Fontamara is one of the Italian classics of the twentieth century. It was written in 1933 and was well-known in translation before it could be published in Italy. This Everyman edition features an introduction, a chronology of Silone’s life and times, extensive notes and an afterword by Michael Foot.
The impoverished, desolate mountain regions of the Abruzzo during Mussolini’s reign provide the backdrop for the three greatest novels by Ignazio Silone, one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. In Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow, Silone narrates the struggles of the cafoni, the farmers and peasants of his native Abruzzo, against poverty, natural disasters, and totalitarianism.
The first novel in the series is a political fable that portrays the bitter trials of the villagers of Fontamara as they battle with landowners who have appropriated their only source of water. First published from his exile in Zurich in 1933, and banned in his own country, the novel was translated into twenty languages and won Silone instant international literary fame.
“Fontamara is the most moving account of Fascist barbarity I have yet read: it is told simply, in the first person, as if by one of the peasants: how the villagers of Fontamara were driven by suffering at the hands of swindling landowners and corrupt administrators to a useless, tragic revolt against the state. It should be read to its merciless end.” – Graham Greene in the Spectator, 1934
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