The Malarazzas on "battered"the second chapter of the Ugo Barbara saga

Don’t be fooled by the cover, by that relaxing 1920s atmosphere that is the backdrop to a group of smiling, beautiful and elegant young people, their hair slightly ruffled by the Long Island sea breeze. In Malastrada the Montalto family faces situations that are anything but relaxing and their story is intertwined with that with a capital S also in this second volume of Ugo Barbara’s trilogyAGI journalist and writer of 7 novels before this one that just came out.
In the decades between the 19th and 20th centuries, precisely from 1881 to 1920, humanity certainly did not experience any peaceful period, and in every phase of those 40 years it faced, in Sicily as in the United States , epochal changes, marked by wars, violence and pandemics. Malastrada, like I Malarazza, is also a choral novel full of intertwined stories, twists, comparisons between social classes and generations.

Even though it is the sequel, however, it has a life of its own and contains within itself all the elements needed for a reader to immerse themselves in the story without having to regret too much not having known the first part in detail. Here too, at the center of the events of the Montalto family is the history of Italian emigration to Americawhich however, as in previous decades, is no longer that, however courageous, of first class travel by entire families, supported by wealth and an entrepreneurial spirit. Now it is the poor people who are emigrating, driven by poverty and hunger due to the crises that are taking place in their lands of origin, separating themselves from their families in order to support them from afar, with earnings from hard work in the fields, in the factories, in the ports. With them However, Sicily also exports crimethe one that precisely in this period begins to identify with the mafia. The popularity of Italians in America, the “Dago”, is affected, causing hostility that on several occasions reaches the point of hatred that leads to the most blind violence.

The references to current events, inevitable for those who write about what happens in the world every day, are different. The scourge of vine phylloxera, which struck European vineyards imported from the United States and which farmers struggled to deal with because this involved the eradication of healthy plants, it is reminiscent of xylella which in recent years destroyed all the olive trees in Salento. The distrust, racism and violence against Italian emigrants are not too different from those seen today in Europe against those arriving from Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. The difficulties of women in achieving equality and professional success have not been overcome at all, more than a century after what Malastrada says. The trenches and bombings of the First World War are revived in Ukraine and the Middle East. The Spanish flu pandemic, with its devastating consequences, has many features in common with that of Covid 19, which exploded almost exactly 100 years later.

Ugo Barbara confirms his ability to outline memorable characters, especially female ones, to intertwine “fictional” facts with historical ones, and to insert figures from real history into his fictional creation. The precision in the descriptions of places, customs, foods and habits, and in the construction of the dialogues give rise to hope for a transposition onto the screen. At the end of 686 gripping pages, one is still not tired and one hopes that the author does not make his readers wait too long for the third chapter of the Montalto saga.