DOVE sono Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom e Charley, Il debole della volontà, la forza del braccio, il clown, il boozer, il combattente? Tutti, tutti, dormono sulla collina.

You don’t recognize those famous lines from Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology?”

You would if you lived in Italy, where the man and his work have been studied and admired for generations. That passion was the main reason that an Italian film crew spent several months during 2014 in Masters’ old haunts of Petersburg and Lewistown, filming a documentary that featured residents of both communities reading portions of the anthology, a collection of epitaphs spoken by residents of the fictional town of Spoon River.