Following the consòlo, the house was closed up with windows shuttered for at least nine months. Grieving women were required to stay out of the public eye and many left the house only to attend early mass, generally at five a.m. Peasant and poorer women were allowed some degree of latitude in this regard since leaving the house to procure food, draw water, and launder clothing at the stream or riverbed was viewed as unavoidable. Custom demanded that children dress in gray, brown, or dark blue, while females who had come of age donned black for specified lengths of time, depending on their relation to the deceased. Generally speaking, strict mourning (il lutto stretto) lasted one to two years, though most widows chose to wear black permanently.

Because many middle-class women were uneducated, they spent long months of imposed confinement embroidering and performing menial household chores. Young women, in particular, suffered unduly during extended periods of bereavement, since lack of exposure to sun and fresh air heightened their sense of isolation and ultimately weakened their physical and mental health.

The short stories of Sicilian writer Maria Messina (1887–1944) grew from her observations of life in Mistretta, the provincial Sicilian town where she spent her formative years. Although Messina set a handful of her mature novels in continental Italy, Sicily remained her point of reference and sentimental touchstone through a twenty-year writing career. A proponent of Italian verismo (a form of realism), Messina focused on Sicily’s repressive treatment of women and the human toll—especially on women—wrought by mass emigration to the Americas.10

A Note on the Translation

Any translator of Messina’s prose must take into account the author’s steadfast allegiance to the principles of Italian verismo, as both the content and style of this school of writing profoundly influenced her work. In the 1880’s, the most prominent Italian verista, Sicilian Giovanni Verga, was in search of “a fresh human content and a style to render it in the best possible way” (Cecchetti 1973, vii). Committed to the representation of the real as opposed to the ideal, Verga and other prominent veristi turned to the regions of their youth for inspiration. In these economically depressed and politically neglected regions, the veristi focused on individuals at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder, locked in a daily struggle for survival amid poverty, ignorance, and immense human suffering.

Rejecting the bourgeoisie idiom as ill fitted to the cultural world of illiterate peasants and fisherman, the veristi sought out new forms of linguistic expression that would convey the essence of their realities. But since most of their subjects spoke exclusively in dialects, the veristi faced a perplexing dilemma. If transcribed faithfully, dialects would have been incomprehensible to mainstream readers. How could they portray the “real” world of their characters using standardized Italian, a language their subjects did not speak?