Today we debut our first podcast, which is about the murder of a priest named Virgilio Costa in Imola, Italy in 1881, the sensational press coverage of his trial, and the novel it inspired, published in 1887: The Priest’s Hat, by Emilio De Marchi.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button here,

or going to this link:

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-f9c5a-1641d6e

And of course, we invite you to check out the novel itself, The Priest’s Hat!

In case you have trouble accessing the podcast, or just want to read the transcript, here is a text version:

Verbal Exchange Episode 1: True Crime, Fiction, and the First Italian Noir

Hello, and welcome to Verbal Exchange, a show about literary translation. My name is Steve Eaton.

Today I want to talk about a novel that has been called the first Italian crime novel, or the first Italian noir. Its title is Il cappello del prete, or in English, The Priest’s Hat. It was written by a man named Emilio de Marchi, and first published in installments, in 1887. Last year, an English translation of the novel, by myself and Dr. Cinzia Russi, was published by Italica Press, and I encourage you to download the free sample of the novel on your Kindle or e-reader and check it out.

But before we talk about De Marchi’s novel, I want to say a few words about the actual event, the actual murder, that De Marchi used as the basis of his story.

That story begins in the year 1881 in the town of Imola, in northern Italy, about forty kilometers southeast of the city of Bologna. In August of that year, a priest named Virgilio Costa, a man in his seventies who lived in Imola, suddenly vanished, and his family reported his disappearance to the police. Now, I’m going to describe what happened based on contemporary newspaper accounts. These accounts don’t always agree on the details, but the basic facts are these:

It took some time for the local authorities to determine what happened to Costa, but eventually suspicion fell on a local aristocrat named Count Alessandro Faella. Faella was a man in his forties, with a wife and child. He was a captain of artillery in the Italian army, and had served with distinction in Italy’s war of independence against Austria 20 years earlier. But he was also known as someone with lavish tastes, and a passion for gambling. He personally knew the priest, who was wealthy, and had previously lent the count money.

In October of 1881, two months after Virgilio Costa went missing, the grounds of Count Faella’s villa were searched, and Costa’s body was found. It was discovered at the bottom of a recently dug hole that was about 6 meters deep, or about 20 feet. Costa’s body was reportedly found standing upright in the hole, with his arms raised as though to protect himself from the heavy rocks that were being hurled down at him from above.  But according to the coroner’s report, although his body did show signs of severe injury from rocks, the cause of death was asphyxiation. He was apparently buried alive in the debris that was shoveled into the hole after the priest fell or was pushed into it.

Now, the police questioned a worker who had been hired by Faella to dig the hole. The worker had been told by Faella that the hole was to be used as a cistern for cooling wine, which would have been a very ordinary thing to do.

After the hole was finished, Faella dismissed the worker, and evidently had laid some flimsy material, like a thin reed mat, over the opening, and then disguised it by scattering straw over it.  Then he had apparently lured the priest into literally walking into his trap.

What was Count Faella’s motivation? Money. He was charged, not only with murder, but with forging an anonymous document sent to local authorities which claimed that Faella had left town indefinitely for missionary work, and had named Faella as executor of his estate. Faella had also forged Costa’s signature on bills of exchange (essentially checks) made out to Faella.

Faella said he was innocent. He told the police that someone else murdered Costa, and placed his body in Faella’s cistern in order to frame him. Faella said that he had found the body but hadn’t reported it, for fear of being falsely accused of the murder, and instead had decided to fill in the cistern and hide it.  Nevertheless, he was jailed, and his trial began in Bologna in February of 1882.

The trial of Count Faella for the murder of Virgilio Costa was front page news, not just in Bologna but all over Italy.

The February 19, 1882 edition of the Genoa newspaper L’epoca had an illustration taking up the entire front page, showing an imagined cross section of the cistern, with the priest trying to shield himself from the rocks raining down from above; the next day’s edition also had a large cover illustration showing workers pulling the priest’s body out of the cistern as police and investigators watch.

The weekly magazine Rivista Illustrata Settimanale of Milan had an article in its February 12 issue which began, “Today Italy is little concerned with politics; there are two topics that claim everyone’s attention, although very different: Count Faella and Sarah Bernhardt.” Sarah Bernhardt was the immensely popular French stage actress, who was touring Italy that year, so that gives us an idea of how gripped the Italian public was by this case.

And it wasn’t just news in Italy but across Europe. The Devon Evening Express, for example, included an article in its March 14 issue entitled, titled “A Mystery of Crime in Italy,” which began “All through the spring the Italian public has been eagerly interested in the trial for murder of Count Alessandro Faella. Day by day the gradual unwinding of the plot became more fearful and more complicated[….]The story is strange; no less so than the murder trials of the Renaissance which it recalls to mind, and the actor is difficult and complex in character.”

The news even hopped across the Atlantic and made it into American newspapers. In the March 18 issue of the Boston Pilot, an article appeared titled, “AN INTERESTING MURDER CASE. AN ITALIAN COUNT ACCUSED OF KILLING A PRIEST.” It contained a detailed account of the crime and discussed the upcoming trial.

