How does one explain The Village of Love other than to recognize it as the archetype from which all civilization arises? A village where everything seems broken, full of love and despair, is continuously mending itself and continuously in the throes of hypocrisy and sincerity at the same time. A village was lost and piled under heaps of centuries of social and familial inheritance, some good and some ignorant. In spite of all this, this village works, and all is as it should be: beautiful, while unifying and separating at the same time, whereby life meets death and death life, whereby women and men celebrate and suffer, depart and arrive, where dark and light, the moon and the stars, children, animals, air and water, marriage and religion, and all stated in this village exist side by side. Only love can be the cement that holds all these blocks together. Only love could allow such a village to endure. Only love. In this novel, Martino does what he does best as a writer. He weaves life and its events into a magical and surreal tapestry, into a hallucination that closely resembles the intangible effect that life leaves on someone trying to understand it. Written in magical realism, hyperbole, poetic flight, and superb craftsmanship, it is not only a writer's delight but a voyage for all readers wanting to capture the inner longing of the heart-the longing that wants to free itself from the cage of what has arisen from that village, the civilization of today-and in that freedom, discard all that is ugly, take all that is good, and fly into another domain of light upon light. The victory of the heart. It has been a very long time since writing of this magnitude and skill has come alive and manifested as a very fine and exceptional novel.