Trio by Dacia Maraini

 Trio

by Dacia Maraini is a quick reading. It reports the correspondence between two friends who shares the same man: Agata is the wife of Girolamo; Annuzza the lover. Grown up as big friends, and having shared beautiful moments together, after all the two of them don't mind. I mean: for sure Agata is not happy of this relationship of her husband, but happy that the betrayal is with Annuzza, someone she respects a lot, and vice versa.

We are in Sicily, Messina and the year is the one of the terrible plague started in may 1743: it killed half the population of the city and was accidentally brought by a little ship with wagons of beautiful textiles from Greece. 

At the arrival, the guards asked for the numbers of the members on board: they had to be 12, but after all they were just 11. 

Why? The reason? the guards asked.

The captain of the ship told to the guards that the sailor died because of a heart attack. 

For several reasons, the guards decided of putting all the crew under quarantine: a quarantine is called in this way because people hadn't to leave the ship for 40 days. But it happened that after two days also the captain fell sick and died, like other members of the crew: it was PLAGUE! And the plague escaped from the ship for entering in the city: maybe also the guards fell sick while they were controlling the ship; who can knows?

For sure of great help for the expansion of the pestilence were rats, via fleas: it became a devastation.

Who could escape away from the city, did it, as in the case of these two ladies. Story repeats itself: rich people, or people with two houses also in this historical moment prefer to escape away from the city, searching for the help of a tranquil countryside, where they can be sure that the contagion is less less virulent and not expected massively as in the city.

The correspondence between the two ladies is beautiful, plenty of good touch of culture, sharing informations, daily life, difficulties in finding food, guests arrived at home, and then fell sick, with the chronicle of a pestilence that will leave the two ladies skeptical, continuing to procrastinate their return in the city with their respective families.

At that time plague yes, was a known calamity, but it wasn't still defined the main vehicle of transmission: there were many suppositions; plague is transmitted thanks to a bacteria, and certain areas of the world have still cases of bubbonic plague: I discovered that there are certain plagues in grade of killing in one day an individual, and that, although this one is an illness known from centuries, no one has discovered a real treatment, although it responds well at the use of tetraciclines. I found the main thematic of this book weird. These women were very modern for sharing a man without difficulties: anyway this correspondence is a good portrait of the old and remote Sicily.

Beautiful.

Highly recommended.

Anna Maria Polidori