97. The quote from Chekhov is from the Letters of Anton Chekhov, Constance Garnett, tr., Echo Library, 2006, letter of 7 May 1889 to A. S. Suvorin.
98. The Simeto, the largest of the Sicilian rivers, skirts the base of Mt Etna and falls into the sea a few miles south of Catania.
99. The words Crispina sings are from the song ‘È arrivato l’Ambasciatore’ (1938) by Nuccia Natali: ‘È arrivato l’Ambasciatore / con la piuma sul cappello, / è arrivato l’Ambasciatore / a cavallo d’un cammello. / Ha portato una letterina / dove scritto sta così: / ‘Se mi piaci, Ninì, / ti darò tutto il cuor’. / È arrivato l’Ambasciator!..’
100. When Nina calls Modesta nennella, it brings to mind the girl in the story ‘Nennillo and Nennella’ in Lo cunto de li cunti (literally The Story of Stories), also known as the Pentamerone (1634), a Neapolitan fairy tale collection written down and embellished by Giambattista Basile.
101. The lines of the song ‘The Prostitutes are Our Daughters’ are from La marsigliese del lavoro (L’inno dei pezzenti), a Socialist anthem. The song goes: ‘Son nostre figlie le prostitute / che muoion tisiche negli ospedal, / le disgraziate si son vendute / per una cena, per un grembial’, ‘The prostitutes are our daughters, who die of consumption in the hospitals, the poor wretches sold themselves for bread, for clothing’.
102. Dante’s verse ‘É ll’ora che volge il disio al … is from the Purgatorio VIII:1–2: ‘Era già l’ora che volge il disio / ai navicanti e ‘ntenerisce il core.’ ‘It was the hour that turns seafarers’ longings / homeward — the hour that makes their hearts grow tender’ (tr. Allen Mandelbaum). Dante, of course, is a Florentine, and Nina, being from Rome, responds with verses by Giuseppe Belli, a poet whose 2,200 sonnets in the Roman vernacular expressed the voice of the common people of nineteenth-century Rome: ‘Che or’è? ccheor’è? È una cosa che tt’accora. Nu le sentite, sposa, le campane? Lo sapete che or’è, ssora siggnora? È ll’ora che le donne sò pputtane…’, ‘What time is it? What time is it? It’s a sorrowful time. Don’t you hear the bells, wife? Do you know what time it is, my dear lady? It’s the hour when every woman is a whore…’ (my translation).
103. The lines ‘Illusione dolce chimera sei tu. Che fa sognare, sperare e amare tutta la vita…’, ‘Sweet illusion you are that makes me dream, hope and love all my life’, are from the song ‘Signora Illusione’ by Aurelio Fierro.
104. The expression ‘Annamo bene!’ recalls the line ‘A-aaah annamo bene’ used by Sora Lella, played by the late Elena Fabrizi, the calm grandmother in the film Bianco, Rosso e Verdone, a 1981 comedy directed and starred in by Carlo Verdone.
105. The song Nina sings may be the Neapolitan song ‘Canzona Doce’ by Roberto Murolo: ‘Nu poco ‘e luna, / nu poco ‘e mare…’.
106. Italian Concordat, one of the Lateran Pacts of 1929 (also known as the Lateran Accords or Lateran Treaty), granted the Church immense privileges; Catholicism was declared the only religion of Fascist Italy. The Church wholeheartedly supported the Fascist regime: prayers were said in churches for Mussolini and for Fascism, priests became members and even officers of the Fascist Party, and so on. The Lateran Treaty is also mentioned further on in the book.
107. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was highly controversial and believed to have been politically influenced. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both Italian-Americans, were convicted of robbery and murder in 1921 and eventually executed. Although the arguments brought against them are said to have been largely disproven in court, the fact that the two men were known radicals — and that their trial took place during the height of the Red Scare — may have prejudiced the judge and jury against them.
108. Ferruccio Parri, an anti-fascist and activist in the resistance movement against Mussolini and Nazi Germany, was Prime Minister of Italy briefly, from June to December 1945. He warned: ‘Beware of … reopening the door to Fascism … There are rumours that Washington and London have no trust in me.’ Alcide De Gasperi, a conservative Catholic and founder of the Christian Democratic Party, succeeded Parri as Prime Minister from 1945 to 1953. Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti acted as vice-premier when De Gasperi became Prime Minister.
109. EVIS stands for Esercito Volontario per l’Indipendenza della Sicilia, the Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily.
110. Jean Gabin was a very popular French actor of the prewar era. The essence of world-weary stoicism, he was a classic anti-hero whose characters ran the gamut of society’s victims and losers, outsiders damaged by life with no hope of survival.
111. The lyrics ‘Bedda p’amari a tia…’ are from a Sicilian song called ‘Liu-là’. The gist of it is: ‘My sweet, for love of you my heart cries, and it will be free of these chains only when you decide to love me … and we’ll gather olives on these hallowed hills … sincerely, it’s no lie…’.
112. The lyric ‘Sciccareddu di lu me cori…’ is from the well-known Sicilian song ‘Avia ’nu sciaccareddu / davveru sapuritu…’.
113. The reference to Sartre as a warped Jesuit or literally, having the Jesuit strain injected the wrong way, calls to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses, Chapter I: ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. […] Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.’ (James Joyce, Ulysses, Oxford University Press, 2011, Chapter I)
114. The Sicilian term camurria is a distortion of gonorrhea, and can refer to venereal disease, which once required a long and difficult treatment, as well as to any annoyance, trouble, bother, nuisance and so on. Here, ‘’sta camurria di parola’, ‘that horror of a word’, refers to the word ‘old’.
115. The term White Fascism, Fascismo bianco, was applied to the successors to the Black Shirts. Though not the Fascism of the regime, Fascismo bianco clearly violated Article 21 of Italy’s postwar constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression.
116. Enrico Malatesta (1853–1932), born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere in the province of Caserta, was a major anarchist leader in Italy and a friend of Bakunin.
117. Julien Sorel is, of course, the young protagonist in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. A starry-eyed dreamer from the provinces, Sorel is fuelled by Napoleonic ideals.
118. The great blasphemous Henry is Henry Miller, whose supporters supposedly referred to his Tropic of Cancer as a ‘dithyrambic novel’, meaning written in an exalted or enthusiastic vein. Dithyrambs were hymns sung to the Greek god of decadence, Dionysus.
119. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held in February 1956. It is remembered for Khrushchev’s so-called ‘Secret Speech’, which denounced the dictatorship and personality cult of Joseph Stalin.