SOURCE: A review of Il cardillo addolorato, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 116-17.

In the review below, Signorelli-Pappas comments favorably on Il cardillo addolorato, praising Ortese's interweaving of fantastic and realistic elements.

In Anna Maria Ortese's strange, haunting novel Il cardillo addolorato three high-spirited gentlemen—a prince, a sculptor, and a merchant—undertake a journey at the end of the eighteenth century from Northern Europe south to Naples to pay a business call on a glovemaker, Mariano Civile. They also hope to satisfy their curiosity about stories they have heard regarding Civile's beautiful but inexplicably silent daughter Elmena. From the moment they arrive in Naples, they find themselves inhabiting an unsettling intersection between the fantastic and the real in what becomes a tale of magic realism that has the intricate plot turns and the disarming inventive force of Ortese's earlier novel, L'iguana (1965).

Like the maiden...