The Night Falling

Author’s Note

The Night Falling is a work of fiction. Though the town of Gioia del Colle is real enough, and much of the historical detail is as accurate as I can make it, some events have been omitted, altered or imagined to fit the story, while – I hope – remaining true to the era and to the social and political landscape. I trust that those in the know will forgive this use of artistic licence. While key historical figures including Di Vittorio, Di Vagno, Capozzi and De Bellis were real people, all characters with significant roles in the story are entirely fictitious, including Francesco Molino, the man Clare sees beaten by a fascist squad in Piazza Plebiscito.

In September 1921, the socialist political leader Giuseppe di Vagno was assassinated as he gave a speech in Mola di Bari. His killers were rumoured, though not proven, to have been hired by the landowners and proprietors of Gioia del Colle. By the early months of 1922, two years’ hard-won progress made by the peasants’ unions and by socialist local government had been almost completely undone by the rise of fascism and its use of violence and intimidation to weaken opposition, culminating in the fascist March on Rome and the commencement of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in October 1922.

The six workers killed at Natale Girardi’s masseria on 1 July 1920 were: Pasquale Capotorto, Rocco Orfino, Rocco Montenegro, Vincenzo Milano, Vito Falcone and Vito Antonio Resta. I placed Paola’s lover Davide amongst their number for the sake of the story. For a comprehensive account of the incident, I recommend L’Eccidio di Marzagaglia, an article by Ermando Ottani, available online. Historical works concerning this era of Puglian history are hard to come by in English. I have found Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy by Frank M. Snowden (Cambridge, 1986) very useful for research purposes. For those who can read in Italian, La Memoria che Resta, edited by Giovanni Rinaldi and Paola Sobrero (Provincia di Foggia, 1981) is a moving collection of first-hand accounts of peasant life at the time.