Dominic Smith on ‘Return to Valetto’
Return to Valetto (A&U, March) is Seattle-based Australian expat Dominic Smith’s sixth novel. Set in a fictional semi-abandoned Italian town, the book excavates the town’s mysteries and explores the lives of the people who still inhabit it. Reviewer Joanne Shiells highly recommends Return to Valetto, ‘full of rich imagery and captivating storytelling’, to Italophiles and anyone looking to be swept up in a character-driven drama. She spoke to the author.
What draws you to writing historical fiction?
Four of the six novels I’ve published have been rooted in the distant past and it’s my fascination with the gaps and silences of history that bring me back to these worlds.
Return to Valetto is a bit of an outlier: it’s set in 2011, but we’re drawn into a complicated family history and an excavation of one Italian town’s reckoning with itself over time. With this novel, I wanted to see how I could make history come alive without technically leaving the 21st century.
You grew up in Sydney but now live in Seattle. How are the cities the same and how are they different?
Both are built around water and are profoundly shaped by the vibrant immigrant cultures that have become part of each city’s identity. Both cities are built around thriving neighbourhoods, each with their own distinctive flavour.
The most tangible difference can be felt in the weather. When you’re this far north, the Pacific stays cold all year round and a bracing midsummer plunge is reserved for diehards and small children. Summer in Seattle is short and gloriously (and unusually) sunny; it’s also when I miss Sydney the most!
Following the bookseller support you received for The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, and now that borders have reopened, what plans do you have for promoting Return to Valetto in Australia?
It’s been wonderful to spend time again in Australia after several years of closed borders. My book tour in March will be my third trip back in the last 12 months and I’ll be doing events in Sydney, Melbourne, and at the Scone Literary Festival.
For your new novel, I’m presuming you had to spend time in Italy researching the setting and abandoned places. Can you describe this experience?
In 2018, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete research among Italy’s abandoned and semi-abandoned towns. I got to visit nearly a dozen small towns and villages all across Italy, including Civita di Bagnoregio, the hill town that became the basis for my fictional town of Valetto.
Civita was settled by the Etruscans more than 1000 years ago and in its heyday was home to about 3000 people. But in 1695, it suffered an enormous earthquake that cleaved about a third of the town into the surrounding valley. Ever since then, it’s been on the decline. When I visited, there were just 10 full-time residents living there and the only way in and out was on a footbridge resting on concrete piers. As I interviewed some of the residents, the question, ‘Who are the people that stay in these sorts of places despite all the odds?’ became the foundation for the novel.
Read Joanne Shiells’s review of Return to Valetto here.
