Best known for his poetry, Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale was also an elegant and incisive prose writer whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. This is a collection of fifty pieces whose distilled language, sprightliness, and subtle irony defy the limits of traditional short stories. This represents a sort of autobiographical novel, albeit in fragmented form. It offers occasions for reflection and sudden flashes into the author’s inner dialogues, evoking people, objects, and animals dear to him while simultaneously shedding light on the social, cultural, and political events of the times. Divided into four parts, the book begins with Montale’s childhood and youth in Liguria; the second and third parts reveal aspects of his adult life in Florence and travels abroad, both before and after World War II; the fourth section is devoted to his final years in Milan.