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Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)

Ignazio Silone

Paperback | Pages: 304 pages

Rating: 3.86 | 2205 Users | 187 Reviews

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Title	:	Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)
Author	:	Ignazio Silone
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 304 pages
Published	:	June 7th 2005 by Signet (first published 1937)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Cultural. Italy. European Literature. Italian Literature. Historical. Historical Fiction. Novels

Ilustration Concering Books Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)

I think this book sets a personal record for me: I finally read it after it had been on my TBR shelf for more than 40 years!

This is a novel of the Italian resistance to fascism set in Italy in the mid-1930’s. A revolutionary hunted by the authorities (as was the author) has returned to the country disguised as a priest. The real political action is in Rome but, emaciated and sickly (probably from tuberculosis), the rebel is hiding out in the countryside – still a land of poor peasants, donkeys and ox-carts. The area is the Abruzzi, a hilly region in central Italy due east of Rome but considered culturally part of southern Italy. As part of his disguise he coats his face in iodine to create wrinkles to look older.



He avoids priestly duties despite demands for him to hear confessions and preside over baptisms. When he is coerced into some priestly action, he has good luck. He makes a life-long friend of a young woman on her death bed (from an illegal abortion) to whom he administers last rites; but she survives. He has an eye for the women including a married peasant and a wealthy lady. He makes a poor priest. If you irritate him his spiritual advice to you might be “Go to hell.”

We learn a lot about the peasants, their poverty, politics and religion.

“…the poor people whose capacity for suffering and resignation was truly without limit. They were used to living in isolation, ignorance, diffidence and the sterile hatred of one family for another.” Their lives are so hard that many have been disfigured and you can tell what kind of work they do by their disfigurement: stooped from mines, lame from heavy labor, bow-legged from harvesting on hillsides or ‘wall-eyed’ (abnormally white eyes) from years of work with furnaces.



On religion:

The church is for the government and the wealthy, not the people. A wealthy woman says: “Social inequalities were created by God and we must humbly respect them.” Some peasants accept this perspective and our rebel despairs at the peasants’ lack of political capacity. “Politics is a luxury reserved for the well-fed.” There’s a lot of talk of inequities and inefficiencies in the land system that serves to keep the poor peasants poor, and the rich landowners rich. There’s sarcasm about the economic system: “Finally, to make his fortune, he contracted some important debts and declare himself bankrupt.”

One character says: “I think religion does for women what salt does for pork. It keeps up the freshness and savor.” Religion is mixed with superstition. The people particularly fear earthquakes. The priest’s landlady is desperate to have him stay at her house as a talisman against another earthquake. People remember the tremendous earthquake twenty years before (in 1915) in the Abruzzi region that killed 35,000 people.



When he arrives in a small village, the local witch/herbalist fears him as ‘competition’ until she learns he’s not authorized to carry out his priestly duties. One old woman crawls up the church floor keeping her tongue to the ground, leaving a glistening trail like a snail.

But there are also some good priests. He visits an old priest, a retired teacher who gathers former pupils in his home. All were idealistic rebels as young boys and the priest encouraged such thinking. But now some are rebels and some are wealthy fascists and even spies for the government.

On politics:

Spoken by those in charge of preparing for a fascist rally: “We’ll have to have some policemen on the trucks, so that the people will know that they have to come spontaneously.”

The main character is disgusted by the Italian war against Ethiopia. Yet the war was supported by many peasants because the fascist government paid a stipend to soldiers’ mothers. They were so poor that some women prayed for the war to continue.

“The country seems to have been divided not into just two different political parties but two different humanities.” (Shades of the current political situation in the USA?)

The main character (as did the author) left the communist party because he felt it become as self-serving as the church and that it had come to represent ‘red fascism:’ “…has not the organization itself become the supreme value?”

There’s good writing: “She did this with a tiny little voice and a fearful smile which looked as if it had been prepared behind the door and held in place with some pins.”



The book reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino’s novel of the Italian resistance, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests. As Calvino did, the author gives a preface about how and why he revised the book in 1955 after it was originally written in 1937.

Photos from grandvoyageitaly.com
Sketch of the author by David Levine from The New York Review of Books at shop.nybooks.com

Describe Books To Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)

Original Title:	Vino e pane
ISBN:	0451529782 (ISBN13: 9780451529787)
Edition Language:	English
Series:	The Abruzzo Cycle #2
Setting:	Italy Pietrasecca(Italy)

Rating Epithetical Books Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)

Ratings: 3.86 From 2205 Users | 187 Reviews

Article Epithetical Books Bread and Wine (The Abruzzo Cycle #2)

Murica (Fontamara); Revolution is not a try for removing lonliness, but a try to stay together and not fear.در مورد آثار ایناتسیو سیلونه لطفن اینجا را بخوانیدhttp://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_...

Communion, Life and Death in Fascist ItalyIf you ever served in the Peace Corps, you would have learned one thing. With the greatest will in the world, with all the right words and deeds, you cant change peoples world view, you cant impose new values. They have to want to do it themselves. If you ever worked with people who lived their lives under Communism, you would find that very few, if any, clung to the idealistic principles that first inspired it. The Communists, even assuming that they

For some reason I have never been able to determine, the fiction of Italy, Spain, and Portugal have been, as it were, swept under the carpet. Reading Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine, I think perhaps the reason is that all three are priest-haunted countries that wear their Catholicism on their sleeves. In fact, in Bread and Wine, the hero, one Pietro Spina, a Communist, is disguised as a priest named Father Paolo Spada, who is in hiding among the peasants of his native Abruzzi. In many ways, this

First Admission:This book offers scope for multifaceted reviews and reflection.- One can look at it as a normal novel where an interesting plot develops to an exciting climax.- One can look at it as a novel with many character sketches.- One can look at it as an anthropological novel that introduces local customs and beliefs of Abruzzi region of Italy.- One can look at it as a political novel that expounds the difficulties suffered by Socialist movement under the Fascist regime of Mussolini.-



Ignazio Silone, despite of his years in exile in France and Switzerland, due too the fascist dictatorship in Italy, was able to capture the esence of those days. Bread and Wine is a criticism of any form of totalitarism. Full of tension and surprises. Not even the mountains are a good refuge. Bravo Ignazio.

This for me was a 3.5 star read, but I'll round up to 4 Stars considering when it was written, 1936, a time when the events in the book were actually playing out in Mussolinis Fascist Italy. The principal character, Pietro Spina or Paulo Spada reflects Silone himself, rejecting Stalinist Communist Party dogma but embracing socialist idealism, criticizing the Church, uncomfortable at first in his ecclesiastic disguise, but eventually warming to it. Silone was an outspoken critic of fascism, but