Among today’s novelists, Righetto makes consistent use of the setting in his stories and its effects on the lives of the protagonists. His first novels, Savanna Padana and Bacchiglione Blues, were followed by the publication between 2013 and 2017 of four novels that form a sort of alpine tetralogy in which couples of men and women take inspiration from nature as they discover its power to transform them, sometimes by restoration, sometimes by reverie, and sometimes by posing a challenge, as in the story of Pietro Stieff and his son Domenico portrayed in The Bear Skin, adapted for the film of the same name directed by Marco Segato and with Marco Paolini in the main role, described as a “Dolomite western”. Two other novels are Apri gli occhi, the story of Luigi and Francesca who during a mountain hike relive the memory of a long-past love affair, and Dove porta la neve, the story of a friendship between Nicola and Carlo, two men who share the need to escape loneliness and leave the city on a snowy Christmas night, drawn by the magnetic attraction of mountain summits. Finally, the forthcoming The Soul of the Frontier, a coming of age tale set in the late 19th century about the families of the upper Val Brenta who cultivated tobacco for making the Nostrano del Brenta cigars: Augusto and his daughter Jole face danger as they smuggle unused tobacco across the border into Austria.
