The sound was not a lovely one. Down a village lane on a cold winter afternoon, somewhere in the flat country of the Po, a low, droning, cavernous groan would rise, closer to the grunt of an animal than to anything you would call music.
Yet, every child in the parish knew at once what it meant: the torototela had come to town. To be truthful, the noise was half the fun: it announced, better than any bell, that the traveling man with the strange instrument and the stranger stories had arrived, and that the long grey monotony of a farming winter was about to be broken.
