A Rebel in Love

Novel

Original title: D’amore e di briganti

Translated by: Giovanna Bongiovanni

A Rebel in Love

Cristiano Parafioriti © 2021

Cover by

Nunzio di Dio

Layout and editing by

Salvatore Lecce

“I want them all dead! They are all peasants, bandits and enemies of the Savoy, enemies of Piedmont, the Bersaglieri and the world. Death to the peasants, death to these southern sons of bitches, I don't want any witnesses, we'll say it was the bandits.”

(Colonel Pier Eleonoro

Negri by order of General

Enrico Cialdini, Lieutenant

of King Vittorio Emanuele

II, August 1861)

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

This is a work of fiction. Characters, organisations, and circumstances are the product of the author's imagination or, if they existed, used for narrative purposes. For the rest, any resemblance to actual events and people is entirely coincidental. Or almost.

EVERY DAMN MORNING

In Galati Mamertino, Sicily, Calogero Emanuele, known as “Bau”, gets up early and is conscious of having to start another day of work in the town hall. Like many Sicilian fathers, his children are scattered across Italy for work and, of course, this distance cannot help but make him get out of bed a little sadder.

Every damn morning.

Spring has just begun and here in the Nebrodi mountains, there is a timid sun. At dawn it rises from the mountain of Rafa and a few warm rays strike the wrinkled tiles of the main square of this remote village, but they do not warm the chilly air and the numb bodies of those getting started.

Calogero Bau drinks his coffee at the Bar Ciccio, smokes his second cigarette and stares absently at the few passers-by and the imposing Mother Church. At that very moment, his heart turns dark. He thinks of don Peppe Emanuele, known as Malupilo, the evil hair, his father, who had died only a few years before, and who was a pillar of that church, always involved in organising the events, preparing the procession and the Masses, and unconditionally serving the Lord and the clergy. He might have seemed a little gruff at times, but he was just old-fashioned, in the good sense of the word, a man of few words and a lot of work. When he passed away, it was as if an aisle in that church had collapsed, and it was even worse for his son Calogero, who had relied on this man for his whole life.

Calogero Bau has a wife, three young sons, an elderly mother and a “thornback” sister who still lives in Galati. He is employed by the town hall – a luxury nowad

ays – and making a living as best he can. A cup of coffee, a couple of cigarettes and then he's off in his blue Fiat Punto to work at the Records Office, just outside the village on the road to Tortorici.

Every damn morning.

ESCAPE TO TRUNGALI

It was a cold and dark afternoon. My friends from the Pilieri neighbourhood and I were in the woods near Trungali. It was a bit of a creepy place because of the dilapidated church, and people in Galati Mamertino used to say terrible things about it. However, Ture S., our leader, had decided to build a hut nearby, next to the small stream. He believed that it would be a proof of bravery. We had brought some wooden planks, a ball of wire stolen from a building site and other necessary tools. We worked on it for more than two hours until our hut was ready. We were children and building a hut in the forest was an important mission. We had wooden swords, bows made of string and imaginary enemies; we were fearless in our own way.

After munching on some hazelnuts and a few unripe chestnuts inside the hiding place, we noticed that the sky was darkening and drops started to fall. Then it grew heavier and heavier, and the thatched roof could no longer shelter us all. We fled in disarray, some of us through the woods, others down into the valley, and I sheltered under the archway of the entrance to the ruined church of Trungali. Besides the shivering cold, the shivers of dread slowly crept in. The ruins of that temple protected me from the rain but not from fear. Indeed.

Rumours had it that a young girl had died nearby centuries ago. In an attempt to escape the Baron of Galati and owner of the land, who wanted to own her, the girl had fallen to her death on the sharp trunk of a freshly cut green hazel grove. Nobody had seen the baron trying to force himself on her, and the death of the girl had been dismissed as a fatal tragedy.

Though unpunished by the public, the nobleman was assailed by remorse and, in an attempt to relieve his soul, decided to build the church on the crime scene. But the idea turned out to be a bad one from the start, a harbinger of dark omens and misfortunes. Finally, one summer night, a disastrous fire started mysteriously from the church itself and engulfed the surrounding woods. After three days of fierce fighting against the flames, which seemed to be fuelled by a mysterious force, the fire was finally doused, the last flames had been extinguished, revealing the now charred body of the baron to some peasants. The young girl's revenge had been carried out at last, in some sinister way.

