red wine per week reduced the effects of the illness. The second was research into the living conditions of the poor in Naples, which was viewed by the government as a very prosperous city. Jessie found large numbers of people living in grottos, under Naples' streets – huge communal spaces with no sanitation, where only crude curtains separated one family's area from the others, all unseen and ignored by Neapolitan citizens in the streets above, except for the grotto landlords who collected exorbitant rents. Her report, La miseria in Napoli ("The Poor of Naples"), was published in 1877, and is cited in timelines of important events in southern Italy. (see The New History of the Italian South, edited by Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris, 1997) The third was research into working conditions in the Sicilian sulphur mines. There was a concern about child labour and the general health of the miners: many of whom were physically unfit for military service. Jessie made extensive personal tours and investigations of the mines, both above and below ground, and published her report, Le miniere di Zolfo in Sicilia (The Sulphur Mines in Sicily) in 1894. Writings Jessie made her living writing. Jessie's career as a journalist had started in England writing for British newspapers (Litta Visconti Arese in his introduction to The Birth of Modern Italy, says Jessie was the first woman journalist in England.) She also wrote for newspapers in the United States and Italian press. Starting in 1866 the first of what would be 143 articles over 40 years appeared in The Nation published weekly in New York. She was also a frequent contributor to Nuova Antologia a semi-monthly magazine published in Florence. (Rossella Certini [see below] has written that Jessie was the first journalist in Italy to explore the 'cracks' in the Italian reality.) Writing was also a way of expressing her passion for Italy and its people. She wanted to make sure that some of the lesser known heroes of the Risorgimento were not forgotten. She wrote biographies of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, to be sure; but also biographies of Dr. Agostino Bertani, Carlo Cattaneo (with Alberto Mario), Giuseppe Dolfo, Alberto Mario (with Giosuè Carducci), Giovanni Nicotera. She was gathering material for several more at the time of her death. Jessie also wrote a couple of histories: I Garibaldini in Francia about the Franco-Prussian War; and The Birth