The Mysteries of Naples: Marta, or Faith

The first complete modern English translation of Francesco Mastriani's most ambitious novel: a panoramic descent through every stratum of 1846 Naples. Book One of three.

Naples, 1846. A city of one million souls crowded beneath Vesuvius. A government indistinguishable from organised crime. A criminal brotherhood, the camorra, that runs the prisons and patrols the alleys. Corrupt magistrates who destroy the innocent for convenience. And every season, the children of the rural poor arriving in the city to vanish into its underworld.

Into this city Francesco Mastriani descends with the authority of a man who has spent his life there. I Misteri di Napoli, serialised across 1869 and 1870, is the work in which he tried to put the whole of Naples on a single page: the criminal underground, the dispossessed peasantry, the artisans and shopkeepers and domestic servants, and the drawing rooms of an aristocracy decaying from inside.

Marta, or Faith, Book One of the trilogy, follows four interlocking lives. Cecatiello, born into destitution and shaped into a thief by the precise machinery of poverty. The Onesimi family, stripped of their land and their children by a single corrupt judicial act. Cosimo Alabiso, an educated man turned brigand, who reasons his way through the philosophy of revenge with cold intelligence. And in the shadows of every scene, the Strangler, a figure of terrifying physical power and absolute moral vacancy who moves through the novel like weather.

At the centre of it all is Marta, a young woman whose unconditional goodness survives everything the world does to it.

Publisher - Espresso Publishing House

Language - English

Perfect Bound

Contributors

By author

Francesco Mastriani

Idara Crespi

Published Date - 0001-01-01

ISBN - 9781997077039

Dimensions - 22.9 x 15.2 x 4.3 cm

Page Count - 762