«[...] How to call them? Images of the sun? Historians call them suns and say that they appeared two or three at a time.

The Greeks call them parhelia because they are generally seen near the Sun or because they are characterized by some resemblance to the sun.

In fact they do not reproduce all the peculiarities of the sun, but only its size and shape; after all, weak and evanescent, they have nothing of its warmth or its greatness.»

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(Lucio Anneo Seneca. Naturales Quaestiones, Libro I par. 11.2)

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Felice Pedroni was born in 1858 and, from his first breath, he was condemned to a life as a farmer in the rough mountains of the Apennines.

Fatherless, the last of six brothers, he emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty, perhaps to escape some trouble with the law.

There, in the promised land he worked for a long time as a laborer, then as a miner, and finally decided to try his luck along the arduous paths of the Great North.

After months of attempts and privations, on July 22, 1902, he discovered a gold vein in the bottom of a stream in the Yukon basin (Alaska), later named Pedro Creek in his honor. Having obtained the state concession for gold mining, he became the president of the local mining district and founded, in his shack, what is now the second largest city in Alaska: Fairbanks.

A few years later, in unclear circumstances, he lost the concession of the mine and died in 1910, aged 52, poor, without ever having returned to his homeland.

The story of Felice Pedroni touches on countless social issues that are still relevant today.

This is a story that talks about emigration, integration, victories and failures, Nature, and blind determination.

The traces he left speak of a common history: a yearning for life that human beings are unable to free themselves from, despite everything.