In Cesare Pavese's last novel, The Moon and the Bonfires (Italian: La luna e i falò), the following passage can be found:
Translated from Italian.
"
[...]
"No," said Nuto, "if I'd gone there, they'd have burnt my house down."
On the bank of the Salto, Nuto had kept a wounded partisan hidden in a burrow and brought him food by night. His mother had told me. I believed it. It was Nuto. Only yesterday, out in the street, he had come across two boys tormenting a lizard, and he had taken the lizard from them. Twenty years go by for everyone.
"If Signor Matteo had done the same to us when we used to go down to the bank," I'd said to him, "what would you have said? How many nests did you raid back then?"
"That's the sort of thing ignorant people do," he'd said. "We were both in the wrong. Let the animals live. They suffer enough of their own in winter."
"I'm not saying anything. You're right."
"And besides, it starts like that and ends with people slitting each other's throats and burning villages."
[...]
"
This book was published in the spring of 1950.
Cesare Pavese (9 September 1908 to 27 August 1950) was an Italian novelist. He is considered one of the most influential Italian writers of his time.
