Sabja de Fek

Opening this book, a reader might wonder, Why a book about the Dolomites legends? Because... To answer this question is at the same time easy and very, very difficult, but perhaps the explanation can be condensed into just one word. Nostalgia. Nostalgia for that lost universe I always felt had existed long ago among those mountains, and which still exists now just in a few verses and stories-often confused and fragmentary, but no less fascinating because of this- and nostalgia for the bespectacled, insistent young girl I used to be in summers now long past when, armed with a pen and notebook, I pestered all the-more or less patient-Fassans who were unlucky enough to meet me, in order to get to know more from them. I wanted to know more about those stories I could feel still hovering on the peaks, in the valleys, in the local traditions and, at times, even in the geographical names; those same stories I later found in books by Wolff and a few other authors, such as Valentini, Garobbio and Lunelli, whose works, however, far from extinguishing my curiosity only fanned it all the more. Alas, more years than I care to count have gone by since those days, and in the meanwhile I have found other interesting books and learned studies about Ladinia; I have also discovered wonderful songs linked to the old traditions, but while my head was dutifully registering and classifying all those new data, down in my soul I kept harboring the heartbreaking feeling that something had been irretrievably lost, and that more keeps vanishing, washed away by the maelstrom of time. These are, perhaps, feelings and emotions fit only for a child, and as a matter of fact, I behaved just like I used to do as a child, when I would get to the end of a book I really loved with the feeling that there was more in it that I had not been able to capture and decipher: I told myself some of these stories-again, and my own way. Almost independently from my conscious will, as I went about this re-telling, the legendary elements in the stories intermingled with "learned" details coming from studies, readings and research, in tune with the long established habits of that curious young girl, now grown up and aged.