirds

Texts: Corrado Piccoli, Ettore Piccoli, Elena Piccoli, Aldo Piccoli, Miro Graziotin
Photo: Corrado Piccoli
Language: Italian
Format: Soft cover with flaps - 16.8x23 cm
184 pages
ISBN 9788831403764

The House with Blackbirds has been the epicenter of a hundred years of my family's life: a place of work, affection, and daily life. It has been uninhabited for some years and awaits a permanent transformation, but the desire to preserve its memory remains, and this book was born from the need to give meaning to time through words and images.

I began taking photographs to quell the feeling of loss and alienation that the place was beginning to instill in me. I then collected some old photographs and two stories written over the years by my father, Ettore Piccoli, some poems by my uncle Aldo Piccoli, including the one that gives the book its title, and a story by Elena Piccoli, Aldo's granddaughter, who never knew her grandfather except through his writings and what she was told by her family. The book concludes with an afterword by Miro Graziotin.

It's not about nostalgia. It's about identity, about recognizing, as Mario Luzi wrote, that we are what we remember.

Biographies

Miro Graziotin . Silandro (Bolzano) 1952.
A typographer and storyteller. He founded the Free University of Santo Stefano dei Ripetenti. He lives in Santo Stefano di Valdobbiadene (TV).

Aldo Piccoli. Conegliano (Treviso) 1928.
He lived for many years in Treviso where he taught literature at the Canova high school.  He died in Treviso in 1986. He published the collections of poems: Le umani misure (Rebellato, 1964), La luce equinoziale (Dell'Arco, 1969), Il filo della poesia (Rebellato, 1974), Il sonno e il sogno (Edizioni del Leone, 1984), Dalla parte dell'ombra (Edizioni del Leone, 1987). He also published two books of fiction, Suite furlana (Canova, 1978), La doppia vista e altre storie (Camunia, 1995), and a book of essays, Un po' più sotto (Canova, 1986).

Corrado Piccoli. Conegliano (Treviso) 1962.
A classical high school graduate, with a degree in engineering and a university degree in architecture. Since 1991, he has been working as a designer and, alongside his main career, as a professional photographer, specializing in architecture and landscape. He has collaborated with Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche for over 20 years, creating photographic campaigns on themes related to landscape and urban studies.

Elena Piccoli. Padua 1999.
With a high school diploma in Classics and a degree in Modern Philology, she teaches literature and has cultivated a passion for writing for years. She published the short novel Voglia di vincere (Montag, 2021) and has won several fiction competitions, including the Antonianum Literary Prize (24th and 25th editions), the 2024 Literary Excellence Award, and the first edition of the Ernani Prize.

Ettore Piccoli. Conegliano (Treviso) 1934.
After graduating in Architecture in Venice in 1961, he began his professional career with engineer Francesco Brunelli. He focused primarily on residential design and, since 1991, has been joined by his son Corrado. He retired after more than fifty years of practice. The two stories in this volume represent memories of life lived between the Second World War and the mid-1950s.