As I thought about this disturbing event, my nostrils were hit by a strange stench. I slowly turned my gaze to the inside of the church, and the threatening grunt of a black wild boar rose up from the stalks of nettle and weeds. It didn't flinch at my cries, it didn't retreat a step, quite the opposite, it appeared clearly about to aim at me. And I was absolutely terrified when my first impression of danger became clear. The offspring of the black boar was out there, close to me. I realised I was in the worst position: between the mother and her cubs. In a flash I took off down what seemed to be the safest route, had it not been that one of the little wild pigs decided to run ahead of me so as to look as if I were chasing him.

The mother must have believed this and, having ensured the safety of her remaining offspring, she threw herself into the defence of the little one on the run. Suddenly the scene turned out somewhat ironic. I tried to move away from the main path, feeling my arms torn by branches and my legs itching from the nettles I was compulsively cutting down in an attempt to save myself.

The squealing cries of the fleeing cub were drowned out by the furious screams of its fur-black angry mother, and no path was safe for me. Weary and tired, I stumbled on a bed of leaves, slippery from the pouring rain, and turning around I realised I had no escape. I only had time to feel a hard, dull blow hitting me.

* * *

It was the recoil of landing.

The wheels of the landing gear had touched the ground, waking me up from that strange nightmare. I looked at my watch: it was 8.40 am. The plane had been quite on time.

I got up still shaken by the distressing dream, took my trolley out of the overhead locker and switched on my mobile phone. The other passengers did the same, and from their phones, which had been put back into service, there was a disturbing concert of ringing, trilling and chirping. When the door opened, Palermo's light filtered into the cabin. Just outside the plane, even before descending the ramp, the air of my homeland filled my lungs and my heart.

As I took the bus from the airport to the train station, the monument commemorating the Capaci massacre passed by me.

Such endless sadness! A painful stele standing in memory of an unforgettable pain, a bloody stain in the history of an island tormented by the Mafia.

After a long journey by train along the Tyrrhenian coast towards Messina, I got off at Sant'Agata di Militello, where my parents were waiting for me. And so we took one of the many roads leading to the Nebrodi by car.

I looked back wearily at my village nestled against the mountainside and, after a quick meal, I fell asleep, this time more peacefully, lulled by the air of that pale spring not yet in bloom, in Galati Mamertino, Sicily.

LONELY SOULS

At five o'clock in the afternoon, my mother took a chance and offered me an inviting hot coffee. She knew I longed to see the square and my old friends from the village after so many months spent more than 1,700 kilometres away. I am forty years old, twenty of which have been spent in the North, half a life that seems like a whole one, actually.

The caffeine immediately kicked in. At six o'clock I took the road to the square. Walking through my old neighbourhood, I had the bittersweet feeling of flipping through an album of memories, I felt my chest tighten around my heart. It's all in the past now. There, of Via Pilieri, only the stones of the houses remain standing, while here, at the bottom of my heart, lie the much heavier rocks of memory.

Calogero Bau was the first villager I met. I couldn’t refuse to drink a coffee with him at the Bar Ciccio. He told me about his children, especially Ilenia, the eldest, who had told him over the phone that she was very excited about reading my stories. Then he began to talk to me about his work at the records office and how, over time, he had become fascinated by reading about old birth and death certificates, some particular registry events, surnames that have now disappeared, or rather, as he called them, old stuff.

I would never have imagined that Calogero Bau could somehow arouse such curiosity in me. He was a good man, no doubt about it, humble and friendly, but he certainly never looked like someone who could discuss such specific and particular topics with me. But he managed to intrigue me incredibly. I even took the trouble of breathing the passive smoke of his umpteenth cigarette and, outside the bar, we went for a walk in Piazza San Giacomo. For a moment I caught a glimpse of my father sitting at the Circolo dei Maestri Artigiani, reading the Gazzetta del Sud. It was in that brief moment that I felt truly at home. Calogero Bau spoke to me again about the records. Actually, he couldn't tell me much more, but it didn't spoil my burning and inquisitive desire to check the papers he had told me about. At dusk, I picked up my father from his last evening chores, and together we made our way home. As soon as we were out of the door, however, thanks to the clear sky, I was assailed by an uncontrollable desire to go towards the Mount of Rafa.

