The Blind Woman of Sorrento
La Cieca di Sorrento · Francesco Mastriani, 1852
Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi
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. The novel centres on Gennariello, a young man of uncertain parentage, whose fate becomes entangled with the secrets of an aristocratic family. Those secrets involve identity, inheritance, and crime. Mastriani's Naples is rendered with social precision and moral charge: a city where the distance between wealth and want is measured in the space of a street.
