Le terre del Sacramento takes the title from the name of an ancient feud set in the center of the complex circumstance with its ancient history that is just the history of the people that lived and live between the weed and its scrubs. The author has told this history in its recent aspects, bu he has recognized the signs of a secular drama; he has tried a transposition in the time without chronological jumps, but looking for the lost echos of a remote discourse. The novel is developed in southern Italy, in a village and in a town placed to the borders of the Appennines; but its characters emigrate toward the big cities and over the ocean, as it always happens to the inhabitants of the province of the South. Migrations for poverty or to overcome the physical anxiety of the horizon.
Le terre del Sacramento has twenty or thirty characters of foreground and about ten characters seen in foreshortening, and movements of country and city crowds. The book is all moved, narrated without concessions, even if minimum, to descriptive or lyric abandonments.
Le terre del Sacramento are a feud of Molise, the protagonist that appears and disappears in the novel; the lawyer Cannavale, misnamed "goat of the devil", is its owner, lethargic nervous, forgetful, messy man; around him a whole progeny of small parasitic and of exploiters. At the end a cousin, Laura de Martiis, become his bride, she takes the reins of the administration and, using all her means, she brings back the land to the most rigorous and exclusive ownership. She uses the help of a youth too, Luca Marano, ex seminarist, near to the socialist ideas, that uses his prestige, to let the farmers work in that stony place and woodshed to which the feud is reduced. The lands will be of whom has worked them; but a turbid movement arrives unexpectedly, that later was named fascism, and Luca Marano doesn't have the time to discover the deception which he has remained wound in, and he dies, shooted down as he was a hare, in a conflict with the policemen and the black shirts.
Laura Cannavale, innocent and tenacious restorer of the laws of the feudal ownership, departs, forgetting all her promises, and goes to St. Remo with full calm of mind.
This is the scheme of the novel, but the art of the writer has conducted the story in a way that the fatal epilogue is not seen.
The writer lets himself wisely distract from many pictures of the province’s life that however, slightly tied up among them because necessary and essential, conduct to an inclusive epilogue in the logic of that pictures.
Just for the wisdom of the artist any part of the story has conducted with the apparent worry to arrive to that catastrophe that, going on, happens.