The Forbidden Book

I didn’t grow up or get educated in Italy, so if I was going to unravel this family mystery, I had a LOT of catching up to do. I couldn’t in a vacuum figure out what had actually happened in that room in March of 1927 if I didn’t understand what led up to it, and people are shaped by their environment, so I had to learn about the world that Nada and Enea move through.

But first, I had to get my hands on that damn book!

It wasn’t hard to find out what the title was. One web search with Nada’s name did the trick.

L'eredità di Saffo (1908). Saffo’s legacy or inheritance.

Soft Cover, L'eredità di Saffo (1908), Giovanni Maria Mataloni

Oh boy. No wonder the book made my super conservative grandmother so uncomfortable. Maybe writing the book wasn’t Nada’s biggest sin after all, in my grandmother’s eyes. I tried asking her once while she was still alive whether Nada was homosexual, but she pretended not to hear me, which told me everything I needed to know about what SHE thought the answer was.

I went on Amazon to see if I could buy a copy of this famous book, but of course I came up short. I live outside of Washington, DC, not far from the vast Library of Congress, so of course I thought they might have a copy.

No joy.

Italian online bookstores: Zip. Antiquarian bookstores: Nope.

I knew the book existed because I could find articles and studies people had written about it since as far back as the seventies, but where the hell was it?

The search made me wonder what exactly my grandmother could have meant when she said her aunt asked her father to burn her books, and whether that could have something to do with their scarcity. It also made me wonder who exactly she got that story from.

I had always assumed she had heard the story first hand. She was alive when Nada died, after all, but she was only nine years old. Her father would follow his sister to the family crypt just a few years later, when she was thirteen.

So what did she hear? And who did she hear it from?

Could my great-grandfather really have gone into detail on this story with his pre-adolescent daughter? Or did she get this second hand from her older siblings?

My grandmother was the youngest of six, and her oldest brother was a full twenty years older than her, so it’s entirely possible she heard the story from him, or from one of her sisters who were eighteen years and fifteen years older than her, respectively.

By the time I started really thinking about all this, my grandmother and all her siblings had already passed away, and I was too scared to ask their kids - my father’s cousins - for fear that they would forbid me from going any further. I worried they would have the same religiously-motived prejudices my grandmother had.

It took a while, maybe six months or so, but I finally figured out how to check the catalog for the Italian library system. And I finally found the book.

There are four copies in total held in Italian libraries, and since my search began in 2020, one more has popped up at an antiquarian bookseller. I would buy it, but it’s a re-bound copy stripped of the original cover and the bookseller is asking 900 Euro. It’s a lot to pay for a family memento.

And the cover is the most important part.