Vita was illiterate, so she left no diaries or letters, only stories passed down through the generations. Miraculously, the six-hundred-page criminal file exists, and provided me with vivid details of what transpired more than a century ago. My historical re-creations are based on those pages, on archival materials, interviews with historians, residents, and experts on the time period, in addition to the work of those writers who came and researched before me. In Vita’s most intimate moments, I have used my own Gallitelli bones and blood to imagine how she would have acted and what she would have thought and said about the incredible events in her life.