Giuseppe and Teresa: The Love Story Behind Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate). A Documentary Novel

Giuseppe and TeresaThe Love Story Behind Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate) — A Documentary NovelDescription (product page synopsis)A lock of hair. A date. A love story recovered.In the late nineteenth century, in a village of the Italian Piedmont, two lives meet and choose each other in a time when to choose often meant going against everyone and everything. Giuseppe Pellizza, an artist of great gift destined to leave his mark on the history of art, and Teresa Bidone, a seamstress who learned to read and write as a grown woman, for love: together they build a deep bond, made of tenderness, respect, understanding, and shared dreams.When History hands the pen to only one of the two, his words remain — letters, diaries, notes written in haste — and her silences remain. And one simple, intimate gesture remains: a lock of hair pinned to a page, kept for a whole lifetime, as a promise and as memory.Born of an authentic 1891 diary and a long labour among the family papers, this documentary novel reconstructs the true story of a love that time had scattered: the love that walked beside the man behind Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), the famous painting of the crowd of workers on the march, and that reveals his most human and most secret side. In the front row of that painting, a barefoot woman advances with a child in her arms. Almost no one knows her name. This book gives it back to her.The pages in italics come from authentic documents. The rest is the voice no one had yet heard.A novel weaving together art, love, and memory, giving voice to a woman forgotten by History. For readers of Tracy Chevalier, Susan Vreeland, and every novel that tells the story of art through the lives of those who made it possible.