Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Vittorini (1908-66) captured the essence of the Sicilian migration north in his masterpiece
Conversazione in Sicilia
(1941), the story of a man's return to the roots of his personal,
historical and cultural identity.
LITERARY SETTINGS
»
Aci Trezza - Giovanni Verga's
I Malavoglia
is set in this fishing village on the Ionian Coast.
»
Palazzo dei Normanni (
Click here
)
- much of Barry Unsworth's
The Ruby in Her Navel
is set in this Norman
fortress near Palermo.
»
Palma di Montechiaro, near Agrigento - thought to be Giuseppe di Lampedusa's inspiration for the town of
Donnafugata in his novel
Il Gattopardo
(The Leopard).
»
Porto Empedocle - features in Luigi Pirandello's early novels and is the inspiration for Andrea Camilleri's fic-
tional town of Vigatà.
»
Syracuse - the setting for Elio Vittorini's
Conversazione in Sicilia.
Sicily's most famous novel was a one-off by an aristocrat whose intent was to chronicle
the social upheaval caused by the end of the old regime and the unification of Italy. Gi-
useppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) published
Il Gattopardo
(The Leopard) in
1958 to immediate critical acclaim. Though a period novel, its enduring relevance lies in
the minutely accurate observations of what it means to be Sicilian.
Much of Sicily's 20th-century literature is more political than literary. None is more so
than the work of Danilo Dolci (1924-97), a social activist commonly known as the 'Sicili-
an Gandhi'. His
Report from Palermo
(1959) and subsequent
Sicilian Lives
(1981), both
detailing the squalid living conditions of many of Sicily's poorest inhabitants, earned him
the enduring animosity of the authorities and the Church. (Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini pub-
licly denounced him for 'defaming' all Sicilians.) He, too, was nominated for the Nobel
Prize and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1958.
The other great subject for modern Sicilian writers is, of course, the Mafia. For a mas-
terful insight into the island's destructive relationship with organised crime, search out the
work of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-89), whose novel
Il Giorno della Civetta
(The Day of
the Owl; 1961) was the first Italian novel to take the Mafia as its subject. Throughout his
career, Sciascia probed the topic, practically inventing a genre of his own. His protégé Ge-
sualdo Bufalino (1920-96) won the prestigious Strega Prize in 1988 for his novel
Le Men-
zogne della Notte
(Night's Lies), the tale of four condemned men who spend the eve of
their execution recounting the most memorable moments of their lives. Bufalino went on
