Amalia's Tale: An Impoverished Peasant Woman, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice

The author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara examines a nineteenth-century court case in which an ambitious crusading attorney, Augusto Barbieri, took on the case of Amalia Bagnacavalli, an impoverished, illiterate young peasant woman from the mountains near Bologna, Italy, who contracted syphilis from the sickly baby she had been forced to wet nurse.