Margherita Pusterla

In the history of Italian incipit the historical novel by Cesare Cantu, "Margherita Pusterla," is remarkable for its extreme originality. If the exergue has the function to select the audience through exclusion ("- Have you ever suffered, my reader? / - You haven't. / - This book is not for you"), the opening words, although apparently in the form of a conventional chronotope, allow the writer to judge severely history and society. The complementary relationship between the exergue (pathos and empathy of reading) and the opening words (the morality of history) is also revealing of the implicit theme of the novel, which aims to point out the spectacular forms of tyrannical power