First edition. The prolific American novelist F. Marion Crawford, born in Italy and for most of his life resident in Rome, enjoyed a phenomenal success both in England and America. Saracinesca is the first novel of his Roman tetralogy (with Sant’ Ilario, Don Orsino, and Corleone: a Sicilian Story), chronicling the annals of a princely house against a panoramic background of Roman society in the later nineteenth-century. Saracinesca and Sant’ Ilario are romances of passion and jealousy--feuds, duels, suicides, and reconciliation. Don Orsino exposes the corruptions of Italian financial life; and Corleone, a belated sequel (1898), is a Sicilian episode that brings the Saracinesca into contact with the Mafia. In these novels the author makes the most of his intimate knowledge of Italian life. Wolff characterizes them, along with Katharine Lauderdale and The Ralstons, as the best of his work. Sadleir 651; Wolff 1579; BAL 4146.

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