Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sicily in Print
Dogged by centuries of isolation, and divided into an illiterate peasantry and a decadent ar-
istocracy, Sicily prior to the 19th century suffered from a complete absence of notable liter-
ature.
With such a context it is interesting to learn that the first official literature in Italian was
written in Palermo in the 13th century at the School of Poetry, patronised by Frederick II.
But such high-minded works were irrelevant to the peasants, whose main pleasure was the
regular celebration of saints' days and religious occasions and, later, the popular theatre of
the
opera dei pupi
(puppet theatre).
THE LEOPARD
Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and published posthumously in 1958,
Il Gattopardo
(The Leopard) is
generally considered to be the greatest Sicilian novel ever written. The story of an ageing aristocrat grappling with
the political and sociological changes that are being brought to the island by the Risorgimento (reunification peri-
od), it is set in an era and milieu that Lampedusa, the last of a long line of minor princes in Sicily, evokes magnifi-
cently. Faced with choosing between tradition and modernity, the topic's central character takes the only honour-
able path (for him) and opts for tradition, thus signing the warrant for his family's loss of wealth, power and influ-
ence. Unusually, the 1963 cinematic version by director Luchino Visconti - himself a member of the Italian aristo-
cracy - is as critically acclaimed as the novel.
Local Voices
The political upheaval of the 19th and 20th centuries finally broke the silence of the Sicili-
an pen, and the literary colossus Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) emerged onto the scene. Liv-
ing through some of the most intense historical vicissitudes of modern Italy - the unifica-
tion of Italy, WWI and the rise of Fascism - his work was to have a major impact on Italian
literature. His greatest novel,
I Malavoglia
(The Malavoglia Family; 1881), essentially a
story about a family's struggle for survival through desperate times in Sicily, is still a per-
manent fixture on every Sicilian schoolchild's reading list.
Since then Sicilian writers have produced fiction to rival the best contemporary
European works. Playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for a substantial body of work, which included the play
Sei Personaggi in Ri- cerca di un Autore
(Six Characters in Search of an Author; 1921).
Poet Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-68) won the award in 1959 for his exquisite lyric verse,
which included delightful translations of works by Shakespeare and Pab-lo Neruda. Elio