From there, the view is unparalleled at any time of day, but the Rafa evening is pure poetry! At sunset, the sun gives way to the moon and the stars, and yet, before it dies, it manages to ignite the view of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aeolian Islands looming in the distance. The islands seem on the verge of being swallowed up by the waters, but they never drown. They remain in constant balance, as if protected by a celestial pact that has placed them there forever. Well, I know what the truth is: those islands are us, exiled children of this land, now detached from it. So close to our hearts but so far away from our bodies that we can only touch each other every now and then. One day it happened that we, the exiles, were cut off from our roots, because of the unfair fate that has condemned this land and its children for at least two centuries now.

A dark will, entirely devoted to evil, that turns us into islands of exiles. In the North, in Germany, in the USA, in Australia. Small, large islands of children stolen from their mother island.

An archipelago of lonely souls.

TRUTHS

I am sure that one day I will discover the hidden reason why the same brand of coffee, drunk in the South, shoots into your body a dose of caffeine that seems three times stronger than in Lombardy. Maybe it's the water, the air, or some strange mental conception, but the effect of a sip is like that of a bucket of ice-cold water suddenly thrown in your face.

Calogero Bau was on time. After the usual coffee and cigarette, we walked towards the records office. During the short walk, the now crumbling silhouette of the church of Trungali appeared in the distance, bringing back the nightmare of the previous day. It had all felt so real that I shuddered with fear at the mere memory.

The record offices were housed in a cold and damp basement; I didn't think much has changed since the last time. The sun never shines, and it's practically on the outskirts of town. I don't envy the people who work there any more than I did back then.

At least, waiting for me now was Bastiano Montagna, who, besides being a dear old friend of mine, I discovered was also an employee of that office.

We greeted each other affectionately, he already knew I was coming, and after a few chats about the good old days, he led me to the room where they kept the papers dating back to the 19 century. There I found birth and death certificates, marriage registers, various other loose documents, and many loose packages. Strictly speaking, the official registers were almost all in folio forms, a typical format for that era. They were in binders with ties on each side of the folder, and the year marking each record was on the front, written with a blue pencil.

I sat down and started flipping through the acts and documents. Almost all of them had a pre-printed form, and the blanks were filled in by hand.

I picked a year at random, 1856. The cursive handwriting appeared to be graceful, and I realised at once that the person who had filled in these registry documents had learned calligraphy at school, a luxury for moneybags at the time. In fact, from the signatures on the acts, I learned the mayor of the time was also a civil registrar and had drawn up the registers.

I was already aware that, at that time, my Galati was only “Galati” without the appellation “Mamertino” which had been added in 1912¹, but I didn't know it belonged to the district of Patti. Not bad. However, I stumbled across some pleasant facts.

I discovered that the town encompassed part of the current neighbourhoods; some surnames were not yet common while others had been lost over time. I read about the existence of a particularly prolific textile industry, so much so that many women under the entry “employment” were in fact “spinners”.

Along with the regular registers, some years had an extraordinary part called dei proietti attached. I didn't even know what the word proietti meant.

From a quick search on my phone, I discovered that proietti were simply foundlings, babies abandoned at birth for various reasons: poverty, misery, or, alas, just because they were unwanted. To provide a solution to this phenomenon in a dignified and Christian manner, the council of Galati employed a certain Anna Guarnera as “midwife and devout caretaker of the rejected babies”.

In the Panetteria neighbourhood there was a foundling wheel for the unwanted babies and a warning bell.² When the bell rang, Anna Guarnera, the devout receiver, was awakened and alerted of an abandoned baby. She would rush to pick them up, look after them until morning, and then go to the Town Hall. Here, along with the mayor and a few witnesses, the child's health was briefly checked and, finally, officially registered. On the same day, the priest of the Mother church, at the first mass, gave the baptism, choosing a name decided on by those present – unless the baby was with a card suggesting a specific name.

The register of foundlings, therefore, listed every newborn found alive or, unfortunately, dead. Most of the records were filled in by hand in the same graceful cursive,³ making some parts hard to read but still clear.

Giacomo Maggiore, Salvatore Mundi, Giulia Condelli, Caterina Fragale, Anna Santalucia, were only some of the invented names given to foundlings at the time of registration, for lack of any other information.

I left the record office at about 11.45 a.m. The registers contained the same information, except for the names and little else. After all, I thought they were just registers of births and deaths, not very different from today's ones.

