The Viceroys by Federico De Roberto
One of my favorite books is The Viceroys by Federico De Roberto. Ironically, I never had the opportunity to read it in school and I read it in a couple of weeks in my subway commute to work. In a few words, I would describe it as a deeper and more accurate novel than The Leopard.
Here is what Archibald Colquhoun writes for the London Magazine: “I vicerè is about the Risorgimento betrayed. Until recent years the aims and results of that movement have been blurred by official rhetoric and a process of falsification which began in the north of Italy and was partly due to the rôle of Piedmont and its dynasty. The piazzas of Italy are still cluttered with some of the less harmful results, those bewhiskered and gesticulating statues of the first King of United Italy, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. Amid the confusion of motives, idealism, dynastic aggrandisement, social aspiration, it was the south that came off worst. Seen from there the posturing and rhetoric looked suspiciously like cover for failed promises; in time this even became linked with Mussolini’s rodomontades about ‘eight million bayonets’, and the age-old distrust of rulers throughout the south spread next to ‘those in Rome’. Resulting waves of immigration from the depressed areas of Sicily and Calabria took with them the Mafia and Camorra to spread all over the Americas; and, less obvious but perhaps more damaging, the diffusion from Soho throughout the world of that most inadequate and adhesive of national images, the Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on a stick.”
Read more at the London Magazine
Buy The Viceroys - By Federico De Roberto - First American Hardcover Edition
