The Blind Woman of Sorrento
La Cieca di Sorrento · Francesco Mastriani, 1852
Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi
Francesco Mastriani's La Cieca di Sorrento was one of the most widely read Italian novels of the nineteenth century — serialised, reprinted, staged as opera, and beloved by generations of Neapolitan readers. It has never been translated into English until now.
At the heart of the novel is Gennariello, a young man of uncertain parentage raised in poverty, who falls in love with a blind woman of extraordinary beauty. Their fate becomes entangled with the secrets of an aristocratic family — secrets involving identity, inheritance, and crime. Mastriani's Naples is vivid, socially observed, and morally charged: a city where the distance between wealth and want is measured in the space of a street.
This edition includes an original introduction by the translator placing the novel and its author in their literary and historical context.
