As the editors, Alda and Elena Croce, have noted, Southern Italian literature is strongly influenced by the great French authors, such as Zola, Flaubert, and Maupassant: heedful, therefore, of social conditions, yet marked by a peculiar accent—a blend of ironic, fairy-tale fabulation and melodramatic tones.
The survey is limited to 10 writers, some of them well known, such as Capuana, Serao, and De Roberto; how representative it is remains unclear, but within it one can single out two singular pieces.
Salvatore Di Giacomo is a prolific Neapolitan writer, journalist, poet, and scholar.
He favors tragic spectacles, mixtures of ferocity and goodness; his characters are harlots, camorristi, and beggars; his settings are filthy, picturesque alleyways.
The short story La Taglia offers an effective portrait of a dramatic and forgotten chapter of our history: the great brigandage between 1860 and 1870.
We find ourselves in a "disconsolate little village" over which weighed "a silence of death": today the sacking of the mayor's house, yesterday a severed ear to extort a ransom, then a herdsman roasted over firewood like a ram; a horror to which the soldiers react,

without the stir of a trial, without lawyers or courts.
Down there, behind the little church, they shot them on the dirt ground

.
Mariangela is seized by labor pains, surrounded only by her children because her husband has gone off to capture a ruthless bandit on whose head a bounty has been placed; it is a poor wretch's desperate bid to escape destitution.

The toddler had crawled up to the doorstep.
(...) The other, the red-haired one, grabbed him from behind and pulled him onto his chest.
The naked infant shrieked, growing restless, with his little hands trying to fend him off.(..) The July sun burst inside with a blaze that scorched the flesh and took away one's breath;(...) the broody hen pecked among the scattered grains, (...) a little dog braced its paws on the rim of the pitcher and stretched its dirty snout into it, (...) outside, a heavy silence...

The woman is in labor; the eldest boy, the red-haired one, runs off terrified to look for his father.
As he makes his way into the brush, he finds a lizard, which he slips into his pocket.
He calls desperately for his father, then catches sight of him:

the murdered man's face was barely visible, (...) flies swarmed all over him, (...) a hand stuck out, all bruised and bloody, open.
(...) Tata! Tata!, called the little boy, Tata, mama is crying and wants you!... Oi, tata!

He grew restless.
He lay flat on his belly on the low wall, brought out the lizard, tied a string to the bloody stump of its tail and made it walk, jerking it back with sudden tugs, yelling after it: Ah, Ah!...
Isce!...

Vittorio Imbriani, also a Neapolitan, was a university professor, patriot, and combatant, but also an imaginative writer attentive to popular literature.
Bearing witness to this is the tale

Le tre Maruzze

, a true rarity, having been published in an edition of only twenty-eight copies in 1875.
In Neapolitan

maruzza

means snail; in the story, these little creatures are the guardians of three precious gardens: a rose garden, a wondrous field of maize, and an orange grove.
Don Peppino, a young peasant, rescues three filthy beasts (the grass snake, the lizard, and the sewer rat), in truth three fairies, who, as Parini sings, make

lovers blissful and in the blink of an eye mingle earth and sea at their whim

.
And indeed the good man becomes the King’s gardener, held in high esteem because Don Peppino is sincere and faithful.
One day, the Queen and the other Royal Highnesses, piqued and envious at hearing repeatedly that Don Peppino was the only one who never lied, proposed a wager to the King: to tempt the gardener by every means, and if Peppino were to

blurt out

a lie, the King’s head would fall; otherwise, those of the Royal Highnesses.
Don Peppino resists the princes' overtures, but when the Queen offers herself in exchange for a rose, as Girolamo Fontanella sings,

the mawkish versifier,

upon the happy lover she falls and joins breast to breast, mouth to mouth, and heart to heart

.
And what is to be done now? Telling a lie means incurring the Sovereign's wrath; telling the truth will mean the King loses his head.
What weighs most heavily on Don Peppino is the grief of the three fairies (now in the form of a spade, hoe, and shovel), because the man could not resist and “tomorrow will tell the little lie.”
But to the Sovereign’s question: “How fare my little snails?” Don Peppino replies:

Mouth of Truth no Lie shall tell, your wife came asking for them; she offered what I might ask, and three she obtained.
As price for the first, I kissed her; (...) Spade, hoe, and shovel, that know all, as I have told you shall bear witness to the truth

.
What moral is to be drawn from this fairy tale? While the powerful amuse themselves with pointless games and foolish wagers, the poor man acts wisely, even if he too has allowed himself to be deceived.
Could it be true? "...Cuccurucù...".

I have chosen only two stories, because the others add little to literature or even to the narrative of our Mezzogiorno.
Journalism, the fantastic, and melodrama mingle together, giving us a languid and pessimistic vision of the South.
The only story of great power is Federico De Roberto’s (La Paura), set in a World War I trench and dealing with foretold death; several soldiers must advance to an outpost, fully aware that they will surely die.
It is death,

crouching, watchful, poised to spring and seize; if one must go out to meet it, staring into its eyes, the eyes grow dim, the legs give way, the veins run dry, every fiber trembles, all of life ebbs away.

It is a tragic and intensely timely page; yet we are in 1927, a world away from the weary and repetitive tales of the late nineteenth century.

Why not read it? Nothing evocative or stimulating.

Nineteenth-Century Southern Fiction Writers