A bicycle, with three gears and good brakes, borrowed. A sketchbook and a pen in a small shoulder bag. Ready, go.

It's 1984. Corinna Sargood is in Puglia, in the Salento peninsula, at a farmhouse. From there, on that bike, she begins to pedal, discover and explore quarries and dry stone walls, pagghiari (summer houses) and liame (roofs, terraces), apiaries and farmyards, cisterns and wine presses, palaces and villas, and then, with that paper and pen, draw them.

This is how a small book is born, titled "Rustic Structures – Relics and Remains – An Illustrated Notebook from Apulia", which in Italian became the lengthy "A Bicycle Tour by a Famous English Illustrator Discovering Salento – Remains and Vestiges of Rural Civilization" (64 pages, 10 euros), translated by Aldo Magagnino and published by Congedo Editore in 2015 (and a copy miraculously appeared in a book crossing in Procida).

Sargood, a painter and illustrator, friend and collaborator of writer and journalist Angela Carter, describes places and spaces in words and drawings. "I pedaled through pine woods with a delightful fragrance, bouncing on dry needles, with sunlight filtering through, in patches, a transparent green", "Tuff is the fundamental material, forming their very discipline", "I wandered through the macchia – rocky fields on the cliff top – on a warm autumn day. Wild thyme and rosemary are in bloom", "In some places fire has crossed the ground, quickly burning only the thin and dry grass. Someone beat the flames with a mastic branch and now a black patina remains on the fields".

It's a romantic journey, a sentimental map, a surprised, curious, and sometimes naive bicycle ride, often cheerful, sometimes nostalgic. "I recorded what remains of a rural civilization within the limits of a bicycle ride. While joyfully drawing its structures, it was as if a melody took me back in time, to Magna Graecia". But if time is a tyrant, man is even more so, more easily inclined to destroy than to preserve. The English artist sounds the alarm: "The authorities of the Puglia Region have just chosen (1984) these places, half wild, half cultivated, as a site for a nuclear power plant, disregarding the past and present and imposing a new nightmare on the inhabitants". Calm down, Corinna: at least this didn't happen.