This novel is considered to be Cesare Pavese's most personal. It's setting is the landscape of his own boyhood: the hills, vineyards, and villages of Piedmont. Three young men spend away their sun-drenched summer talking, drinking, enjoying life. One senses it is their last such summer. In view of its transience, the prolonged leisure of their new wealthy acquaintance Poli fascinates them. For a while they linger in his world, in his decaying villa, half-appalled by his cocaine addiction, his blasphemy, his corrupt circle of friends, but nonetheless mesmerized, until autumn creeps upon the hillside, and the seasonal moment of leave taking arrives. Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogenous narrative cycle of modern Italy.. They are works of extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings.""--Italo Calvino.