Umbertina understood nothing of who the Bruttii were or who Dante was, but she understood her father.

Carlo Nenci was a poor man, one of the many poor men of Castagna. His home was a stone hovel and he worked one piece of the large holding belonging to the Baron Mancuso di Valerba, which meant he paid the baron in labor and produce for the privilege of turning that gentleman’s idle land into profit. The baron did not work the land and did not know about the land; in return for doing nothing and knowing nothing, but for having had the good fortune to be born who he was and thus owning all the land and trees and streams within sight, the baron was given half of what was produced by Carlo Nenci and the other men of Castagna. Baron Mancuso lived in Rome—he was too great a signore to be seen in these parts—but he could be imagined, the people said: Just multiply by a hundred times the airs and orders of his agent, the fattore, and that would be the baron. The wife of the baron was obese and the baron had gout, but, went the people’s bitter humor, those who worked for them were fortunate because they ate little and so stayed lean and hard. We plant wheat, they said, but never taste white bread; cultivate vines, but rarely drink wine; and raise animals, but eat no meat except the tainted flesh of those that die from sickness.

The baron never came himself to collect all the abundance of his lands—the wheat, the oil, the grapes and figs, walnuts and chestnuts, the wool and cheese and flax; the person who did the collecting was the fattore, and to kiss the hand of the fattore was to kiss the hand of the absent baron.

For some it was different. For Carlo Nenci’s distant relative, Serafino the shepherd, it was different because he had left, following Domenico Saccà, the socialist, to America. Domenico, sometimes called Minguccio, was a shoemaker in the market town of Soveria Mannelli, and the first of the region to go. Hotheaded, quick to flare up, filled with ideals and the frustration of what he called the unfinished revolution, he had emigrated to America because, he said, the new Italy had betrayed Garibaldi, its parent. Domenico Saccà wasn’t a laborer who had sweated under the sun or shaken with the cold only to go hungry despite his toil; he could read and write, and he knew of the New World and what to expect of it.

He was not well liked by others of education.

“Let him go to America,” Don Antonio said scornfully. “That is an intelligent distance for him to put between us.”