Back home, I found the table set. The cold had made me burn a lot of calories and, even before the whole family had arrived, I greedily devoured countless hot and crispy cro-quettes and thistle fritters, whose delicious smell I still remember.

After lunch, exhaustion set in, but I didn't have time to doze off, because around a quarter to four, I woke up by a message from Bastiano Montagna. He asked me if he could put the registers I had consulted away or if I had stopped by to look at something else. But what else was there to look at? Indeed, I recalled a few loose bundles piled up without any specific dates. The cold had perhaps dampened my curiosity too, but I decided to indulge in another afternoon of study.

At half-past four, I went to the records office again.

I had no intention of taking any more mouldy boxes out of the shelves, as they were damp to the point of disintegration. They were stored in a room lit by a dim and flickering lamp. I imagined that the stale air was also damaging the electrical cables, so I helped myself with the torch on my phone.

The was a mess all over: boxes were packed with acts, inheritance records, collections of Bourbon decrees, shredded codes, collections of laws, statutes, concessions, private contracts.

Bastiano brought me a beautiful little book on parchment. He took it from a box of church books, or so he told me. There was indeed a wooden box stored in a dark corner containing contracts, deeds of gift, wills, legacies, in short, a series of random documents, but related to liturgical offices and ecclesiastical matters and not to Municipal correspondence.

There were also missal, prayer books, an eighteenth-century “Importanti discorsi per l’esercizio delle bona morte” by a certain Giuseppe Antonio Bordoni, a Latin text, “Epitome thoelogiae moralis ad confessariorum examen expediendum”, by Michele Manzo published in Naples at the printing house of Pasquale Tizzano (dated 1836), “Ristretto di mistica dottrinale” by Father Giannotti da Perugia (mid 18 century), a great collection of selected sermons by Father Da Loiano published in Naples in 1827.

I was particularly struck by a series of biblical tomes with parchment covers and gilt tooling on the spine, belonging to Sacred Scripture is just the vulgate in Latin and vulgar with the explanations of the literal and spiritual meaning taken by the Holy Fathers and by ecclesiastical authors by Le Maitre de Sacy priest published in Naples in 1786 by Gaetano Castellano. Many volumes were missing, also because this work appeared colossal.

At first glance, the complete collection could have consisted of at least forty volumes. I saw only a dozen, but they were enough to lead me to a leading discovery. At least those texts – but I assumed the other church books as well – were all from the vanished Abbey of Sant'Agata di Galati, which had once housed an order of Poor Clare nuns.

I noticed the same disturbing handwritten note inside each of the remaining tomes:

Sor Clara Rosa Girgentani Custos Veritatis⁴

What truth could this Poor Clare from Agrigento be the keeper of? I could only hope to learn something from the other tomes. I took them out of the box one by one and placed them on the desk; who knows how long they had been in the dark!

There were twelve of them, some of them incredibly well preserved, such as volume XIII containing the two books of the Parapolimeni, or volume XIV of the prophets Ezra, Nehemiah, and Tobit. However, other volumes were in a poor state, due to the humidity they had been exposed for who knows how many years, and that has increased their deterioration.

After a first reading, I slumped in the chair, tired, because even just reading those pages for ten minutes caused me a certain amount of effort. The letters were mostly small, perhaps to make the book more tiny and pocket-sized, and some of the handwritings were very different from today's style (the letter “s”, for example, was printed in a font more similar to a modern “f”). The sheets, wrinkled and thin, were damp and almost stuck together.

I felt drained but struck by the thickness of one of the tomes; it was two different shades of colour, the first half being more in keeping with the chromaticity of the book and the second half being darker and more worn. I opened the text. It was Tome X of the New Testament containing St. Paul's Epistle II to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the Galatians.

I was stunned.

Unlike the handwritten note on the other texts, this one had a rectangular cut-out that read “Ex Libris u.J.d. a. Raymundi M.Musumeci Paroch. s.J.b. Syracusis”.

Touching it, I realised that it was a paper scroll that had been laid out in a second moment. Exposing the page slightly to the sun, I noticed something written under that piece of paper. But at the time, I could not mess with the text too much to free the hidden writing, nor could I consult it. Employees were hanging around my desk, and I could attract their attention. Besides, detaching the paper without damaging the writing underneath required painstaking work and tools that I did not have with me.