But the news was already outdated. The editors of the Pilot were apparently unaware that back in Italy, the trial had already begun, and then abruptly ended, with the unexpected death of Count Faella on February 18. What happened? Well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Right now I want to jump ahead, to five years after Count Faella’s trial and death, and discuss the novel that was based on the murder of Virgilio Costa. That novel was called The Priest’s Hat, or Il Cappello del prete. It was written by Emilio de Marchi, and it debuted in the year 1887, the same year, incidentally, that the first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in the U.K.

Some of the details of the actual crime were changed in the fictionalized version. For example, the action was moved from Bologna in northern Italy to the southern city of Naples. Count Alessandro Faella became Baron Carlo Coriolano of Santafusca.  But the essential elements of the crime, its motivation and how it was planned and carried out, remained the same.

The Priest’s Hat was initially published in 43 installments, as daily supplements to the Milan newspaper Italia, in June and July of 1887.  The following year, it was published, again in installments, in a newspaper in Naples, as well as in book form.

 In recent times it’s been called the first Italian crime novel. The contemporary Italian crime writer Carlo Lucarelli wrote an afterword to a modern edition of novel, in which he states that the Italian noir genre began with The Priest’s Hat.

 In 1943, towards the end of Mussolini’s reign, a film adaptation was produced, and in the early 1970’s it was made into a 3-part miniseries on RAI, the Italian state television network. Those three hour-long episodes can be found today on YouTube, although the dialogue is in Italian, without subtitles. And in 2023, an English version of the novel, translated by Cinzia Russi and me, was published by Italica Press.

So that’s a brief history of the book, but now I want to talk about what, in my opinion, makes it special. If it had just been a retelling of a lurid crime with the names and places changed, I think it would have been a pretty forgettable novel. Certainly De Marchi’s intentions went well beyond simply capitalizing on a sensational true story. In the introduction he wrote for the bound version of the novel in 1888, he told his readers that in writing the book, he was conducting an experiment, with two goals. The first objective was, in his words, “To show whether it’s really necessary to go to France to obtain a so-called serialized novel, or if instead with a bit of good will, we ourselves can’t amply and with better judgement provide for the simple needs of our wider public.”

What did De Marchi mean by this, and why he is bringing France into the discussion? Well, we’ve said that The Priest’s hat was first published in a newspaper. This was a very common way to debut a novel in the nineteenth century, and indeed many of the novels we now consider masterpieces were first published this way. War and Peace, The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations, among many others, all began life in serial form in newspapers or journals. In Italian newspapers, these novels were typically not written by Italian authors, but were translations of works originally in French, English, or other languages.

An example of a very successful novelist of this period was the French author Xavier Montépin, who lived from 1823 to 1902. Montépin was a prolific writer, turning out something like 90 novels in the course of his career, and like successful writers of thrillers and romances today, he eventually employed ghost writers to do the writing for him. It was said that he turned out novels “au kilomètre,” or by the kilometer. And in fact De Marchi makes a mocking reference to Montépin in The Priest’s Hat. This is the point in the story after the priest has disappeared, and before his body has been found by the police. His murderer, Baron Santafusca, had hoped and expected that public interest in the priest’s fate would quickly fade away, but unfortunately for the baron, local newspapers have latched onto the case and are making all sorts of lurid speculations about what may have happened to the priest. Santafusca thinks to himself, “Vedi il sogno! vedi la stravaganza! vedi il romanzo di Saverio Montépin!” “What a dream! What an extravaganza! What a novel from Xavier Montépin!”

So our fictional killer didn’t think much of writers like Montépin, and neither did De Marchi himself. And that ties into his second goal for The Priest’s Hat, which he declared was “to conduct an experiment, to find out how much vitality and honesty and reason exists in this wider public, which is so often vilified, and declared to be a hungry beast, sated only by nonsense, filth, and naked flesh, and which our newspapers with a circulation of a hundred thousand copies feel required to feed with slop.”

When De Marchi talks about “the wider public” here, he is referring to working class folk who buy their newspapers from a street vendor, or who are illiterate and listen to their neighbors read the latest installment of a novel aloud. He felt that Italy’s newspapers treated these readers cynically, by feeding them with trashy potboilers, and assuming that they wouldn’t understand or appreciate real literature. De Marchi didn’t think that was true, and he wanted to prove it. And I believe this is why the novel was initially published in serial form, not just in De Marchi’s native Milan, but also in Naples.

De Marchi states in his introduction, “This Priest’s Hat, printed by two newspapers with different sensibilities in two cities at the extremes of Italy, Milan’s Italia and Naples’ Corriere di Napoli, has accomplished more than the author hoped for.”  When De Marchi refers to the “extremes of Italy” he’s not really talking about geographical location. Milan, which not coincidentally was the writer’s home town, was considered the cultural and intellectual capital of Italy, home to its banking industry, the La Scala opera house, and the center of its publishing industry, as it remains today. Naples on the other hand was thought of as the symbolic capital of southern Italy, which was associated with poverty, illiteracy, and crime. De Marchi aimed to demonstrate that readers in Naples would be just as receptive to a serious novel as those in Milan.

