Finding him absent, they go on a wild goose chase to find him. He sends the women to the estate of the Impresario, a wealthy fascist businessman who exerts political control over the region. However, they are ignorant of the fact that the mayor is now a fascist leader called a podesta. The women respond by protesting at the region’s capitol. Soon enough, the Fontamaresi men are astounded to see workers shifting the waterway. In order to trick them into agreeing to a plan that will only hurt them, he coerces them to sign a blank piece of paper, virtually gaining a blank legislative check. Pelino a Cavaliere, or Italian knight, comes to Fontamara and tricks the peasant class into endorsing a decree that agrees to shift the local waterway farther from the fields where they work. He compiles their words into a book, ostensibly the text of Fontamara.

They relay to him the history of their village. A writer visits Berardo Viola and his lover, Elvira, who live with Berardo’s son. The novel delves into the lives of these exploited people, showing how they formed solidarity and internalized a new political consciousness. An event in which a Fascist cohort called the Squadristi rapes a number of Fontamaresi women results in the proliferation of anti-Fascist literature through Italy.

The naive Fontamaresi, constantly exploited by the upper class, gradually grow conscious of the reality of fascism. Here, Fontamara’s citizens (the Fontamaresi) are engaged in a class struggle against the urban elites, the latter embodied by a man called the Impresario. It takes place primarily in a small, impoverished village, Fontamara, in southern Italy. For its incisive criticism of the Fascist party and its political effect on its readers, the novel was considered a piece of political propaganda. Written when Italian author and political activist Ignazio Silone lived in Switzerland after fleeing the fascist Italian state, Fontamara (1933) resonates with the widespread political anxiety of its time, foreshadowing the growth of fascism in Europe which culminated with Hitler’s regime and World War II.

Fontamara by Ignazio Silone