Pitico, a family nickname for Hermes Ayres Azevedo (1881-1959), is a historian passionate about his small town in the countryside. A reader of letters and documents from his province’s past, he gleans from the handwriting the emotion, feeling, culture, obscure and tragic forces, and sensibility of those who left these records behind. Pitico reads, studies, deciphers, and carefully examines the particular configurations of what is shifting and unstable, following the rhythm of time gone by in that small town. For in these accumulated trajectories, in these handwritings, in these lines written in letters, in these documents invisible to human eyes, lie hidden the deep causes from which spring all the forces behind the contradictions, formations, and settlement of this small place.