---

By Idara Crespi

---

The assignment arrived on a Thursday in winter — a novel I was covering for a piece on recently reissued Italian fiction, the kind of thing a small Turin press had done a new edition of and a publicist had passed along. I was writing arts and culture, not books specifically. It seemed manageable.

The English translation published alongside the Italian was not incompetent. That would have been easier to name. It was careful and competent and perfectly legible, and in every paragraph it had made the choice that made the book easier to sell — which was also the choice that made the book smaller. The roughness of the Italian had been smoothed. The dialect had been standardized. The social pressure that gave the novel its moral urgency had been gently removed, the way you might take the spine out of something to make it easier to handle. What remained read well. It just wasn’t the book.

I went back and retranslated it from scratch.

That project — private, unplanned, something I did because the gap between the two versions bothered me in a way I couldn’t set aside — became Espresso Publishing House.

EPH publishes foreign-language fiction from the nineteenth century that has been inadequately translated, or never translated at all for a serious literary readership. We work in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian, and we publish small, carefully made editions that treat the text as something worth getting right.

The conviction underneath all of this is simple. Translation quality is not a commercial variable. It is a moral one. When a translator’s choices (or often, a publisher’s) reshape a book — when discomfort is smoothed, when dialect is levelled, when a voice is domesticated into something easier to sell — the reader who buys the resulting edition has been given a version of the work. Not the work. They don’t know this. They can’t. That asymmetry is the problem we’re here to address.

Francesco Mastriani drew me first. He wrote more than two hundred novels, serialized in the Neapolitan press, and he is nearly invisible to Anglophone readers. La Cieca di Sorrento — The Blind Woman of Sorrento — is his masterwork: a Gothic thriller, a social document, a novel about a woman whose blindness is also the sharpest perception in any room she enters. In Naples in 1852, it was a sensation. Before this edition, English readers had no serious way to read it. And that is why The Blind Woman from Sorrento is the first book that EPH published in March 2026.

That gap is what EPH seeks to close — not just for Mastriani, but for the writers like him: accomplished, original novelists whose obscurity in English is an accident of translation history and publishers’ priorities, not a verdict on their worth.

We operate out of Calgary, which is not where publishing usually happens. I regard this as an advantage. A certain consensus shapes which foreign texts are worth translating and how they should be presented to English readers — a consensus that has produced very careful, competent, faintly domesticated literary translation. Calgary is outside that consensus. I am not accountable to it.

The translations EPH publishes should feel like entering a different world, not like being handed a guidebook to it.

Idara Crespi, Publisher & Managing Director, Espresso Publishing House

---

Introduction to The Blind Woman of Sorrento

By Idara Crespi

---

A note to the reader: this introduction discusses the novel’s themes and historical context, but does not reveal its central mysteries. Read it before or after — it will serve you either way.

At an hour past midnight in one of the most fetid lanes of old Naples, a young medical student sits alone in a room, bent over a table by the stub of a tallow candle — staring at a severed human head.

This is how Francesco Mastriani begins The Blind Woman of Sorrento, and the image tells you immediately what kind of novel you are reading. It is a novel about the relationship between knowledge and feeling — about what happens when you know something terrible and must decide what to do with it, and about whether the doing is ever clean, or whether it merely replaces one injustice with another. That young man in the dark room is not a villain. He is not quite a hero either. He is a man who has organized grief into purpose, and purpose into something more difficult still. A few chapters later, when he stands in the anatomy hall of the Ospedale degli Incurabili and performs a dissection before a roomful of fellow students — on a cadaver that turns out to be his own sister — the image crystallises into something still more disturbing.

This is Gaetano Pisani. And in 1840 Naples, he is about to set a great many things in motion.

Mastriani and His City

To understand The Blind Woman of Sorrento is to understand something of the city that produced it. Mid-nineteenth-century Naples was a metropolis of violent contrasts: one of the largest cities in Europe, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies under the Bourbon dynasty, beautiful beyond most cities’ capacity to claim the word — and deeply, systematically unjust. The lazzaroni, the urban poor who inhabited the city’s sunless alleys and open piazzas, lived alongside the aristocracy in a proximity that made the gap between them impossible to ignore and, apparently, easy to sustain.

Francesco Mastriani (1819–1891) was the city’s chronicler as much as its storyteller. Born and raised in Naples, educated in law and literature, he spent his life writing about the city — serializing his fiction in the Neapolitan press, producing novel after novel that combined the machinery of Gothic popular fiction with the concerns of a genuine social conscience. He is sometimes compared to Dickens, and the comparison is not mere flattery: both writers used the energy of popular entertainment to make readers feel the weight of inequality, the reality of suffering, the cost of injustice in individual lives. Both were fiercely readable. Both were moral without being preachy.

