25. Figghia, the Sicilian word for figlia, daughter, can also be used more broadly to indicate any young woman or girl (like carusa) or even a child or a kid. Carmine initially calls Modesta figghia to tease her and emphasize her inexperience and youth, though later in their relationship it becomes his affectionate pet name for her.
26. The spagnola is the Italian for Spanish flu, or the influenza epidemic of 1918–19.
27. The Lancia Trikappa passenger car was produced between 1922 and 1925.
28. Picciotta, like picciridda or carusa, is one of several Sicilian words for a girl or young woman. The masculine form, picciottu, plural picciotti, has passed into the Mafia’s lexicon with quite a different meaning, referring to minor killers, inconsequential ‘soldiers’ in the Mafia ranks.
29. The walls of the palazzos in Catania were adorned with sculpted floral elements carved from the sharp lava of the island of Sicily. In addition to flowers and vines, many of the palazzos and churches, built from soft tufa stone, were embellished with sirens, winged horses, monstrous masks, and grotesque figures which sprang from the facades.
30. Cabiria here refers to the 1914 film directed by Giovanni Pastrone, not the later 1957 version by Fellini.
31. The Holy Father is said to be a prisoner since the popes opposed the ‘liberal’ Italian state and were ‘prisoners of the Vatican’ between 1870 and 1929 (the year here is 1921). Most Italian politicians were openly anticlerical and Mussolini himself was extremely anticlerical, both as a Socialist and later as a Fascist. His Fascist formula was simple: ‘Nothing above the state, nothing outside the state, everything and everyone to serve the state.’ The later Lateran Treaty of 1929 was an attempt to end the conflict between the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church that had existed since 1870.
32. The lines are from Ecclesiastes 10:19–25: ‘A feast is made for laughter, / wine makes life merry, / and money is the answer for everything. / Do not revile the king even in your thoughts, / or curse the rich in your bedroom, / because a bird in the sky may carry your words, / and a bird on the wing may report what you say.’ (New International Version, copyright © 2011)
33. The Carbonari were an influential, revolutionary group of Italian patriots originally formed as a secret society to fight for the unification of Italy (achieved in 1860).
34. The ‘Blond Tiber’, il Biondo Tevere’, as Romans call the river, dates back to Horace in the Odes, Book I: viii. Horace’s word is flavos (an earlier spelling for flavus), meaning yellow, golden, tawny or blond. The Tiber was often described as yellowish because of the mud it contained.
35. The gentleman king, the Re Galantuomo, with whom Garibaldi met in Teano, was King Victor Emmanuel. In the famous Handshake on 25 October 1860, Garibaldi handed the Two Sicilies over to the Kingdom of Italy.
36. ‘May of 1898’: the phrase refers to a spontaneous uprising to protest inhumane working conditions, the Bava Beccaris massacre, named after the Italian General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris. The repression of widespread riots by workers in Milan in May 1898 resulted in 400 dead and more than 2,000 injured. Filippo Turati, one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, was arrested in 1898, accused of inspiring the riots.
37. The Dante verses, ‘Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria’, are from the Inferno V: 121–3, Mandelbaum, tr.: http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/.
38. The description of the comrade who had worked with unions since she was a young girl and was imprisoned and tortured many times alludes to the fact that Mussolini’s Black Shirts regularly attacked Socialist Party headquarters and newspapers as well as union halls.
39. Beatrice wonders why Marx chose the dreadful word ‘spectre’ because she’s reading the Communist Party Manifesto, which begins with the words: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre…’
40. The quote attributed to Antonio Gramsci is from his Prison Notebooks (volume 3, Joseph A. Buttigieg, ed. and tr., Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 324).
41. The words ‘Be good, be saintly, be cowards’ are Modesta’s way of referring to Filippo Turati, who early on preached passive resistance and patience (‘Non raccogliete le provocazioni, non rispondete alle ingiurie, siate buoni, siate santi…’), which Modesta finds cowardly.
42. The term le salariate dell’amore, literally ‘wage earners of love’, is attributed to Filippo Turati in Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (volume 2, Joseph A. Buttigieg, ed. and tr., Columbia University Press, 1996, Notes to the Text 53, p. 452).
43. Stamped paper, or carta bollata, was used as an efficient way to collect taxes on documents requiring stamping, such as leases, agreements, receipts, court documents, etc.
44. Diderot’s actor refers to Diderot’s essay, ‘Paradox of Acting’ (‘Paradoxe sur le comédien’, written 1773, published 1830), known for its famous paradox, namely, that in order to move the audience, the actor must himself remain unmoved and detached.
45. Modesta calls Argentovivo a murata viva, literally someone who is walled-up alive. The expression recalls the Middle Ages, when it was supposedly common practice for nuns to have their cell doors bricked up, leaving just a small opening for food to be passed through.
46. Comrade Bebel, or Ferdinand August Bebel (1840–1913), was a German Marxist politician, writer, orator and author of Women and Socialism, published in 1879.
47. The gigantic Moor’s head on the piano is one of the colourful ceramic vases from the Caltagirone region of Sicily.
48. The Saracen olive tree is the name often given to ancient olive trees in Sicily, which can be hundreds of years old, and whose huge gnarled trunks are twisted into bizarre shapes. The name reflects the period of Arab rule in Sicily.
49. On 2 November, the Day of the Dead or All Souls’ Day, it is traditional for children to be given small gifts purporting to be from the family dead.
50. Maccu is a traditional, very thick soup (almost a puree) made of dried fava beans in most parts of Sicily. It is usually cooked in the winter months and has been a staple dish for the contadini, peasants, since ancient times. Also known as Maccu di San ’Gnuseppi, according to Pino Correnti in his Il Libro d’Oro della Cucina e dei Vini di Sicilia, it is a ritual soup for Saint Joseph’s day, 19 March, as well as a custom handed down from the celebrations of the spring equinox in classical times, when the housewife would clear her pantry of leftover dried legumes in the expectation of the new harvest to come.
51. The word maredda in the expression ‘tosta maredda’ (here and elsewhere in text) is Sicilian slang for girl; in dialect, morella and moredda are diminutives for the Sicilian moru, meaning dark-haired.
52. Lazzarolu and cocciu di tacca are dialect: a lazzarolu is a rascal, scoundrel or thug, an arrogant young tough guy or someone young and attractive but of no consequence. A cocciu is a scamp or little rogue; a brat. And di tacca means insignificant or small-time. The two expressions basically mean the same thing: someone young and brazen, a fireball.