E ti chiameranno strega

Seen from a distance, the castle of Fiè allo Sciliar looks like something out of a fairy tale. Carved in white onyx, it stands majestically against the cobalt sky of a valley in the Dolomites and seems to watch over the houses that surround it. No one would imagine that within those imposing walls a horrific crime was committed, that one of the most dramatic trials of the sixteenth century took place, and that thirty innocent women lost their lives at the stake. And yet the witches of Sciliar were imprisoned in the tiny cells of the castle’s dungeons, branded as lovers of the devil, tortured, and forced to make false confessions, intended solely to end their torment. And no one pitied them, for to feel compassion for those damned women would have meant incriminating oneself. Barbara Vellerin is one of them. Raised by her mother on the outskirts of the village to be close to nature, her early years were enchanting, spent studying plants and caring for the needy. Then everything changed; suspicion crept into the eyes of those who had once sought her remedies, and the ideas of a handful of clergymen—for whom every woman is a potential witch—spread through the valley like a plague. Five hundred years later, Arianna Miele wins a competition to curate an exhibition on the witches of the Sciliar. It is her chance to finally embark on the career as an anthropologist she has always wanted, to break free from a family that has always tried to stifle her, and to prove her worth—above all to herself. She cannot know that, by bringing to light the lives of a group of women who, to her at first, are nothing more than a list of names, she will uncover an uncomfortable truth about the local hero, the Tyrolean captain Franziskus von Stauber, and succeed in giving a voice – she who has never had one – to an innocent woman, silenced by hypocrisy and cruelty.