A rare edition of the most famous work by Italian historian Gabriele Tontoli (1610-1665), in which he recounts, as an eyewitness, the great revolt in Naples on July 7, 1647, and its aftermath. This insurrection was led by the fisherman Masaniello (1620-1647), who rebelled against the Spanish Crown for its new taxes. Gabriele Tontoli, a historian, was born around 1610 in Manfredonia, Puglia, and studied law at the University of Naples, where he still lived at the time of the 1647 revolution. A witness to the turmoil that accompanied Masaniello's revolution, he wanted to recount what he had seen, without claiming to write a history: "I wrote this book as a mixture of the historical, the narrative, the poetic, the declamatory, and the colloquial... I believed that a revolution led by a man of the people should be written only by a common pen."