This novel purposely distorts real events that took place in a Sicilian town, Alia, at the start of the twentieth century, to the point of rendering them so unrecognizable as to border on sheer fantasy. A priest by the name of Rosolino Martino was arrested for corruption of underage girls. A former local pharmacist turned lawyer, Matteo Teresi—who in the pages of his weekly newspaper, La Battaglia, fought the abuses of mafiosi, landowners, and the clergy—began an investigation of the case and came to the shocking discovery that the priests of Alia had founded a secret sect that “brought together inexperienced, virgin young girls and young brides, deceiving them into believing that sexual relations, and the sexual practices preparatory to the sex act, were a means for acquiring divine indulgences and opening the gates of Heaven,” as explained by Gaetano D’Andrea, ex-mayor of Alia.
The discovery of the sect and its practices, when publicized by Teresi, sent shock waves beyond the island of Sicily and elicited the indignation of many political and religious officials, including Filippo Turati and Don Luigi Sturzo. The priest Rosolino Martino confirmed what Teresi had written in his newsweekly.
The clergy, the landowners, and the Mafia, however, closed ranks. On the one hand they attacked Teresi, on the other they forced the population—even the immediate families of the victims of the abuse—to remain absolutely silent on the matter.
Dismayed by the lack of reaction on the part of his fellow townspeople, Teresi goaded them harshly:
“The men are now resigned to the religious prostitution of their women, since it is no longer admissible [ . . . ], after what has happened, to plead ignorance. Let us avoid this danger, let us open the eyes of husbands and fathers, and after we speak to them frankly and boldly, things will reacquire their proper names. Divine grace will no longer be a cover for sexual relations; the mystical bride will seem a common prostitute; the husband, amidst the saints with their haloes, will see his horns sprout majestically twisted; the young woman already on the path to perfection, setting aside her saintly mask, if not yet the mother of some scion of angels will be like the half-virgin of the French, who has lost everything and given everything except her supposed honor, which resides in the simple physiological sign of her virginity.”
The article, which appeared in the August 11, 1901, edition of La Battaglia, achieved the opposite result, eliciting a wave of genuine hatred towards its author. The bishop of Cefalù accused him of blasphemy and held a reparative procession onto which Teresi, from his balcony, dropped flyers further denouncing the misdeeds of the clergy.
It amounted to underwriting a death sentence for himself. After a warning, Teresi wrote a last article of goodbye in his newsweekly, and took ship for the United States.
In the town of Rochester, New York, he continued practicing his profession as a lawyer and wrote a tremendous number of articles in support of the Italian immigrant community and on such broad questions as divorce and abortion.
His “American” writings were published in 1925, by D’Antoni Editori, a Palermo publishing house, under the title Con la patria nel cuore (“With the Homeland in My Heart”). They were republished in an anastatic printing, edited by the Comune di Alia, in 2001, with a preface by Gaetano D’Andrea.
To repeat: the reader should consider this novel a product of my own imagination. Only two things were drawn from reality: the names of the protagonist and his newssheet (I did this in homage), and the passage from the article by Don Luigi Sturzo.
Should any reader encounter names or situations reminiscent of real-life names or situations, they should be attributed to chance.
I dedicate this book to Rosetta, for the more than fifty years of life we have spent together.
A.C.