We’re excited to share with you today an excerpt from the autobiographical writings of the award-winning poet and writer, Franca Mancinelli, translated from the Italian by John Taylor. Inside the Horizon of Hills evokes her hometown of Fano, on the Adriatic coast, where she was born in 1981, and its immediate hinterland.

Her poetic prose will transport you into the world of her childhood behind the sea of hills that hide family secrets: “It is precisely here that the madness begins, all the deeper and more radical as the distance from the sea increases.” Tell us what you think using @TranslateMonth and #TranslationMonth!

Click here to read Inside a Horizon of Hills by Franca Mancinelli
Translated from the Italian by John Taylor

—Claudia Serea and Loren Kleinman