Benedetta Cibrario

The novel is set between 1838 and 1848 in Savoyard Turin, poised between the Restoration and Risorgimento values, between conservatism and the desire for change, not least economic. In those years, Great Britain—and London in particular—served as a touchstone for technological innovation, the growth of trade and manufacturing, and the dissemination of new ideas, which also encompassed the condition of women. The author imagines Anne, the young daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant, given in marriage to Prospero, a Piedmontese nobleman raised under the most rigid and traditional Savoyard tenets: military discipline, an obtuse allegiance to the crown and to social conventions, and a disdain for economic matters—even for the very landed estates from which, nonetheless, he derives handsome revenues. It is an improbable match, one might say; it allows the author to investigate how to “recognize something of oneself in a country that is not one's own,” how to remain oneself while forced to adapt to foreign customs and to languages so vastly different from English as Italian and the Piedmontese dialect. Anne, moreover, grew up frequenting warehouses and shops, accustomed to discerning the quality of textiles from across the globe, to speaking of fabrics, innovations, and trade. These are modern values, fostered by a grandfather with Jacobin leanings and a governess who grants the utmost intellectual freedom to her charges, Anne and her sister—independent spirits receptive to the new. The first question Anne's father posed to Prospero was the following. > “So tell me, are you interested in silk?” (...) An expression of disdain crossed Prospero's gaze. While he knew nothing of commerce, he was well versed in good breeding, and he was at a loss as to how to take his father-in-law's vulgarity. (...) In Turin, he thought, tradesmen enter through the service door and wait in the anteroom . It is not smallpox, then—which strikes Anne on her journey to Turin and mars her skin—that ruins the marriage; rather, it is the cultural divide between her, forced to adapt, and Prospero, obtuse and aloof. In a letter to her sister, Anne confesses that > several months had to pass before I came to understand that the journey meant to deliver me to Prospero was not an approach, but a departure—both from all I held immensely dear and from the person I had been until that moment. No one parts willingly from what they love and know, so you can imagine my state of mind now that I have understood that the person I was about to abandon once and for all was myself. To be estranged from oneself is the deepest sorrow . And yet, in the Piedmont of the 1840s, swept by a quest for innovation in agriculture and manufacturing, Anne—pragmatic, tenacious, economically adept, and immensely wealthy—could well find her way; and for a moment we dare to hope, when she strikes up a friendship with Enrico, an adventurous entrepreneur, and when the obtuse Prospero dies on the battlefield in 1848. Instead, the frail and overly faithful Anne > ever since arriving in Piedmont has had but a single desire: to be left alone, to fade. As happens with bitter griefs, generously tempered by time . Anne belongs to the multitude of characters who marked the transition from the Restoration to the new Italy: > their opinions, their hopes—often naively grand—their desires and their failures belong to that twilight realm that is literature . The book suffers from numerous flaws, both in content and narrative structure, which compromise its quality despite starting from an interesting premise and a potentially intriguing protagonist. The author attempted to say too much: to paint a sweeping fresco of 1840s Piedmont, to recreate the allure of Italy in the English imagination by introducing the theme of the “Grand Tour,” to flesh out the differences between London and Piedmont with a painstaking detail that obscures the broader picture, and to crowd the canvas with secondary characters who overshadow the protagonist, herself rigidly immobilized in her sorrowful fate. The narrative structure lacks rhythm: it unfolds in a slow, verbose manner, fragmented by ceaseless leaps in time and space, and above all weighed down by an excessive reliance on the literary device of correspondence—not only the protagonist’s, but that of the other characters as well. In the end, it all becomes redundant; the novel ought to be rewritten with sweeping cuts. Why not read it? The premise is interesting, but the narrative structure renders it prolix and tedious.

> I feel as though I have lost myself in an underground cave full of perilous crevices and labyrinthine hollows unknown to me, so many chasms into which I might slip. Questo mi succede adesso, quando guardo avanti e mi accorgo che non cʼè più strada, e allora mi volto indietro e vedo che di strada non ce nʼè neanche lì . The protagonist, the first-person narrator, is now an elderly woman living on an estate in Tuscany where she has succeeded in producing a wine of great quality, *Rossovermiglio*. Her mind now frequently wanders back to distant times, and the novel unfolds, indeed, through a continuous alternation between present and past. Born into an aristocratic Turinese family, she marries very young to a man of her own social station. It is an arranged marriage that will bring the young woman nothing but misery. Betrayed, wounded in her deepest sensibilities, repulsed by the coldness of her husband and of a formal, vacuous social class, the protagonist decides to take refuge in Tuscany on an estate inherited from her brother. And here she leads an isolated life, with her beloved horses and a growing passion for the land. When a man with whom she had once been infatuated reappears. An affair begins, and the young woman finds herself pregnant. Yet the man disappears, and the woman, to preserve propriety, decides to pass off her own child as that of the estate bailiffs. Why did the man disappear? Up to this point, the protagonist appears as a “sleeping beauty”: young, wealthy, restless, slightly eccentric, over whom the great shifts of history—such as fascism, the world war, the partisan struggle, the dawn of the republic—merely glide. Yet at the very end of her life, the protagonist discovers that the man she loved disappeared because he received a handsome sum from her husband, who, even from afar, meddled once more in her life. She was condemned to live as others dictated. From her social class she received nothing but sorrow and deceit, while she is surrounded by the affection and loyalty of the local people. Only the land (the vines, the olive trees, the woods) is something steadfast and true. > At times I dismount from my horse and sit on a stone, and I remain there looking at this land, unchanged through time, with these colors and these scents, slow and silent as I have known it . Yet on the other hand, “we do not live tragedies, we only have sorrows.” At the beginning of the novel, the reader is left somewhat disconcerted by the vacuity of the events, settings, and characters. Why should we care about nobles who squander their fortunes on elegant, refined receptions? First comes the prose, exquisitely refined and meticulous, and then the growing discovery that the superficiality and detachment from the present of aristocratic life are the interpretive key to the novel. We often live a life “made of nothing,” and thus find ourselves swept along by chance and by others. Why read it? It is written in beautiful Italian.