The Patriot (piccolo Mondo Antico)

In the misty foothills above Lake Lugano, where the mountains of Lombardy meet the first tremors of revolution, a young engineer named Don Franco Maironi finds himself trapped between two worlds. He loves Luisa Rigey, a woman of modest means and fierce spirit, with an devotion that threatens everything his family name demands. But his grandmother, the imperious Marchesa Maironi, has other plans: she demands he marry for position, for legacy, for the preservation of a noble house that has already begun to crumble. As Italy stirs toward unification in the mid-19th century, the personal becomes strikingly political. Fogazzaro crafts a meditation on what it costs to remain true to one's heart when the weight of centuries presses down from every direction. The novel breathes with the atmosphere of a region caught between old Austria and a new Italy, between the piety of the past and the uncertain promise of the future. For those who savor the great Victorian triangulations of desire and duty, here is an Italian master working in the same moral terrain as George Eliot, though with a distinctly Mediterranean heat.