La Cieca di Sorrento was first serialized in the newspaper L’Omnibus from 1851 to 1852, to enormous popular success. It is widely considered his masterwork, and it is not difficult to understand why. It has everything: a wrongful execution, a revenge plot, a romance with the stakes of Greek tragedy, a medical mystery, and at its center, a woman whose blindness reveals more than most people’s sight.

The Novel

The story begins seventeen years after a crime. On the night of the twenty-second of January, 1827, the Marchesa di Rionero was murdered in her bedroom at the family’s villa in Portici by a thief who had come for her jewels. A man named Nunzio Pisani was arrested, tried, and hanged for the murder. The Marchesa’s young daughter, Beatrice — barely three years old at the time — was left permanently blind by the shock of what she witnessed.

When Beatrice makes her entrance in the novel proper — on a September morning in 1844, at the Rionero family’s villa in Sorrento — she is a young woman of about twenty, who has been blind for seventeen years. She is not what strangers expect. Her blindness has produced in her not the helplessness or pathos that convention attaches to blindness, but something harder to define and more unsettling: an acuity, an attentiveness, a quality of perception that operates below the threshold of what most people notice. She hears what others miss. She understands what others rationalize away. She is, in the logic of the novel, the person who sees most clearly — which is precisely why the people around her find her useful, dangerous, and impossible to deceive.

Into her world arrives Gaetano Pisani: son of the man who was hanged for her mother’s murder, newly returned from years of study in Rome, Paris, and London, carrying a new name (Oliviero Blackman), a growing medical reputation, and a purpose that involves the Rionero family in ways that are not simple and not innocent.

Mastriani is too intelligent a novelist to make Gaetano a straightforward villain or a straightforward hero. His plan involves Beatrice — specifically, his knowledge of recent advances in the treatment of trauma-induced blindness — and his intentions toward her are entangled with vengeance and with something that cannot quite be called its opposite. The complexity of that entanglement, and what it does to both of them, is where the novel’s real drama lives.

The story also involves a corrupt notary whose past catches up with him; a scheming aristocrat who tries to marry Beatrice by means that cannot fool her; journeys from Naples to Calabria, Paris, and London; and a final revelation, in Sorrento, that puts everything in its correct light.

A Remarkable Heroine

Beatrice Rionero belongs in the company of the nineteenth century’s great unconventional heroines — alongside Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Eliot’s Dorothea, Tolstoy’s Anna. Like them, she is defined less by her circumstances than by the quality of her response to them. Unlike them, the quality of her response is partly a function of her disability — not despite her blindness but, in a crucial sense, because of it.

Mastriani understands something that most writers handling blindness as a theme have not: that the absence of sight does not impair intelligence. What it impairs is the particular kind of inattention that sight permits. When you can see, you can look away. You can scan a room and take in the surface. When you cannot see, you listen — to everything, continuously, with a focus that most people only approach under conditions of extreme concentration. Beatrice’s intelligence was always hers; her blindness simply removed the option of not using it.

This gives the novel a distinctive dynamic. The characters who try to deceive Beatrice — and several do — are operating on the assumption that blindness is equivalent to perceptual limitation in general. It is not. She hears the hesitation in a voice. She notices the small inconsistency in a story. She reads, as Mastriani puts it in a passage of quiet beauty, what is not said.

This is not a supernatural power. It is attention. And in a novel about a murder that was attributed to the wrong man, about corruption that persisted because no one was looking at what was actually there, it is exactly the right quality for the central figure to possess.

A Note on Translation

This is the first modern English translation of The Blind Woman of Sorrento. Previous English versions — if they existed at all — date from the early twentieth century and are of limited literary quality. The present translation was made directly from the Italian, with the aim of giving English readers a version that renders Mastriani’s full range: his Gothic atmosphere, his social intelligence, his narrative energy, and the particular Neapolitan texture of his world.

The Italian of the novel is the Italian of a highly educated Neapolitan writer of the mid-nineteenth century: formal in its narrative register, inflected with popular energy in its plotting, alive to dialect and social class in its dialogue. Translating it requires calibration between fidelity to Mastriani’s voice and the demands of living English prose — a calibration that favors fluency where the two are in tension, while trying never to sacrifice what makes the novel feel distinctly Neapolitan, distinctly of its moment.

