What could it be to Tinuzza the goat girl that in antiquity her land was called Magna Graecia; that its city Sybaris had given the world its concept of luxury; that Plato had visited the flourishing center of Locri to learn from the masters there; that in what is now Reggio a woman poet called Nossis had sung in celebrated verses of her loves; that Hannibal had sulked in defeat in Crotone before evacuating Italy; and that Spartacus the gladiator had hid out in the Sila from the might of Rome? Rome to her was only the place where the baron, the pope, and now a king lived, all equally indifferent to the fact of her existence.

She looked about her and saw what was familiar: Over to the west where the sun sank at night was where Giosuè lived in Carlopoli, a village like Castagna perched on an elevated clearing overlooking the valley. Twelve kilometers away was the town of Soveria Mannelli. At the marketplace she saw men in the uniform of Italy, a country she knew no more of than of America. But she heard her father and other men talk, and they would shake their heads and complain about what this new country, Italy, was doing to them. She had been born the year it all happened, in 1860, when the great Garibaldi had crossed over from Sicily, and right there, at Soveria Mannelli, routed the Bourbon troops of the king of Naples in the name of the king of Italy.

It was a new thing to be Italian and the men said it brought new troubles: Taxes had come on salt and even flour milling, so the poor could no longer afford their daily bread, and many of the younger ones had gone up into the mountains, even as far as Aspromonte, to live as bandits rather than be conscripted into the armies of the new nation. There were shepherds, too, like Serafino, who had lost out when some of the old estates that had allowed pasturage on communal lands were broken up and the new money that bought them closed them off.

Don Antonio, who had chickens in his yard and ate white bread and had no worries over taxes on crops, said that it was God’s will and that they were all subjects of a king who came from the far north, from Piedmont.

Of the baron’s existence, Umbertina was quite sure even though she had never seen him; she grazed the goats upon his hills and gathered wood and nuts from his forests; he existed every time his fattore came riding through the village to collect payments and levies, raising a cloud of dust and scattering the chickens and pigs. She knew he and his fat wife existed, for they had to be fed those prodigious amounts of food and wine that her father and the others worked out of the land and turned over to the fattore. Umbertina had heard of the baron since her earliest childhood. But the king?