Now praise it, even many who attacked him on the floor of the civil commitment. Some almost considering it even hostile to Falcone and Borsellino. And instead, said Italo Calvino, is “the wrist moral is never less”, that his defense of the right and reason, and confirmed by the case-Dove, Moro, from political power to the mafia, to emerge as the hinge of the entire life of Leonardo Sciascia.
“Sciascia heretic. The history and prophecies of a sicilian awkward” (Solferino) by Felice Cavallaro is on newsstands January 8, for a month 10.90 euros
A life that began a hundred years ago, in January 1921, between the roads and the mines of Afghanistan, not far from Girgenti, Pirandello, in the shadow of the Castle of the feudal lord, a time supported by the Spanish Inquisition in the hunt for a brother rebel. Guilty of a “heresy and the social,” said the three centuries after Sciascia. Ready to tell it the odyssey of fra Diego in The Morning. The only alleged heretic who managed to kill, during the umpteenth torture, his inquisitor, don Giovanni Lopez de Cisneros. Sumptuously buried in the church of the Gancia, in the heart of Palermo. Two steps from the plateau marine, where, however, the monk and burned at the stake. Because it was necessary to praise the torturer and erase the memory of the heretic.
Operation opposite to that made by leonardo Sciascia, with the Death of the inquisitor. Useful pages like a magnifying glass to examine the damage and the evil that is power is using flawed religion, transformed into a tool of oppression, they can multiply. And it is not an exaggeration to call what can still happen in our time, an Italian barracks, a prison in egypt, around a mosque because it is precisely this referred Sciascia.
Having died on 20 November 1989, of course, were other bad examples and bad masters, to whom he was referring. But just think of his captain Bellodi, and to the conception that was in the practice of law and in respect of the right to consider also The day of the owl another lens useful for viewing the world today.
Now many understand, and January 8, of the one hundred years since the birth becomes an opportunity for praise. So much the better, it would be advisable to Andrea Camilleri, who, until a few years ago, moving in the living room in the library of his home, he pointed at the shelves for the books Sciascia trusting to pull every so down one. Tired, he said, the noise felt in public life. Worn down by the failure reflection in talk television reduced to ring and in the vacuum of so many political debates: “I’ll get a text to Leonardo and I can regenerate. Why great writers like him, and precede in time, the events, hear them to snuff to reason or to the skin…”.
Following the trials and misunderstandings of the last few years of life there is the risk of concentrating the memory of Sciascia only on the pamphlet related to the controversy sometimes astiose. Clarified, for example, in the case of the so-called “professionals of the anti-mafia” just by Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone. In Racalmuto. One evening in July 1991. Sciascia was no longer there for two years, and the next year would have exploded the bombs of Capaci and via D’amelio. You tried to delete all shadow that day in the “land of reason”, following on from earlier trips, and the smiles of leonardo Sciascia and Purse in Marsala and Gibellina.
But have broken even strong friendships with the clashes of a tenacious and stubborn writer who, though well-pleased of his heresies, and was devoted to the religion of truth. As it emerges from the works that marked the distance and clutch from the communist party and from the band of many intellectuals defined “organic”, with disdain adjective.
Works such as The context, ‘Todo’ and then The affaire Moro. An operation to release that incrinerà even the balance affection for Renato Guttuso. A page bitter. How many we look at the life of a scholar who remains a beacon on a literary level. For the language. For the passion with which he analyzed and proposed Manzoni, Stendhal, Voltaire, the pamphlets of Paul-Louis Courier and, again, Denis Diderot, Montaigne. Without forgetting Auguste de Villiers de L’isle-Adam, the playwright of the quote engraved on the tomb of the small cemetery, where it rests, “we will remember, on this planet.”.
And it is also from this other angle of Racalmuto that the traveler in search of the author and his characters can venture following the stages of the “Road of writers”. The route that leads to the case of leonardo Sciascia. In the country and in the countryside. Starting with one of the aunts who raised. The house, just steps away from the municipal Theatre. The building that was going to ruin for a bizarre game of inheritance. Saved by intellectual remained in the province, Foo Hawk, a leader of the farmers sicilian linked to the old communist Party, an unbridled passion for books, 80 million bought in the past sixty years.
Now in part collected in this home, left as it was, transformed into a living museum. The place of study, and to have a chat. The landing of the “Road” that brings together novelists, filmmakers, editors. All intrigued by the network, exalted by the newspaper, the local, and in the first number was the signing of leonardo Sciascia, satisfied, from the name of the newspaper, “in Spite of Everything”.
From the top of a chest can emerge letters and journals covered in dust. Including copies of The “Reading” of 1941. Why Sciascia was a subscriber to the precious head in the last few years, revived by the “Corriere della Sera”. Copies aligned as memorabilia from that Of the Hawk on the dining table, in a house where the furniture, the chairs, peeled, studiolo, everything seems to have stopped time. Almost Sciascia same to return. As it happens, moreover, is in the house, the Walnut, just six kilometres, the buen retiro among pines and vineyards, where one evening Sciascia saw the fireflies mentioned in the first page de L affaire Moro. The same who the audience is said to have disappeared in a Country ravaged by pollution and corruption. And that again there, along the border of a neighbor. A glimmer of hope scrutinized by Sciascia, in addition to each pessimism. In fact, in spite of everything.
the volume published by The Solferino on newsstands for a month
A prophet uncomfortable, and often unheard of. Yet capable of seeing and with acute precision where it would go Italy in the years to come. Thus emerges, in the words of Felice Cavallaro, the figure of Leonardo Sciascia — including the January 8, 2021 will celebrate one hundred years since the birth, which took place in that Racalmuto, in the province of Agrigento, which will then be transformed into Regalpetra in his literary debut. Places, friendships, battles and controversies about life — and work — the writer in the pages of leonardo Sciascia the heretic. The history and prophecies of a sicilian uncomfortable, the book signed by Cavallaro and has been published by Solferino, on newsstands with the “Courier” is the 8th of January to celebrate the anniversary of one hundred years. The novelist Walnut, buen retiro park in the countryside, six kilometres from Racalmuto,”harbor in the summer of a writer from eight in the morning, at noon, if it was in front of his Olivetti laptop to tell and interpret the world”, or in Paris, “in search of ancient prints between the stalls of the Seine, or of the documents in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition: it is also one Sciascia private — along the axis of a life spent between Palermo and Rome, Milan, and France — that tell of the pages of the book, a portrait passionate and full of anecdotes and stories that the author, a journalist of the newspaper “Corriere della Sera” that has lived his early years in Racalmuto and is the creator of the path of the Road of the writers,” that he founded and directs, narrates from a privileged point of view and very close to the sicilian writer. The book Sciascia heretic, enriched by a foreword unpublished, is in the newsstand price 10,90 € plus the cost of the newspaper, and will remain on sale for a month.