Donna Francesca Savasta, intesa Ciccina

In this novel, set in 19th century Sicily, Ciccina is the original, irreverent and very modern protagonist of a story about adultery, brigands, and more or less licit love affairs that have been silenced.

Donna Francesca Savasta, nicknamed Ciccina, is a young working-class woman who is simple, possibly uneducated but definitely revolutionary in her boundless wisdom and pragmatism. She is a midwife in a remote mountain village and devotes herself to helping as best as she can the lives of poor, inexperienced young mothers and abandoned children. She does this according to a strict moral law – her own – among brigands who aren’t so very bad, parish priests who aren’t all that faithful to their vow of chastity, local vendettas, murders and disappearances.