The first, after a long stay in Rome, in a fever of productivity, wrote in 1833 “Ettore Fieramosca”, a historical novel which takes the facts of Barletta as a starting point. The book was immediately an extraordinary success, to the surprise particularly of its author, who, before publishing it, had given it to his father-in-law, Alessandro Manzoni, to read, but from whom he had not had much encouragement.

The Anonymous Eyewitness Author provides us with not only the reconstruction of the events of the famous Challenge, but also of those that preceded it and those that followed it. It seems, in fact, that he was an eye witness.
A few copies of the chronicle of those events, written up on impulse and with the emotional stimulus of those exciting days, seems to have been written and published that same year.
Only in 1547 would the notary of Capua, Giovan Battista Damiani, sees to the proper publishing of the book, with a preface written by him, under the title “History of the Battle of Thirteen Italians and the Same Number of French, Held in Puglia Between Andria and Quarati”.

To consult the complete list of literary works on the Challenge of Barletta, click on: