These stories, along with more of Messina’s work, have gone unread by audiences outside of Italy because, even today, translating the literature of Italian women writers into English has rarely been regarded as important. Magistro’s informative Introduction and Afterword situate these beautiful stories historically and aesthetically, opening up possibilities for English readers to investigate what it meant to be a Sicilian woman in the early twentieth century. Magistro has thus rendered a great service by enhancing our understanding of the complexities of female life in Sicily. By taking us inside and beyond the women dressed in black who have for too long represented Sicilian women in literature, Maria Messina, with Magistro’s aid, has diversified the dominant portraits of this island and, in turn, helped to dispel one of the many myths of the Mediterranean.

Fred Gardaphé
Stony Brook University
April 2007

Introduction

Introduction

In the early twentieth century, Sicily was as deeply divided socially and economically as it had been for much of its long and painful history. While the island’s ancient wonders and the splendor of its capital city had made Sicily a de rigueur stop on an eighteenth-century Grand Tour, a fascination with Sicily’s rich past belied the appalling conditions in which most Sicilians had lived for centuries. Day laborers and peasants with negligible holdings accounted for more than three-quarters of the island’s inhabitants, many of whom worked small plots beyond their hillside towns. Others toiled on the vast latifondi (ex-feudal estates) of Sicily’s remote interior. For these impoverished peasants, life followed an immutable course, governed by the rhythms of the agricultural cycle and punctuated only by births, deaths, epidemics, and ritual celebrations. Bt the time of national unification in 1861, illiteracy on the island still hovered at a staggering 87 percent (Briggs 1978, 38), dropping only to 58 percent by 1911, numbers that were unparalleled elsewhere in Western Europe (Astorita 2005, 288).

The deep-rooted pessimism that permeated Sicily’s peasant class was the result of centuries of neglect and exploitation by foreign rulers. National unification offered guarded hope for meaningful change. Citizens of the new Italy residing in the north-central regions of the country were aware of the political divide that had long separated them from their southern neighbors. Few, however, had any realistic conception of the degree of Sicily’s backwardness or the desperation of its people. In four hundred years of Spanish Bourbon rule, the uncontested power of the land barons, coupled with the conspicuous absence of an educated middle class, had perpetuated southern poverty beyond any imaginable measure. Emissaries dispatched to the region after unification were shocked by what they considered the cultural and moral disparity between North and South, their prejudices evidenced in the discriminatory language of their official correspondence (Moe 1992).