In principio era la bestia

January 1799, Taranto surroundings. While the Jacobin uprisings are boiling over, the headless body of old Narda Stumicusa, maman and sorceress, is found. The crime is followed by mysterious sightings of a demonic creature – chilling howls in the middle of the night, ferocious attacks on animals – and, a year later, another violent death: the mutilated carcass of a traveller is discovered in the thick vegetation. With the second murder, rumours spread in the community about the existence of a dangerous fair and the inhabitants begin to barricade themselves in their homes, until a patrol of the king’s dragoons from Naples – accompanied by the naturalist James Fenimonte – is sent to Terra d’Otranto to investigate. Among the people, some claim to have seen the Beast, a kind of big wolf, while others say that the bloody deeds can be attributed to the brigand Malesano. In an Apulia still stunned by the fumes of the Neapolitan Republic, divided between Jacobin supporters and Royalist conservatives, the group begins their search and in the church basement they track down and examine Narda’s body, half-mummified under a layer of lime. They then converse with the two brothers who discovered the second corpse, whose remains were immediately burnt on the spot. The investigation very soon turns out to be the discovery of a world of profound inequalities in which violence, superstition, feelings of the sacred and esotericism coexist with rationality and rigour. Through the eyes of the foreign soldiers who arrived from the capital, Omar Di Monopoli unveils the extraordinariness of an unresolved territory: a fascinating and obscure journey at the end of the Enlightenment, in an untamed and werewolf-like South. Sightings of the creature coloured the tales of every tavern and mysterious attacks on flocks and hen houses were the order of the day for months. The following summer, having crushed the rebellion of the republicans in blood and restored retrograde power with the return of the Bourbon monarch to the throne, the Beast returned to strike.