Troncamacchioni

‘Here you will find the epic rags of the dispossessed who cannot afford the luxury of inner emotions, the story of the last who made history. The protagonists of these pages, if they shine, it is because of the quartz of their granite teeth. If their skin changes colour, it is because a wound bleeds like a vein of hematite. And when they are close, they sparkle, like pyrite when it meets potassium nitrate.’ Domenico Marchettini, known as Ricciolo, ‘a porter inclined to brawling and foul language’. Giuseppe Maggiori, a taciturn illiterate miner. And also, Robusto Biancani, a communist cobbler with a sensitive and dreamy air, and Albano Innocenti, ‘a fermenter of disorders’. Characters that you rarely meet in history books, if not grouped together in collective and faceless entities such as ‘the masses’, ‘the proletarians’, ‘the people’. These are the protagonists of the dark novel told in this book, together with their associates, mothers, sisters and partners. It is the story of men and women in the Alta Maremma at the dawn of fascism: anarchists and bandits, deserters and communists, dishevelled characters who were not lucky enough to find a straight and smooth road ahead of them, but were forced to forge ahead by force – ’ among the holm oaks, the hornbeam and chestnut trees and the oak woods, with their hearts in their mouths and their lips cracked”: perpetually fleeing from the established authority, from fascist thugs, from informers ready to sell their neighbours out for a few coins. The rebellious spirit of miners and farmers who have nothing to lose but refuse to give up their opposition and deny their consent, comes forward with knives, sticks, fury, but also with improvised verses in ottava rima. And from the hills of Maremma it reaches as far as France, Belgium and Russia.’