From the introduction: Rodolfo A. Pelvoux (1889 - 1938?) first appears in Turin in the last months of 1918, after spending the war years in "rambling travels", as he will write in one of his own diaries in the following years. After a short time as a guest in some friend's home on the Turin Hill, he buys and furnishes a small independent house in a street by Corso Massimo D'Azeglio, a few hundred yards from the Valentino Park; here he makes his home, with a pair of servants (Filiberto Barba, gardener and handyman and his wife Giuseppina, cook and maid) and soon the place is famous with the neigbours for the loud music - american jazz during social evenings, or more frequently, opera - that a gramophone by a window on the first floor plays on summer evenings.