The Castle of Fratta by Nievo, Ippolito - 1958

Cambridge, Boston, USA: Riverside Press, 1958. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. 5.75 X 8.5. h/b 589 pages, condition is very good, some edge wear and tears to the DJ. The story centers around the ancient feudal family of Fratta, existing in a shabby aura of magnificence, while in the grass-covered courts and beneath the moldering towers of its fantastic castle is growing up the new generation that will replace it. Like War and peace, it is a vast epic of Europe in ferment, written when the events described still had the freshness of living memory. But it is very mush a Latin epic, filled with love, intrigue, and a tremendous appetite for life. One of the main protagonists in the drama is the city of Venice itself, in decadence, shame, and eventual hope of renascence in a united Italy: a symbol of past glory and future promise, of romance no less than political power. The author is fully as extraordinary as his novel. Born in Padua in 1831, Ippolito Nievo crowded as much incident into the brief thirty years of his life as into the broad canvas of his book. Poet, philosopher, dreamer, conspirator, and soldier, he wanted to live dangerously and is reported to have shielded Garibaldi with his own body at the battle of Calatafimi. He was lost at sea in 1861. The Castle of Fratta was written in a fury of creative effort in only eight months when the author was twenty-seven years old.