“The Girl of Marseille” by Maria Attanasio: long live Rosalia – Libération

Maria Attanasio brings back to life a Garibaldian heroine disowned by her husband who came to power and erased from Italian history.

One idle day in 2010, Maria Attanasio discovered information dating from 2007. An article in an online magazine recounted the ceremony of placing a plaque on the wall of a Florentine palace for the bicentenary of Garibaldi's birth . The plaque was dedicated to the Garibaldian of Calatafimi, “Rose Montmasson, landed with the Thousand in Marsala”. “Unbelievable information” for the Sicilian writer and poet. If she knew that women had participated in the Risorgimento (the Italian unit) and joined the team after disembarking at Marsala, she was unaware that one of them had participated in the Thousand expedition itself. In May 1860, this corps composed of just over a thousand volunteers and led by Garibaldi landed in Sicily to dethrone the Bourbons.

Fending off a bigamy scandal

What about this Rose, or rather Rosalia as Maria Attanasio will discover later? There was no trace of her in the history Books, “an inexplicable silence on theheroine of the Thousandas she was called by her contemporaries”. Enough to make you want to retrace her life in a novel, by collecting the rare elements about her and “schematic existential details”but enough to unfold an epic chronological thread. The journey of Rosalia Montmasson (1823-1904) contains many irresistible ingredients for a good story: a