Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

for the Italians his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age. As a young man of letters Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Bitter struggles took place between Germans and partisans in this area.

He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.