Women of Messina by Elio Vittorini

First published:Le donne di Messina, 1949; revised, 1964 (English translation, 1973)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1945-1946; epilogue, 1949

Locale: An unnamed village in the center of Italy, at the base of the Apennine Mountains, not far from Bologna; various railroad cars as they travel throughout Italy

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an unnamed Italian whose father worked for the railroad
• Uncle Agrippa, the narrator’s uncle, an elderly man retired from the railroad
• Siracusa, Uncle Agrippa’s daughter who ran away from home during the war
• Ventura, (also known as
• Ugly Mug, ), a former Fascist officer and Siracusa’s lover
• Carlo the Bald, a former Fascist working as a domestic spy for the Italian government

The Novel

Women of Messina focuses on the social and moral aspects of life in Italy immediately after World War II. Elio Vittorini explores how his physically ravaged and spiritually defeated homeland recovers from the horrible experiences of war. An anonymous village becomes the focal point of the narrative, with a sizable subplot involving the train travels of Uncle Agrippa.

The commune-like village of war refugees and their families creates itself quite by accident. When a truck carrying a large group of refugees stalls and cannot be restarted, a member of the group disembarks and decides to settle in a destroyed village which he can see in the distance. Weary of traveling without a set destination, several other refugees join the first man, called Thorn. Among the first to leave the truck is Thorn’s best friend, Whistle. Whistle will eventually be considered the unofficial mayor of the small village because of his ability to see all sides of an argument and to sum up matters well.

While the village is gradually being made inhabitable, the narrative switches focus to Uncle Agrippa’s travels. Agrippa converses with everyone who appears friendly on the trains and tells them the story of his lost daughter, his only child. This daughter, Siracusa, left home during the war, supposedly to seek adventure, or at least a sense of community that her home lacked. Agrippa, a widower, carries pictures of his daughter to aid in finding her, but they are mostly from her childhood and she is now a grown woman. The narrator emphasizes that Agrippa searches in a haphazard and often useless manner for Siracusa; the elderly man is actually enjoying his travels through Italy and the sense of purpose his search gives him.

Also on a search is Carlo the Bald, whom Uncle Agrippa knows from the train routes. Carlo, a former Fascist, works for the new Italian republican government, reporting unlawful activities. His interest focuses on the unnamed village and its inhabitants, who sell scrap metal for money. These scraps are from ruined war machinery scattered across the land and are technically the property of the Italian government. Carlo hopes to dissolve the village by arresting or scaring away Ventura, who seems to be at its spiritual center. Carlo the Bald had served as a minor officer for the Fascist republic with Ventura; he hopes that some form of blackmail will cause Ventura to leave the village.

The narrative shifts to the early stages of growth in the small village, emphasizing the unplanned nature of its development. The former peasants and partisans (for they are a mixed group, representing all Italy) first clear the land. They build primitive housing, often using the bases of partially erect buildings from the original settlement. The people, numbering seventy-nine in the early months of the community, sleep in a half-destroyed church.

In September of 1945, one of the original villagers comes back to survey her homeland. Her name is Antonia, and her small horsecart quickly becomes the prized possession of the commune. Since everyone possesses the land and tools in common, the villagers use the cart for the good of all. Eventually, parts for an abandoned truck are brought to the village on the cart from the nearest city; soon, the community enjoys the luxury of a motor vehicle to bring larger supplies from the city. Meanwhile, Antonia has brought back to the village many peasant refugees who were its inhabitants when it was destroyed. With these additions, the population of the community swells to 150. All the inhabitants work hard during the summer and fall to rebuild the area and to plant a crop of wheat. When the winter sets in, however, the farmers among the group try to rest, as was their former pattern in life. Disputes arise when the former city men and factory workers in the village, notably Whistle, try to make the farmers work all winter long. An informal register which the narrator has found records the psychological repercussions of these events in the community. A small number of people leave during the first winter, some for a brief time and others permanently. Even Thorn takes the horsecart and is gone for five months.

The community survives these upheavals, and the wheat crop is a good one. A generator is completed in April, bringing electricity to the village. During the summer of 1946, an unofficial but large posse of men comes looking for Ventura because of some unspoken war crimes on his part. They are unable to capture him, and Carlo the Bald’s plan to crush the village by removing Ventura from it fails. In an epilogue to the novel, set in 1949, the narrator describes Ventura, a less vital and spirited man than he was a few years earlier, at home in the village with Siracusa. She remains unfound by her father Agrippa, who still travels the train lines in 1949.

