Al di qua del fiume

English introduction available

At the dawn of the 1800s, on the banks of the River Adda, the Crespi family achieved an ambitious feat: they founded Italy’s first worker village. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Hopes, drama, mystery, revenge, and love come together to form a grand historical fresco that encompasses fifty years of Italian history.

River Adda, 1877. Cristoforo Crespi sees a small triangle of land bounded by the river as the future and the chance his family needs to make an indelible mark upon this world. Thus, the son of a simple tengitt, a dyer, builds an avant-garde cotton mill and a village to house its workers. Italy has never seen such a thing: the village has its own church, school, and comfy homes with gardens. Cristoforo bets everything he has on this dream. His money, his reputation, and even his relationship with his brother Benigno, who has succumbed to the temptations of the high life in Milan and by the prestige of owning a newspaper. For Cristoforo, what matters most is to create something concrete and to change the life of his workers for the better.

Young Emilia’s life changes the day she moves into the new village. The daughter of one of Crespi’s most loyal workers and a woman tormented by dark premonitions, Emilia witnesses, from this side of the river, the creation of a self-sustaining world. She experiences the small and large events of Italian history: the 1989 bread riots, the First World War, the labor insurrections. But as fate would have it, her path soon crosses that of Silvio Crespi, heir to the company and to his father’s vision. Despite the socio-economic chasm that separates them, they develop a special relationship that stands the test of life and time.