A two-day trip with one of my dearest friends. An escapade in Monferrato, in Piedmont, in northern Italy. A land that I have crossed countless times during my travels to the Langhe, the region where my brother lives with his family. Monferrato is a beautiful land. Sweet hills that spread out in wide, clean, airy spaces. An agricultural, hard-working land of good food and good wine. What remains most impressed in my memory of that trip, however, is the widespread feeling of silence permeated by everything. Houses with closed windows, empty streets, churches with bolted portals, very few cars crossed: the silence of this place is the silence of the abandonment, of the escape, of a life once present and now only the trace of a faded memory. Walking at sunset through the narrow streets of Villadeati, I felt myself immersed in the atmosphere of the tale The personal city by Dino Buzzati. Visitor of the city inhabited only by the protagonist, at sunset I was afraid, and I preferred to leave, before darkness fell, before finding myself confronted with my personal solitude. Many villages of the Monferrato tend to be depopulated. People move to larger, better-served centers. The elderly remain, there are those who still have an activity, there are those who have not yet had the chance or decided to leave. What remains is the melancholy, the feeling of abandonment, the stifled voice of a life now transferred elsewhere.