Title: Pilgrim in the trail of faraway roots’ footsteps, the author draws countless maps, with her own footsteps, from the Indus valley to Anatolia, from Troad to Siritide, from the enotria finds of the ancient Monte Chiaro, lapped by the waters of the Sinni river, to the dormant riches of archaeological finds, still waiting in ancient Noia’s maternal territory bowels along the Sarmentum banks. Finally, she reaches up to mount Pollino’s populations antique beliefs, in which the laid out table was surrounded by kneeling Angels who prayed so no one would choke by swallowing with hunger the food, “God’s grace”, the fruit of hardships and of precious undisputed and constant solidarity exchange.

Genre: This is a literary work in four interconnected yet autonomous volumes. It was born not precisely only from the literary genius and imagination, as the author pursued the call of ancient languages, such as the local vernacular, the Turkish language and even the Urdu one, to seek the distant shadow of the kinship that the passage of each population leaves in the environment as in the remote glottological folds. It resonates with exotic Italic typicality, while looking at myth and protohistory, in the volumes Eliade and Egea, at history, in the volume *Angela (Gli eredi dei Messapi), and at cathartic analysis, in the meditating existential research of the Virgilia (Gli eredi del cavaliere che volle erba per sette cavalli) volume and in its troubled technological time. This literary work wants to steal ancient cultures from oblivion and propose them to those who pursue the search and recovery of roots and identities in continuous flight in the face of the indiscriminate attack of looming social turning points whose overlapping the past did not see in millennia and of events that threaten human survival.

Style: The refined, emotional, dreamy, lyrical and quality style of this author’s other works, here becomes high literature inhabited by a strong epos, which breaks into human soul’s movements wise analysis and fragments into irrepressible “gattopardiano” fatalism. The language, faithful to the literary, historical and narrative plot, does not fall into the dissonant entropy in which the Homeric characters would make one shudder, if they would paraphrase the contemporary media characters. The target of this work is universal, since universal is its message: human beings must look to the past, because only knowing who they have been can they understand who they are and plan who they will be or, better, “who they want to become”.

Contents / message: Between two rivers is the Sarmentum valley, which has given homes, pastures, hunting territories and abundant provisions of all kinds to the lineage of the Sarmentan Messapians, who have chosen it in memory of the valley where other two rivers framed the mythical Troy. This work immortalizes, in volume 1, the life and traditions of the communities clinging to the buttresses of the Lucanian Mount Pollino, revealing, through the epic love of two characters of the twentieth century, their remote and immediate identity and overshadowing the design of a protohistoric “dacanting”. In volume 2, it reveals the secret of the warriors who came to the mountains with boats and oars on horses worthy of the king of the gods and tells of the first Messapian-Sarmentan king, his legendary wife and their fatal love. It fulfills the cathartic introspection of all the sections in the physical and ascetic journeys of the tormented protagonist of volume 3. It tells, in volume 4, the legendary story of the great queen whose destiny flung her scepter between Messapians and Iapigians; describes her dramatic connection with the great warrior who asked grass for seven horses and reveals the ramifications and the conclusion of Messapian history.