[5][6] Appearing on the eve of the Spanish Civil War, and published just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power, when the world was beginning to take sides for or against Fascism, the novel had a galvanising effect on public opinion.

[2] Fontamara became "the very symbol of resistance",[7] and is "widely agreed to have played a major role as a document of anti-Fascist propaganda outside Italy in the late 1930s",[8] as it criticises the immorality and deceit of the Fascist party and its followers.

The Fontamaresi work the earth to survive, turn to emigration as a means of economic improvement and are isolated, ignorant of events happening outside of the region and untouched by modernity and new technology.

The Impresario, in stark contrast to the Fontamaresi, who have laboured for centuries to little avail, has quickly become the richest man in the region and embodies the power, authority and immorality of the Fascists.

The Fontamaresi are exploited due to their naïvety and ignorance, the women are raped by the Blackshirts, Berardo Viola makes the ultimate sacrifice to allow the continued distribution of clandestine texts that spread the word about socialism and encourage rebellion against Fascism, and at the end the majority of the population are killed at the hands of the Government.

Pelino informs the government that the Fontamaresi are not cooperating (through ignorance) with the new Fascist regime and Innocenzo la Legge comes to impose a curfew, which will severely inhibit their work, and forbid talk of politics in public places.

Some of them miss the truck home and meet a man who takes them to a tavern and offers to help them with their uprising and bring them weapons but, whilst he is gone, the Solito Sconosciuto approaches them to warn them they are being set up.

The Solito Sconosciuto publishes an article, "Long Live Berardo Viola", which tells the story of Fontamara and he passes on printing equipment ("the duplicating machine") to the ‘’Fontamaresi’’ so they can start their own local anti-Fascist newspaper, which they call Che fare?

She is known in Fontamara as destined to marry Berardo, though he doesn't propose to her due to lack of land and money, whilst Elivira has a vast dowry and trousseau.

- a thousand in cash and sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, shirts, blankets, a new cupboard, two walnut drawers and a bedstead made from two pieces of brass, all bought and paid for.

And as this intense attention from Berardo had become so well known amongst Elivira's friends, and she had not complained, or even changed her routine or the time of her outings([17] p. 102) She is a simple and modest girl, almost considered a saint, insomuch as no one would blaspheme or swear when she approached; on one occasion she saves the Fontamaresi looking out from the belltower because the police think she is the Madonna and flee.

[8] Physically he is described as With a melon hat, a spongy porous nose, ears like fans and belly at the third stage (of his concertina trousers) ([17] p. 73) and regarding his character, Giuvà says in his narration that he always had a goodwill for the people of Fontamara, he was our Protector, and talk of him would require a long litany.

He approached, talking animatedly with some of the workers, he was in his work clothes, with his jacket over his arm, a water level in one hand, a folding ruler protruding from his trouser pocket, shoes whitened with lime.

The Solito Sconosciuto publishes an article which tells the story of Fontamara and passes on printing equipment to the Fontamaresi so that they can start their own local anti-Fascist newspaper, which they call Che fare?

At one time, don Carlo Magna possessed almost the entire region of Fontamara and, of our young girls, those he liked the most were forced to go into service in his house and be subjected to his whims, but now nothing was left for him but the land from his wife's dowry([17] p. 65).

[10] Don Achille Pazienza is a knight, and a guest at the Locanda del Buon Ladrone (The Good Thief's Inn) ([17] p. 200) where the youngest narrator and Berardo stay in Rome.

Giuvà's son describes him in the room in the inn as a sick old man lying on his bed We found don Achille Pazienza lying on the bed, he was a poor old man with catarrh, with a 10-day-old beard, a yellow suit, white canvas shoes, a straw hat on his head, a bronze medal on his chest and a toothpick in his mouth, and he had put on these ceremonial garments to receive us ([17] p. 206)[10] The family of Torlonia arrived in Rome at the beginning of the last century in the wake of a French regiment and was originally called Torlogne.

None of them have ever touched the soil, even for pleasure, but their holdings have extended into a lucrative realm of many tens of thousands of acres, and In return for Torlogne's political support of the weak Piedmontese dynasty...he was given the title of duke and later that of prince.

Among other things, he used the most bizarre excuses to get away from Fontamara on Sundays and returned in the evening, in reality, more than ever starving hungry and sober, but with a toothpick between his teeth and wobbling, like someone who had eaten meat and drank until they were drunk, to appear as if he were in the position to spend and indulge his whims ([17] p. 86)[10] Silone write in a very simple and readable style.

Linguistically the Paratactic construction prevails with simple and colloquial language that reflects the simplicity of the cafoni, whereas the more educated and affluent characters express themselves in a much more refined manner, using quotations and Latin vocabulary.

The misery of peasants is closely linked to their ignorance as this makes them vulnerable to scams and abuse, especially due to their reliance on others for contact with the new and complicated world of the city.

They are disconnected with the world and don't know about new laws like the Emigration Policy, wage rate changes, and identity cards and papers needed to get on a train or work elsewhere.

In some books, of course, southern Italy is a blessed and beautiful land in which the peasants go caroling joyfully to work, echoed prettily by a chorus of country girls dressed in traditional costume, while nightingales trill in the neighbouring wood'.

As Nelson Moe indicates, there is a vast difference between the situations the North and South of Italy and '’The vexed relationship between the two parts of Italy, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped that nation's political, social, and cultural life throughout the 20th century’[18] The annexation of the House of Savoy was like a colonial conquest for the South, the large estates remaining intact, along with the social connections that meant the rich could become richer.

The Fontamaresi say The law of Moses says "Thou Shalt not Steal" and The militia had come to Fontamara and violated a number of women – an abominable outrage, though in itself not incomprehensible.

Fontamara was 'one of the most widely reviewed, read and talked about novels of the 1930s in North and South America, Europe and the Soviet Union'[8] and 'was interpreted by foreign readers in the 1930s as a factual revelation of Fascist oppression and peasant resistance’.

[8] In 1934, the first English translation received wide acclaim; Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker called the novel "a little epic of peasant resistance, based upon an actual event in recent Italian history",[19] while Graham Greene in The Spectator praised it as "the most moving account of Fascist barbarity [he had] yet read";[20] New York Times Book Review wrote: "The propaganda, if it is such, is in the facts.

"[22] George Orwell called Silone "one of the most interesting of the writers who have come up in the last five years" in 1939: "his Fontamara is one of the brightest spots of the Penguin Library";[23] later he compared the novel to Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and wrote that both of these two belong to "the special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism", and that these were unlikely to appear in English literature, as "there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside", as unlikely "as for a slave-trade to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Later critics diverged from that view; Elizabeth Leake believes the novel to be "marked with deep-seated ideological ambivalence", arguing that it "introduces, then subverts, some of Marxism's fundamental concepts, by investing them with autobiographical elements that deform and deflate them.

The fact is that Fontamara and its successors inspired a generation, and Silone’s admirers included Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Thomas Mann and Arturo Toscanini.