The “vast and populous novel” - as he himself defined it - was inspired by Pirandello's late nineteenth-century history of the Sicilian Fasci and the failure of the Bank of Rome, at the end of the Crispi era and in the context of collective disillusionment, which completely destroyed the hopes generated by Garibaldi's movement and the resulting national unification.
First published in part in «Rassegna contemporanea» in 1909, the novel then saw two other complete editions, in 1913 by Treves and in 1931 by Mondadori. Its breadth, its sub specie corporis reading of human history, and its meticulous linguistic weaving make Pirandello's historical novel a unicum within his corpus, as well as one of the most acute and painful testimonies of post-unification Italian history.
