“The Langhe is not lost,” confides the cousin of The Southern Seas as he climbs the hill of Moncucco, a vantage point in Santo Stefano Belbo overlooking the entire Belbo Valley. “We walk one evening on a hillside in silence. In the shadows of late twilight my cousin is a giant dressed in white, moving placidly, tanned in face, silent. Silence is our virtue. From the summit one can see on clear nights the reflection of the distant beacon of Turin.” The lighthouse in the distance is the Winged Victory holding an intermittent lamp (18 1/2 feet high) with an epigraph by Gabriele D’Annunzio, a gift from Giovanni Agnelli in 1928, just before the poem that opens the collection of Tired Work. From Moncucco, the view of the area is 360 degrees, and even clearer and sharper is the geography of Santo Stefano Belbo, a large town at the bottom of the valley, where the extreme foothills of the Langhe border the first hills of Monferrato.
