Domenico Rea

> I have a daughter, fair and coquettish,/an unwed maiden, fresh as a rose;/ever close, since she was a tot,/I’ve held her fast by my skirt. . Thus Nunziata would sing of her little girl, Miluzza, while picking lice from her head. And Miluzza was truly beautiful, and all the men in town > studied the slender ankles of a racehorse, the breasts budding like a posy of flowers, the dark charm of he

The book is a collection of short stories written between 1943 and 1947, expressing the author’s effort to reckon with reality, with the lush, carnal, amoral, and shrewd humanity of that “Babel of history” that is Naples: hence, in all likelihood, the title *Spaccanapoli*, the thoroughfare around which the city’s life has always gravitated. Let it be said at once that this reckoning with reality w