The third volume is set in the modern era and tells of the journey that Angela’s daughter begins, inside and out, by virtue of the legacy of the mysterious words spoken by her dying mother. Virgilia seems to be zigzagging at random, with real incursions, in the dialogues and in the life of the people of the Pollino slopes and of the Sarmentum valley, in childhood memories as in worldwide and spiritual latitudes, in search of communicating doors between her mother’s life and another dimension glimpsed in visions to which she seeks confirmation and to which, at the same time, she is unable to give defined outlines. The feeling that guides her warns her against a recurring dream. Virgilia’s torment arises from the seduction of total harmony, from her inaction in the material and spiritual life, from the lack of certainty of the fidelity of her loved one and from something that comes from much further away and that has to do with disconcerting mental images. The end is not new to her but … plays with the lights and shadows of the timeless, abysmal, blinding, irrepressible, inimitable and shadowless love that inhabits Virgilia and tears her without respite, since time immemorial, with rebus, needles and thorns interspersed to crucibles of brilliance that come from sidereal abysses, perhaps fatal. This novel is actuality and legend, reality and dream and the tormenting expectation of something that seems unobtainable, because it lives in that indefinable indefinite place that digs in her soul caves full of pain and joy similarly lacerating. It is a challenge for readers, a gymnasium between contrasting sensations and pages that seem random, in which, like the paw of the lion, fiction and poetry mix, metaphors flash and ignite questions about equally shattering spurs and balms. Reading rises and falls, in the mind, heart and breath, as hives of questions chase each other. What is Virgilia really looking for? What affects her soul and pushes her to cross geographical and mental boundaries? Where do the unfathomable mysteries of unacknowledged torment arise? What alchemy pushes her to merge with mountains and skies and to chase the end that the reader does not expect?
