The earthly experience of Carlo Carretto (1910-1988) is fascinating, because it was an intense, multifaceted life full of opposites. Already president of the Italian Youth of Catholic Action, after years of apostolic and social commitment, he received the habit of the Little Brothers of Jesus by Charles de Foucauld, on Christmas Day 1954, and joined a community of about twenty novices in the west of Algeria, in El-Abiodh-Sidi-Cheikh, near the Saharan desert. The need for silence, essentiality and the Word characterized that intense period. The lyrics of Diary in the desert by Carlo Carretto, republished here more than thirty years after the first edition, are the clear and sober reflection of the presence of the Holy Spirit in his soul as a novice and of how crucial that year of formation in religious life in despoiling was for him austere desert. The fruitfulness of the ministry of the Word was precisely the fruit of that renunciation of himself and earthly things, in obedience to his vocation following Brother Charles de Jésus, a path of which this volume is the faithful echo.