Marta, or Faith

About the book

When Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris captivated Europe in the 1840s, it inspired writers across the continent to attempt their own versions — portraits of city life seen from below, tracing the lives of the poor alongside the powerful. In Naples, no one answered that challenge more ambitiously than Francesco Mastriani.

I Misteri di Napoli is Mastriani's masterwork: a panoramic novel of nineteenth-century Naples that ran to hundreds of chapters and was read across the Italian peninsula. Marta, or Faith is the first complete volume — introducing a cast of characters whose stories unfold across the series, set against a city of startling beauty and profound inequality.

This will be the first English translation of any volume of I Misteri di Napoli.

Francesco Mastriani

Francesco Mastriani (1819–1891) was one of the most prolific and widely read novelists of nineteenth-century Italy. Born and raised in Naples, he spent his career writing for the city's popular press, producing serialised fiction that reached readers of every social class. His novels were adapted for the stage, reprinted across the peninsula, and read by the same audiences who were reshaping Italian literature in the years before and after unification.

Mastriani wrote in the tradition of popular realism that produced Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and the great serial fiction of the century — but his Naples is distinctly his own: vivid, socially acute, and morally charged. He depicted the city from the street upward, and the lives of the poor and the dispossessed with an attention that was unusual for the time. I Misteri di Napoli is his most ambitious work: a panoramic novel that ran to hundreds of chapters and was read across the peninsula.

Despite his enormous popularity in Italy, his work has remained almost entirely unknown to English-language readers. The Blind Woman of Sorrento (2026) was the first of his novels to appear in English translation; Marta, or Faith is the second.

Idara Crespi, translator

Idara Crespi was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada. She studied Journalism at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary — a practical education, oriented toward readers rather than disciplines — and came to translation through her work writing about arts and culture. She was reviewing an Italian novel when she found the published English translation had made it smaller in every way that mattered. When the review was done, she translated the novel herself. Espresso Publishing House grew from that project.

Her work begins with a question that guides everything Espresso Publishing House does: which novels celebrated in their original languages have never been adequately translated into English? Her first published translation, The Blind Woman of Sorrento (Mastriani, 2026), was the first English edition of one of the most widely read Italian novels of the nineteenth century. Marta, or Faith is her second translation for the imprint.

This edition

This Espresso Publishing House edition is a new translation made directly from the original Italian source text. It includes an original introduction by Idara Crespi, a cast of characters, a translator's note, historical notes, and a glossary — apparatus designed to help readers enter Mastriani's Naples without losing the pleasure of the story.

Available in Kindle ebook (pre-order now) and paperback (September 2026).