The Characters

Vittorini leaves his major characters only partially defined. His main concern is with their psychological states, but these are often related by a narrator who is a vague, unnamed person. This narrator, who knows some things about village life as well as about Uncle Agrippa’s life, is an Everyman character. He seems to represent all of Italian life after World War II. He evaluates how daily living has changed from prewar times to 1945 and 1946. He feels nostalgia for the innocence and beauty of the simple way of life, close to the earth, that his nation lost during the war. He also misses his relatives who have died during the harsh war years; in this way, he resembles Vittorini himself.

Several interesting minor characters make appearances in the village and on the trains. One outstanding minor figure is Barberino, an old woman who is a visionary or seer. She can view scenes in detail at great distances that no one else in the commune can discern; she may represent the best of old Italy looking forward to a new age. Among the villagers she befriends is Siracusa.

Siracusa is a strong woman who manages to live with the often remote and sometimes disturbed Ventura. Ventura keeps his past a secret from his lover, yet he is a powerful and quiet force in bolstering the morale of the villagers. He was an officer during the war on the side of the defeated Fascists, and he still commands respect among men by his bearing.

Two young partisans, known as Red Kerchief and Toma, are among the more active members of the commune. When the posse of young men comes searching for Ventura, Toma and Red Kerchief find old friends among them. Persuaded by talk of good jobs and modern luxuries in the cities, Red and Toma leave the village with these friends during its second summer.

A portion of the narrative is given over to a dialogue of voices of the villagers themselves. Several of the peasants—the Widow Biliotti, Elvira La Farina, Cataldo Chrisa, and Pompeo Manera—explain the differences that arose between them and the leadership of the village during the harsh first winter. The farmers tell of the lack of food, in large part brought about by a lack of planning. Whistle and other former city men, such as Ventura, Thorn, and Toma, explain how their psychology differs from that of the farmers. The voices Vittorini employs in this section are various and distinguishable; one person often picks up the thread of a tale after another has left off, providing a chain of events relating the community’s long, difficult winter.

The women of Messina, for whom this book is named, are the hardworking, sometimes unkempt peasant women who form the backbone of the village in its early days. They stand in sharp contrast to Carlo the Bald, a sneaking, conniving character who wishes to ruin the village. Carlo’s one good quality seems to be his tolerance of and friendship for Uncle Agrippa, which is shown in the epilogue. Carlo and Agrippa talk often of the village in its beginning days, although Agrippa has never seen it, and Carlo gains his information only by spying. In this epilogue, especially, Agrippa comes to represent the Italy of the past: a friendly, innocent, and warmhearted man, out of place among a newer, somewhat colder generation. Carlo fits in better with the new Italy, as he continues to inspect land for the Italian government; his kindliness in talking to Agrippa, who now often bores the other passengers, shows that he has some capacity for sympathy.

Critical Context

Women of Messina, in its revised form, was Vittorini’s last novel. He wrote it at the end of World War II and published it in Italy in 1949 but was disappointed with that version. He rewrote the book fourteen times, drastically changing its structure and plot. In 1964, he published what he thought was the final version of Women of Messina.

This novel is Vittorini’s longest, a large undertaking that he hoped would reflect all of Italian life in the postwar years. He wanted to capture the diversity, the charms, and the strengths of the Italian people as they heroically reclaimed their land from the horrors of Fascism and the ravages of war. Women of Messina includes several themes that the author analyzed in his earlier works, Il garofano rosso (1948, written 1933; The Red Carnation, 1952) and Conversazione in Sicilia (1941; In Sicily, 1948). Whereas these ideas received separate treatments earlier, they converge in Women of Messina in one all-encompassing setting. Vittorini handles his various materials well, but critics consider Women of Messina a flawed work that does not fully resolve conflicting ideologies or even its various artistic styles. Perhaps Vittorini wanted Women of Messina to be that way—a novel of diversity and some conflict, reflecting his view of Italian life in the late 1940’s.

Bibliography

Cambon, Glauco. “Elio Vittorini: Between Poverty and Wealth,” in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. III, no. 1 (1962), pp. 20-24.

Heiney, Donald. Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini, 1968.

Lewis, R.W.B. “Elio Vittorini,” in Italian Quarterly. IV (Fall, 1960), pp. 55-61.

Pacifici, Sergio. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, 1962.

Schott, Webster. “Elio Vittorini’s Hoping and Nonhoping,” introduction to Women of Messina, 1973.