ABSTRACT
Zita Bernabovi died of old age after a simple life. At the age of twelve she had been taken as a maidservant into the house of the wool merchant Pagano Fatinelli in Lucca, where she remained for the rest of her life. 'Anthropology in the late twentieth century is no longer the "discovery" of terra nova or undescribed cultures, but rather a method of informed critique'. Nevertheless, anthropologists do engage in a retrieval which, by its methodology and its presentation, claims the authority which discovery also claims. Each significant relative for whom the informant has a particular responsibility or by whom he is particularly affected is the subject for a new short narrative. Here is the last narrative in the account of a man of sixty-two whose family during land reform had been categorized 'middle peasant'. Ethnography is by definition a writing which can be checked. It is like historiography.
