“Europe ends at Naples and ends badly. Calabria, Sicily and all the rest belong to Africa.” — Creuzé de Lesser, 1806

No geographical map distinguishes Montefalcione as being different from any number of isolated mountain villages in southern Italy. It has ancient customs and its own saints and feast days, like other villages. Yet Montefalcione in Campania is the setting for a unique meditation on family and the Italian Diaspora, reconstructing three generations of village life through myth, superstition, and the anecdotal history of the author’s own family, Iantosca.

Mezzogiorno is a unique mediation on family history and the Italian Diaspora. Author David Kerekes reconstructs three generations of family history and myth, with material drawn from anecdotal legacy and villagefolk. The book is steeped in the religious and superstitious culture in which the Iantoscas lived, which inevitably makes the work as much a piece of magical realism as it is biography, the family drama unfolding amidst a landscape of abject poverty, vicious landlords, feuds, curses and the hypnotic tarantella. It is a haunting world lost to the changing Italy of the twenty-first century.

Chapters

1. When entering the village of Montefalcione
2. Italy Iantosca 1955
3. The tradition of the chicken
4. Bread & labour
5. A slight earthquake
6. The evil eye
7. Duce, fascisti!
8. A dozen ricotta
9. Sanduccio’s gate
10. Jus sanguinis
11. Contraband
12. A fight at the wedding
13. The drowning of Martignetti’s wife & daughter
14. Montevergine
15. The election day quarrel
16. Natalina falls ill
17. Zi Minuccio, the agent for the village
18. Festa
19. A toast to Saravatico
20. Diaspora