Wool of bat and lizard leg

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth.

Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living; shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers — mezzadri, ‘half-people’, handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts — eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground into flour, supplemented by an occasional thrush or dormouse.

Thin Paths is subtitled ‘Journeys in and around an Italian Mountain Village’, but as always with Blackburn, things are not straightforward, and its chapters trace other, more fugitive inner journeys. As she puts it in her epigraph, with a nod to Eliot and Proust, ‘It’s as if time past, time present and time future is stretched out around us like a vast landscape and we are walking through it on a tracery of thin paths.’

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In The Emperor’s Last Island Blackburn followed Napoleon to St Helena, exploring not only the place and its imperial prisoner’s last years but her own obsession. With Daisy Bates in the Desert her identification with her ambiguous subject became so strong that Daisy and Julia fused, leaving the reader not always sure whose inner turmoil was under scrutiny. In Liguria Blackburn catches the last survivors, some in their nineties, in time to hear echoes of a culture that is already a part of the past. At first speaking only a few words of Italian, struggling with the local dialect, she begins a notebook, writing down the names of neighbours, hearing their stories, increasingly drawn into their lives, being changed by them.