[ book tip by cinzia sarro ] Red hair never seen in family portraits, hard as horsehair and curled like raw wool, stamped Costanza’s life. She was a marchesa the last heiress of the Safamita, a Sicilian line of barons. In a miserable cave of the Montagnazza where they were confined, the wet-nurse Amalia Cuffaro recounts this story to her niece Pinuzza. She does this while combing Pinuzza’s hair, thus repeating a rite that was long reserved for the Marchesa.  Costanza was unlike her two brothers; the favourites of their mother. And yet their father Baron Domenico disowned them for unworthy behaviour. Thanks to this decision of Domenico the luck and misfortune of the Safamita now weighed upon the lone female child. She was forced to abandon the quiet and resigned life of pastoral rhythm for urban life in Palermo. There she was compelled to assume aristocratic obligations, this entailed a husband. Costanza’s choice, the Marchese Pietro Patella di Sabbiamena, was a man viewed suspiciously by her father. The marriage based upon Pietro’s avarice constrained him to daily confrontation with a female type that repelled him. Costanza was far from the sensual and accommodating figures with which he had been familiar. The rejection that followed amplified Costanza’s conflictual sexuality.  The Marchesa is a story of discontinuity, in both the characters of its protagonists and the trauma of nineteenth-century modernisation in Sicily marked by the waning of the ethos of nobility and the concurrent disintegration of mental and material structures. Simonetta Agnello Hornby exemplifies this in her story of the romantic demise of a grand aristocratic family. There might not have been a place for the Mafia on that Island suspended between loyalties, its history and national cynicism.

[ book info ] Agnello Hornby, Simonetta: The Marchesa. (Book language: Italian) Trans.: Alastair McEwen. Penguin, London, 2007 . ISBN: 9780141023700 .