The original introduction, the text that opens the fairy tale, in an English reading version

When a child is born, it takes a whole village to raise them. So they say somewhere in the world, and if that is true, then I am my son's village. Solomon J., at his birth, had many curious visitors, yet nobody truly stayed. And still, in a «city of dead dogs», as my friend Pamela describes it, a person capable of going to a funeral without managing to hide her euphoria, I learned the beauty of being a mother. It can be done, even when around a new life in symbiosis one breathes, at times, too much solitude.

As a little girl I was looked at many times with a gaze I could now call the portrait of desolation and dryness, yet back then I had not gathered enough sadness to decipher the message hidden in my mother's eyes. I took no pride in that code while I was learning it, because I was learning to read the sorrow of a people perhaps more invisible than invincible. Having done so now gives me a wider view of the world of women, and especially of those who are unloved, isolated, considered too much or too demanding.

Alongside them I had the honour of catching the particular enchantments of their children. Children sometimes born of loves defeated from the start, crumbled and scattered, yet children in the world with the same light as the others. Their lightness of heart, happily, keeps them from noticing the embarrassment in the barely hidden smiles that betray the hypocrisy of other parents, and from sensing how quietly inconvenient they are considered in the most ordinary experiences, the classic birthday invitations or the afternoons of play. And so they grow, trained and saved by the filter of the love of their mothers on their own, or rather: «Mamme Sole», though you will understand this later.

This is a story dedicated to humble, rooted people, and therefore to everyone whose spirit is still intact, because it takes a soul to read a story like this to a child. Little Solomon J. needed a mythology of the absent ones to learn the places where some grown-ups get lost, playing hide and seek with life. Through an incredible journey he will discover the nature and the truth of the figures that belong, irrevocably, to his path. He will understand that the maps his parents walked do not lead him to his own destiny.

Discovering that the only true mission of every child is, in the end, to pursue their own highest good will finally free him from a latent question that weighs like a boulder on his days: if I find dad, will he stay?

The story invites us to become solid bridges, mediators between reality and magic, bearers of enchantment who bring out the light shining in everyone. You will see that, deep down, truth is a story with two voices: one of them may stay untold, while the other may seem to you right and worth telling to children.

May beautiful thoughts carry us far.