4 ideas
In the Abruzzo village of Fontamara, a Roman-connected businessman called the Impresario, newly made podestà under Fascism, diverts the stream that waters the peasants' fields to his own land. When the cafoni protest, the lawyer Don Circostanza, who poses as their friend, proposes that the Impresario take three-quarters of the water and the villagers keep three-quarters of the remainder.
The peasants describe the social order as a ladder: at the top God, then Prince Torlonia, then his guards, then his guards' dogs, then nothing, then nothing again, then the cafoni. Because the ranking is so fixed, changes of government reach the peasants only as new names for the same masters. For them, Fascism is not a new ideology but the latest management of an arrangement in which they rank below the landlord's animals.
Illiterate peasants are robbed through signatures on blank sheets, petitions they cannot read, legal compromises and new taxes whose terms only the educated can parse. Formal procedure and legality become weapons for those who control the documents.
Berardo Viola is Fontamara's strongest and most individualistic cafone, and he wants only land for himself. After his fiancée Elvira dies, he is arrested in Rome and chooses to confess to being the 'Solitary Stranger', the wanted anti-Fascist agitator, so that the real organizer can go free. He dies under police torture, and his sacrifice inspires the villagers to print their own paper, 'What Are We To Do?'. The Fascist militia answers by destroying the village.