A brief translator’s note at the end of this volume discusses specific decisions in more detail. A glossary of principal Italian and Neapolitan terms appears in the back matter.

Why This Novel Now

There is something almost perverse about the fact that The Blind Woman of Sorrento has been so little known to English readers for so long. It is not a difficult novel. It is not an obscure one. It was enormously popular in its own time, was adapted for film four times, and is regarded in Italy as one of the landmarks of nineteenth-century popular fiction.

What it has lacked, for the Anglophone world, is a version worthy of it. The present translation is an attempt to provide one.

Mastriani asks, in this novel, the questions that serious fiction has always asked: What does justice actually look like, when you get close enough to see it? What do we owe the people who have been harmed by the same system that harmed us? What does it mean to see — really see — another person? And what can a blind woman teach us about all three?

---

Chapter I: The Medical Student

In that labyrinth of endless alleys, lanes, and passages no wider than an outstretched pair of arms — bearing their hundred barbarous names, grim vestiges of foreign peoples — through which one always passes with a certain unease of spirit, as when visiting a prison or a hospital; in that mass of squalid and blackened houses heaped one upon another, so grudgingly touched by sunlight; in those quarters where the eye and thought of wealth rarely penetrate, yet whose damp walls shelter honest families of humble day-labourers; in that network, in short, of densely peopled ancient alleyways that compose the districts of the Mercato, the Pendino, and the Mandracchio, and which go by the single common name of Old Naples — there lies a little lane, or rather a burrow, one of that thousand that raise a species of dread in the breast of even the Neapolitan who visits them for the first time. This crooked, ill-omened, and fetid lane bears the name of Vico Chiavetta al Pendino: you would search in vain, dear reader, for it in that Hispano-Gallic-Latin almanac of viceregnal memory, unless you happened upon it by some accident of chance.

An hour past midnight of the tenth of November, 1840.

The land-wind blows violently through the old arches of those medieval buildings, howling like an enraged demon over the sleeping city and rattling the ancient shutters of the windows.

The silence of that street reigns absolute and solemn in the intervals that the wind leaves between its cries…

It is the hour when the race of the wretched and the suffering finds in sleep the balm for its wounds.

But what is that man doing, bent over that table on which the stub of a tallow candle sputters? What is that thing thrown across the table? Good heavens — a head!.. a human head!.. and the blood is still clotted at the part severed from the trunk!… And a knife… he holds it in his hands!

Do not be alarmed… That man is no assassin… He is simply a student of medicine.

In the pale light of the candle, his face reveals itself: dark, lean, hollow-cheeked, and ugly. His head is covered with red hair — coarse and tightly curled; his upper lip protrudes outward, fleshy, and nearly meets the tip of a large aquiline nose. The rough bristles of his moustache seem to find no room to settle between those two prominences and twist themselves in every direction, composing themselves almost in the form of a hedgehog’s quills. His eyes, rather noticeably cross-eyed, are nonetheless full of vivacity and extremely mobile beneath a wide, broad forehead, in the center of which a deep furrow opens like a wound — or like the mark of a curse with which God has branded it. In the whole of this human being’s physiognomy one reads at first glance the hatred he has conceived for all beauty, and that irascibility of character natural to the deformed; but, studying his features more closely, one is struck by the expression of profound sagacity with which they are impressed, and by that solemn authority that clothes the face of those men who have made science their constant occupation.

The miserable candle serves more to cast sinister shadows about the room than to illuminate it; a few quarto-sized books are piled in one corner against the wall; several lie open on the table, indicating that the young man has only recently ceased drawing from them his intellectual nourishment.

The walls of the room, wavering between black and white, gave it more the aspect of a prison than a dwelling — all the more so as the floor was cold, damp, and without tiles.

Poverty without doubt, with all its court of deprivations, hardships, and sufferings, reigned in that house; that squalor, that wretchedness, those reminders of death, that night so gloomy and dark, those plaintive voices the wind drove through the shutters — all of it seemed to place upon the lips of that house’s master the biblical words: My soul is sorrowful on every side, even unto death: stay here, and watch with me.

And indeed, in the way the young man would sometimes turn his almost frightened eyes around and around the room, it seemed as though he had called upon some companion to remain and keep watch with him.

This man — who might appear at first glance to be already of mature years — has only a little past his fifth lustrum; his name is Gaetano, and he is from Calabria.

