ABSTRACT
it was in the autumn of 1933 that I saw a bandit killed. His name was Fraticheddu. In Sardinian this means "little monk," and is a nickname given to children who have to wear monk's habits, to keep a vow made by their mothers to some saint who cured them of some deadly disease. I was going round Sardinia for the Corriere delta Sera, and journalism was a tricky business in those days. Pretty well every vital and important subject had been banned by the régime at some time or other, for one reason or another, and editors were wary of anything new or out of the way, even subjects that had not been forbidden but had not yet been officially pronounced upon. The papers were filled with endless and beautifully written descriptions of sunsets over the sea and dawns among the sand dunes, endless gloomy scenes of storm or rain (though even descriptions of the weather were not entirely safe, since it was forbidden to mention—say—snow in Naples, if there was any, for fear of harming tourism).
