Friday 10 May, 6pm
Mal di Sicilia by Francesco Terracina
The author in conversation with John Dickie (UCL)
In Italian
Mal di Sicilia is a widespread feeling that generates the impulse to run away and at the same time the desire to stay or to come back. The book attempts to create a dialogue between people from different backgrounds who have never met before, but who have had a complex relationship with the island. It is Sicily that the voice of Alexander Hardcastle, an early 1900s archaeologist, echoes, lost in the ruins of the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento, amazed by the beauty of the landscape and eventually killed by his own passion (he will die in a psychiatric hospital).
Through fourteen portraits, Francesco Terracina’s essay tries to brighten the autumn island, which with its slightly crepuscular colours tries to hide its dark sides in the shadows, giving the idea of a land of light and recreation. A land whose complexity is clear to those who decide to belong to it. Mal di Sicilia seems to be well summarized in a verse by Giuseppe Ungaretti: “Come portati via si rimane”. The fate of an island that has many ambitions is played out and ends up stumbling into the chaos that rules it. The appeal of Sicily is probably not part of, or at least does not end, the nostalgia that absolves everything.
Stefano D’Arrigo’s extraordinary career, thanks to the way he invented the festive language of Horcynus Orca far away from his hometown of Messina, then Livia De Stefani, Goliarda Sapienza, Laura Di Falco, three writers who never came to terms with their Sicilian years even though they left when they were barely teenagers, the fugitive Elio Vittorini, in whose works this region-continent is a lasting source of inspiration, as it is in the theatrical repertoire of Franco Scaldati, a Sicilian “di scoglio”, of the rocks as Leonardo Sciascia would have said, clinging to a strip of land that gives substance to his being in the world.
In a place torn apart by mafia arrogance, the judge Gaetano Costa, the sociologist Mauro Rostagno, the parliamentarian Pio La Torre and his collaborator Rosario Di Salvo will fall under the blows of organized crime. A land of atonement, even the Emilian footballer Benigno De Grandi, AC Milan’s playmaker, was sent to Palermo for a “punishment”. But fate also plays its role: the painter from Trieste, Tino Signorini, who arrived in Sicily with no intention of staying, ends up being captured by what the island hides. Finally, the German hermit Gisbert Lippelt, sailor, former cruise ship officer, struck by the beauty of Filicudi, where he has been living in a cave for 54 years.
Sicily is a kind of paradise that contains hell. The Sicily of a thousand contradictions that seduces by treating good and evil with equal power.
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Francesco Terracina, journalist and writer,is the author of Mal di Sicilia (Laterza, 2023), has also published the short stories Graffette e altre storie (Doramarkus, 2003), the investigative book L’ultimo volo per Punta Raisi (Stampa Alternativa, 2012), the novel Una vista in scatola (il Palindromo, 2018), the short story-essay Targa Florio. Le Madonie e la gara piu’ bella (Laterza, 2021). He worked at the newspaper L’Ora, he was director of the newspaper Il Mediterraneo. He has collaborated with numerous newspapers, including Il Mondo, L’Europeo, Diarion and he is currently working at Ansa.
John Dickie, professor at University College London, is an internationally renowned expert on many topics in Italian history. In the Laterza catalogue also: Cosa Nostra. Storia della mafia siciliana (2005 and new edition 2007), translated into twenty-one languages and awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association for non-fiction works; Con gusto. Storia degli italiani a tavola (2007), voted gastronomic book of the year in France in the prestigious RTL/Lira poll; Una catastrofe patriottica. 1908: il terremoto di Messina (2008); Onorate Società (2012); Mafia Republic (2014), I liberi muratori. Storia mondiale della Massoneria (2021) tradotto in undici lingue.