Yet the real man was a mesmerizing figure who inspired Machiavelli's classic The Prince. During the brief space of time when he occupied the stage, he shocked and stunned his contemporaries with his lofty ambitions and daring, becoming the most feared, hated, and envied man of his day. By 31 he was dead: his story assumes the proportions of Greek tragedy.

    We meet them as fresh-faced children, follow them through adolescence, see them as mothers struggling through series of pregnancies, and know them as burnt-out grandmothers at forty. In a time when most of their men have been forced to leave for the factories of the industrial North, the women remain behind, working in the fields under the broiling summer sun, enduring hunger and lack of privacy and desperation, sometimes scheming to break free, always keeping life going.The author forces her "raging fear of social myths and the tragic, shambling chaos their manipulation can create," a fear born out of her long, firsthand knowledge of her subject. She writes as a woman who has won the trust of the diffident, cautious women she has lived among in the mountainous villages of Lucania, evolving a rapport that has given her an extraordinary understanding of their interior lives. The result is one of those rare books that, as Paul Bailey wrote in The New Statesman of Torregreca, "makes us proud to belong to the human race."(jacket)