The Plot Summary

Lucy Hughes-Hallett offered this summary of Ippolito Nievo's long nineteenth-century novel, The Confessions of an Italian, in the October 10 TLS:

Here are ruminations on subjects from the nature of democracy to the peregrinations of a fur cap. Here are ardent love and cruel perversity, the "last farcical act of the great drama of feudalism," and the messy, morally compromised beginnings of a modern nation sate. Here are cats, variously cruel, devoted, or eaten by the starving heroine during a siege. And here is the story of a life, which rambles up dead ends and hits the doldrums, but which, with its complement of love and adventure and dunderheaded idealism, holds us gripped.