As dusk fell, it became dark, and it was time to leave. And yet, my curiosity was eating me. Under the pretence of putting the tomes back in the wooden box, I returned to that dark room. The other volumes returned to their long rest, while

Tome X “decided” to come with me.

I was unfair, and I am to blame, but after so long, I confess that I would do it again.

εὕρηκα (EUREKA)

To remove the paper without compromising the writing underneath, I thought of a particular technique. I heated some water in a small pan, and, with a brush stolen from my niece, I moistened the surface of the leaflet.

The paper was similar in size to those cards attached to wedding favours. Despite my evident clumsiness in all things that involve good craftsmanship, I carefully managed to re-move the addition.

Once I removed the delicate piece of paper, I immediately proceeded to blow-dry the uncovered surface, still very wet, with a hairdryer so as not to melt the ink and undo all the work done – sometimes YouTube tutorials come in handy. And this is what emerged:

Sicut prediximus et nunc iterum dico: Si quis vobis evangelizaverit praeter id, quod accepistis, anathema sit.⁵

I did not fall into the trap of believing that it was just the clerical pseudo-dread of a cloistered nun. I strongly felt a connection, a common thread which, first through Calogero Bau and then through Bastiano Montagna, had led me to that tome.

I transcribed the sentence as it was on Google. It may have been a trivial, cheap, and unscholarly method, but in the end, the search engine did its job in full. The Latin inscription was a verse from Letter of Paul to the Galatians, the same epistle held in the second part of that tome. The similarity between the words Galatians and Galàti immediately jumped out at me.

What was that sentence then? A revelation? A warning? A clue?

Today I would merely call it a gateway. The hidden and arcane entrance to a story that, even today, I do not feel like defining “tragic” because that would be trivial, nor “romantic” because that would not be exhaustive.

Following that inscription, I then opened the tome to the Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Galatians. But to my great surprise, the pages of the epistle were missing, completely removed. In place of the Pauline epistle, a manuscript booklet had been carefully and meticulously placed.

In its original form, this booklet was supposed to be slightly big. However, the Poor Clare nun reduced its size by carefully cutting the margins to camouflage it better within Tome X so that they would fit perfectly into the new book, transforming it into a sort of book within a book.

Only by carefully looking at the back of the tome, could you discern the different colours of the first original part and the subsequent addition. But I had no merit in this discovery, since only by luck I drop my eyes on that book which, placed randomly among the others, revealed that small, different detail. That tome of the Bible concealed within it a handwritten diary.

In the following days, the reading and analysis of what I had discovered utterly captivated me. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the events that unfolded before my eyes, and, at the same time, I began to frantically search for evidence, proofs, and writings that would give me further knowledge of the facts reported in that diary. I went several times to the State Archives of Palermo, to the Regional Library, to the Episcopal Curia; at some point, I was forced to rent a room at the Panormos B&B, a few steps from the Politeama Theatre.

It was from there that, every morning, I looked for some news, some clue, grasping onto the little historical information in the diary. With only a few days left before my return to Lombardy, I never got a break. I quickly set up a vast research network through my contacts in the field of old books and post-Risorgimento Sicilian history.

Rachele Borghese could not take much more of me. She was the young owner of Le pagine d'incanto, in Chiaramonte Gulfi, an antique book shop of which I was and still am an affectionate customer and which on many occasions had supplied me with rare and curious texts on Sicilian history.

I shyly confess that I stressed poor Rachele at all hours of the day and, in some cases, even at night to get news about possible bibliographic discoveries on the subject. I aroused – I imagine – the wrath and antipathy of the young husband to whom I promised to give a copy of this text as a present, together with a bottle of new olive oil from my land, an apology for my pressing demands.

I entrusted the IT investigation instead to my brotherly friend Salvo Lecce, who spent many nights in Milan on online archives, regional OPACs, and inter-library services searching for data or texts that might be helpful to me. The nightmare was back. I took again a path bristling with brambles and nettles, but this time it was not the rage of a wild sow that was chasing me but the thirst for truth.

I only hoped that I would not slip again because I knew perfectly well how treacherous the ground of history was.

A DIFFERENT GOSPEL

The hidden diary was preceded, in turn, by a short incipit written by a female hand:

Sister Clara Rosa,

Abbess of the Convent of Santa Agatha of the Daughters of Santa Clara of Assisi in the town of Galati, at the dawn of this new year 1866 AD., I place here the writings that I was given to keep, in memory of the courageous deeds of Giovanni Darco. He was condemned in absentia by the laws of the Kingdom of Italy for rebelry, sedition and desertion, murder and theft, and gang robbery since 1863 and still vehemently wanted in these mountains and elsewhere.