But he also believed that literature had a mission: to both entertain, and educate and improve, its readers. In his words, he sought to “nourish, within the excitement of their curiosity, some living feelings of justice and beauty, which elevate the soul.”

To give you an idea of De Marchi’s outlook, in 1887, the same year that The Priest’s Hat was published, he also published a book aimed at teenage boys, titled L’eta’ preziosa (“The Precious Age”), meant to advise and guide the young into becoming responsible adults. In the introduction he writes:

“I know that the biographies of many famous men tell tales of an unrestrained, lost youth, which doesn’t stop someone from attaining goodness and glory. In the hands of a young man these examples, without the necessary reflections, can cause misunderstandings and lead to bad consequences. I want to put them on guard against hasty decisions.”

So De Marchi was certainly successful in accomplishing his first stated goal, that of writing a popular serialized novel in Italian, instead of importing and translating one from abroad. What about his second goal, that of writing a work that is ennobling and uplifting? And if so, what moral lessons was De Marchi trying to impart?

To answer those questions, I would like to talk about what I think makes this novel special.

The most important ingredient that De Marchi adds to the true story of Count Faella and Virgilio Costa is that he tells the story through the eyes of the killer, as he tries to keep his crime a secret, and to shift suspicion elsewhere.

What sort of person is De Marchi’s Baron of Santafusca? Well, De Marchi describes him in the very first sentence of the novel:

“Baron Carlo Coriolano of Santafusca did not believe in God and still less in the devil, or even, though a good son of Naples, in witches or evil spells.”

And the author goes on to give the reader a brief history of Santafusca’s life, the life of a boy raised in a privileged, aristocratic family, a brave young soldier, now a middle-aged man who loves fine clothes, cigars, beautiful women, and gambling, and who has carelessly frittered away his inheritance. But I think the key to Santafusca lies in that first sentence. As we continue to see throughout the novel, he doesn’t believe in anything. Or rather, he believes only in himself. He tells he himself that morality is a meaningless abstraction, and that therefore any actions he takes to save his own skin and stay out of prison only confirm his own natural superiority.

This is Santafusca talking to himself, trying to convince himself that there’s really nothing wrong in murdering an innocent man, who in the novel is a priest named Don Cirillo:

“Cirillo the Priest was already a carcass consigned to death. Time would have destroyed little by little what the strength of a man destroyed in a moment. It was thus a question of months and days, which vanish into the great number of years, and are nothing over time without end.”

De Marchi also made an interesting decision with respect to the character of Santafusca’s victim.. While Don Cirillo is certainly an innocent victim, he’s not a very sympathetic character. He is an old man who has become wealthy through exploiting the poor and working people of Naples, by loaning money to those in financial distress. He himself lives in poverty, and he values the accumulation of money for its own sake, unlike the spendthrift Baron. But rather than using his money for doing good works, he believes that by leaving his money to charity after his death, he is paying for his own salvation.

I believe that De Marchi is saying that both the baron and Don Cirillo are wrong. Don Cirillo can’t buy his way into heaven. And Santafusca, in some way, will have to face the consequences for his murder.

What are those consequences?

You may remember that I spoke earlier about the abrupt end of Count Alessandro Faella’s trial in February of 1882. Faella was, or claimed to be, in poor health, too ill to attend his own trial. Before it could result in a verdict, he was found dead in his jail cell. The Rivista illustrata settimanale of Milan reported that a chemical test indicated that Faella had died of poisoning, presumably by his own hand.

Why am I telling you this? Have I spoiled the ending for you? No, because that’s not what happens to De Marchi’s Baron of Santafusca. If you want to know what happens to him, you’ll have to read the novel.

So far I’ve painted a pretty dark picture of this narrative about a selfish playboy murdering a miserly old priest. And there is a lot of darkness in this story. But there is also a lot of joy and humor. That joy comes from the important parts played by all of its other characters, servants and groundskeepers, policeman, journalists, fishmongers, barbers and tailors, the peasants who farm Santafusca’s ancestral lands, and many others. The Priest’s Hat functions as a love letter to the people of Naples, especially its poor and working-class people, precisely the kind of people De Marchi wrote this novel for.  

The most important of those other characters is an unassuming parish priest named Don Antonio. He is important to the novel for two reasons. First of all, in terms of plot, he unintentionally sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately lead the authorities to suspect the baron. Incidentally, that’s where the priest’s hat of the title comes into play. But more importantly, I believe it is through the unlikely person of Don Antonio that De Marchi intends to arouse, in his words, “living feelings of justice and beauty, which elevate the soul.” How he does that, well, I’d rather leave that for you to find out.

Again, the novel is The Priest’s Hat, by Emilio De Marchi, translated by Steve Eaton and Cinzia Russi, published by Italica Press, available in hard copy or Kindle versions on all the usual online booksellers.

This has been Verbal Exchange, and my name is Steve Eaton. I invite you to visit my blog at gardenofeaton.home.blog

I’m going to leave you now with a recording of the song “Santa Lucia.” This is a quite famous song. Its title refers to a neighborhood that runs along the bay of Naples, and in the novel it’s played and sung at a celebration. Here is the great Enrico Caruso performing Santa Lucia.

Goodbye.