For some two hours he has not moved from beside that table, his eyes fixed immovably upon that livid head. But what is he doing? Why has he suddenly started and thrown a worn rag over that head, casting a glance toward a corner of the room?

Ah! — a woman, an old woman, lies asleep on a poor straw pallet thrown on the ground, wrapped in a scrap of the coarsest woollen blanket. In her sleep she had called Gaetano’s name, and he, believing her awake, had turned sharply toward her — not without a movement of alarm, for he had two reasons for hiding that anatomical specimen from her.

That woman was his father’s mother.

The woman was still sleeping, and Gaetano, who had crossed on tiptoe to see whether she had woken, returned to his place and uncovered once more that remnant from the hospital. He sinks back onto his chair; he rests his head in his two open hands, and immerses himself anew in the dark meditation inspired by that gloomy and mutilated companion.

It is certainly not thoughts of science, anatomical investigations, or practical studies that in this moment concentrate the attention of the young Calabrian; for if his ideas were directed at reviewing on the anatomical specimen the lessons learned that morning in the halls of the Incurables, he would be continually separating the nerve plexuses, or cutting through the muscular masses, or uncovering the hidden small vessels, or tracing, beneath the nervous system, the arterial branchings and the thousand minute vessels with which the organ of thought is in particular lined. No, this time it is not science that absorbs this young man’s thoughts — or at least not in the moment when we first present him to our readers.

Why do two great tears fall cold and heavy from his eyelashes, worn with wakefulness?

Why does his hair stand upon his pale forehead?

Why do his eyes make a convulsive turn in their sockets, and then close — as though to flee from some object of horror?

Dreadful memories coil about in that head, and gather there like dense storm-clouds heralding an imminent tempest.

A full hour passes in that mute and savage contemplation of the fleshed skull; but sleep descends upon Gaetano’s eyelids; nature reclaims her rights; and one must obey.

He rises, and places the skull in a tin case, in which he ordinarily keeps the anatomical pieces he brings with him from the Hospital and which he faithfully returns there the following day, to be conveyed to the burial ground together with the other cadavers and severed members that are gathered up each evening from the anatomy halls.

Gaetano’s lodging consists of a single room with an alcove at the far end, in which his little bed is set. Wretched, dark, damp, and unwholesome — this dwelling, like all those of those unhealthy quarters, receives its air and light only from a window with nearly all its panes broken and crumbling, which looks out over the small square called the Zecca dei Panni.

Before going to bed, the young student approaches the window and casts a long glance down into the street; a lantern illuminates a tavern — or rather a cavern — with vaulted ceilings as lugubrious and metallic as a tomb. By the wan and uncertain light of the lantern, two men who have emerged from the cellar converse in low and mysterious tones… After a brief exchange, one of them draws from inside the brim of his hat a sharp, broad-bladed knife, which reflects its pale blade dully in that dying light, and thrusts it into the sleeve of a velvet hunting jacket he wears beneath his cloak; then both of them vanish into the shadows, like two wolves disappearing into the thickets of a wild forest.

— Like those men! exclaims Gaetano mournfully, following with his eyes as long as he can the movements of those two figures… Perhaps the same darkness covered these streets!.. perhaps in the same cellar the crime was plotted!.. perhaps on this same day — the tenth of November!.. and perhaps the same death!!… Oh — cursed through all ages be that evening!… cursed… a thousand times cursed, that night!… cursed be the place where the deed was plotted and committed!… cursed, a thousand times cursed, whoever lent his counsel or his arm to Nunzio Pisani to complete the infamous work!

These last words, pronounced with mounting and desperate energy, startled the old woman awake, and she sat up in bed, crying out:

— God! My God! What a dreadful dream I have had!

Gaetano, meanwhile, unobserved by her, was pressing himself against the wall of the room as he made his way to his bed.

End of Chapter I · The novel continues in the full edition.

---

Francesco Mastriani (1819–1891) was the author of more than two hundred novels, stories, and plays, most serialized in the Neapolitan press. He is one of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century Italian popular literature. La Cieca di Sorrento, published in 1852, is widely considered his masterwork and was adapted for the screen in 1916, 1934, 1953, and 1963.

Idara Crespi is the publisher and translator behind Espresso Publishing House, a boutique literary imprint dedicated to bringing overlooked works of foreign-language fiction into English for the first time. She works from the original source texts, producing new translations alongside the editorial apparatus — introductions, notes, glossaries — that give each book its full context. The imprint’s catalog spans nineteenth-century fiction in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian, produced through a team of literary translators she directs. The Blind Woman of Sorrento is her first published translation.