Like a dear and secret son, I take care to keep it as an everlasting testimony of the real facts that happened and that I understood through direct words and also through the words of others as they really happened and not as history has written, keeping my word to hand down the memory of a human battle of a son of this land of Galati, that bravely opposed the new occupation of old masters, that now threaten also our sacred vows and ecclesiastical institutions, without fear of human judgment and even more of that of God to which they will one day submit unavoidably.

It happened that in the past year, around the third ten days of April the Bersaglieri⁶ posted in the streets of this city and around it an edict announcing the final liberation of the Nebrodi Mountains from the band of the rebel Giovanni Darco. He had kept at bay the military of the new kingdom for more than two years, at the point to require the presence on the island of a military delegation from Piedmont.

This dispatch, published widely and posted as a threat and a warning on the walls of all the towns in the district, read:

“The Royal Delegation congratulates the Royal Carabinieri, the Bersaglieri, and all the faithful and honest people who, since the birth of the rogue band of outlaws headed by the rebel Giovanni Darco and created by him, have served the Sovereign King and the Constituted Authority. The perseverance and invaluable courage of the soldiers finally overcame the criminal gang nesting in the Nebrodi hills. The fugitives and their associates have until the end of the tenth day – from the date of this proclamation – and the opportunity to surrender unarmed and in peace. After this period has elapsed without success, the remaining perpetrators, and those of them who are subsequently arrested and sentenced will be sentenced to death by public hanging.”

Even within these strong and sacred walls, the echoes of those words also displayed at the entrance of the Mother Church reached me, and, the following night, I recited a prayer for the victims' souls of both factions.

A few days later, when the priests of some neighbouring churches had gathered at the Church of the Assumption⁷ and waters settled a little, Don Nofrio Cletofonte, archpriest of Nicosia, also a wanted man, sneaked up on me and, asking to see me – to my astonishment –, placed this diary in my hands, affirming that I was chosen by God and the author to receive, keep and protect it. Eight days later, the archpriest was taken by the Bersaglieri and shot in the public square with twelve other rebels. I guarded this booklet with delight and curiosity and read it all in one breath in my room.

Now that I fear for my life and feel my end near, I have decided to protect it here, hidden among the letters to the Galatians, as tracers of the real events that took place in the land of Galàti, of a brave fight for freedom, hoping that one day it will be held in honest hands. They will finally bear immortal witness to the light of truth against the sad darkness of lies.

It suddenly became clear that this opening had been written by the same hand that had affixed the handwritten note on all the other volumes – Sor Clara Rosa Girgentani Custos Veritatis. Then in Tome X had indicated how to unravel the mystery by inserting that verse of St. Paul, hidden by the scroll. Sister Rosa wanted to draw attention to that work – Sacred Scripture is just the vulgate –, and then direct interest precisely to the Letter to the Galatians and then to the diary that she had so skilfully concealed.

It was clear that this booklet had been the object of a ruthless hunt, and I immediately began to read it hungrily. It was, as mentioned, a diary written by Giovanni Darco (or D'Arco), the rebel at the head of the reckless group, which was the subject of the edict referred to by the nun in the beginning.

I did not immediately realise what testimony I had in my hands. And yet, for a moment, I had the same impression and felt the same emotion as when, as a child, after a heavy snowfall, I was preparing, with immense privilege, to be the first to run through fresh, soft, unexplored snow.

As I read on, I also found some letters. I realised on reading them that they were only copies. There were scratches and erasures, some words had been replaced with others, some parts had been completely erased, and there were small additions here and there. I soon realised that the letters that delivered to the addressee (the noblewoman Eufemia Celesti) had obviously been copied in good style and on a different sheet of paper, so much so that after each rough copy, I noticed the tearing of the following pages. The ones where the letter had probably been transcribed in fair copy.

I was surprised to learn that Giovanni Darco, a rebel who had gone into hiding at a very young age, was incredibly well educated. In those days, illiteracy was common; many rebels did not even know how to read their bounty or even their names posted on the walls of towns and villages as wanted men. This man, on the contrary, had good language skills, and I soon discovered how he learned.

During my stay in Palermo, Rachele Borghese had a large package sent to me by express parcel containing a General Formulary of all Judicial Acts by Luigi Tirrito, published in Palermo in 1859, an impressive Collection of the Laws and Royal Decrees of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, issued for the adjustment of the Real estate Registry office in Sicily drawn up in Palermo in 1856, the Statutes of the Civil Administration in Sicily of 1857 and above all The Proclamations of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies conquered by Garibaldi and subsequent edicts, published by the Fibreno Printing House in Naples in 1862.

Rachele was unable to find anything on the personal events of the rebel Giovanni Darco, but studying the Bourbon laws and Garibaldi's subsequent pro-dictatorship decrees helped me understanding the legislative, social and human context in which these events took place.

Surprisingly, however, the biggest news came from Calogero Bau. I had involved him – without any commitment and with little hope – in the search for any personal records concerning Giovanni Darco without being able to offer him any information other than his name – was it the real one? – and one evening, while I was still at the Panormos, he called me. He had found him! It took me a while to understand. He told me that he had sifted through all the registers from 1828 onwards and, finally, under number five of the extraordinary register of foundlings for the year 1839, there was a record of the discovery of an infant with handwritten notes on the back which he took care to scan and email to me.

I read it with greedy anticipation:

Extraordinary register of foundlings

Number 5

The year 1839, on the 30th of the month of March before us, Dr. Michelle Emmanuele Mayor and Civil Status Officer of the Municipality of Galati, District of Patti, Province of Messina, came Mrs. Anna Guarnera of 48 years of age, a midwife by profession, resident here in Galati, who introduced us a child who declared that he was found in the public wheel of the Panetteria neighbourhood, today at eight o'clock, of which she does not know the mother and the father.

We recognised him at the apparent age of a few hours, with no marks or signs on his body wrapped in rags, to which we gave the name of Giovanni D'Arco. The above-mentioned declaration and presentation have been written in the presence of Giuseppe Papotto of 42 years of age, a shoemaker by profession, resident here in Galati, and Giacomo Anzalone of 38 years of age, a farmer by profession, resident here in Galati, witnesses intervening to the present document together with Mrs. Anna Guarnera above mentioned.

The present document, which we have drawn up, has been registered in the current register, read to the declarant and the witnesses, and on the day, month, and the year previous signed by us having declared the witnesses not to know how to write.

Michelle Emmanuele Mayor

Giacomo Anzalone witness

Giuseppe Papotto witness

Therefore, the rebel Giovanni Darco was a foundling almost certainly born in Galati the night of March 30, 1839, and left in the public wheel. A series of short handwritten notes on the back of the page read:

11 January 1863. Recognised as a deserter, lacking a military exemption, he was sentenced to five years in prison.

9 June 1863. Guilty of murder and for having formed an armed band, he is an outlaw in the Nebrodi mountains as a rebel named Giovanni Darco, previously sentenced in absentia to capital punishment.

Then nothing else.

Who had made those brief notes and why? Some government official? The Bersaglieri? The handwriting was not of Mayor Michele Emmanuele; moreover, there was nothing else that could help me, but this confirmed the authenticity of what had been found and the proper precautions taken by Sister Clara Rosa in keeping that diary so carefully and secretly.

The foundling from Galati, Giovanni D'Arco, had escaped the conscription imposed by the pro-dictatorship government and had gone into hiding. In little more than five months and at only twenty-four years of age, he had lost an apostrophe but had become the rebel named Giovanni Darco.

Every piece was falling into place.

I spent the last day in Galati. Having taken pictures of every page of the text, I rushed to the archive to see Giovanni Darco's birth certificate in person and immediately afterward put the tome containing the diary back in its original position. I was slightly saddened, thinking that it was destined to fall victim to the humidity, but my honesty and love for my country prevailed.

I have reported below what I read myself, without any comment or remark. I have only explained difficult and obsolete words and tried smoothing out the language and writing in the harsher parts. I could not explain then and still cannot explain up to this day where such good fortune came from. However, to have nothing to blame me for, I have made myself a mere executor of an order that I immediately felt was paramount and clear: to give light to this story, simply for what it was, to enhance its truth, cleansing it, after more than two centuries, of the “different gospel” that has been preached.

Just as those who wrote, protected, and safeguarded it would have wanted, at the cost of their own lives.

I apologise in advance if I have not succeeded.

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