Letters to the Editor
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small mistake
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was Duke of Palma (Southern Italy), not of Parma (Northern Italy)
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UTTER ROT
Excuse me, Ms. Monardo, have you BEEN to southern Italy in the past -- oh, say thirty years? Because I live in the deepest heart of southern Italy, Matera, in Basilicata, and I travel extensively throughout the south and I utterly fail to recognize anything in the article that even remotely resembles the very vibrant culture I live in. Quoting someone who was born in an orphanage in the early fifties -- well of course they went hungry! Italy had just come out of a war, the entire country was still devastated.
Sciascia was a great great writer, but of a different epoch. It is like writing an article about the American south, quoting only Faulkner.
You need to take a trip NOW and look at what southern Italy is like NOW. You won't find cities more vibrant than Naples, Palermo or Bari.You'll find an entire generation of young entrepreneurs who have decided not to emigrate to Rome or Milan because they have more opportunites right at home. The cities and towns are full of music and film festivals, book presentations, art galleries.
I live in a city which is known for its connection to Carlo Levi, Matera. Levi wrote of grinding poverty there in his famous 'Christ Stopped at Eboli' and I get so annoyed when it is the only thing people know of it. Levi was a great writer and a great artist but he described life almost eighty years ago!
Together with my Italian partners, I organize a very lively writers' conference and literary festival, the International Women's Fiction Festival (www.womensfictionfestival.com) and it couldn't possibly exist in the southern Italy you describe in your article.
Articles such as this to an enormous disservice to a very interesting, intensely beautiful part of the world, a unique combination of antiquity (it was Magna Grecia after all and the archeological museums in the south of Italy are as good as the ones in Greece) and modernity.
To the readers of this article -- please visit the south of Italy and see for yourself. And read more modern southern Italian authors, like Andrea Camilleri or Gianrico Carofiglio. And listen to modern southern Italian rock singers like Mango.
Best, Elizabeth Jennings
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A bit late, aren't you?
When, being an Italian forced to emigrate as a small child, I read Sciascia, one book after the other as they were being published, I thought more or less as Anna Monardo writes. It was somehow to the point then. I find strange to “discover” Sciascia today. Literary beautiful, but nowadays his books are history. Not that the Mafia does not exist any longer, on the contrary. But it does not work as Sciascia writes, and Italy is moving. I recognize the trend, being myself an Italian grown up far from where I come from: we do not see the country as it now is when one lives there NOW. We have an idealized (positively or negatively) view of things, even if we go back regularly. The fact that we have a foot somewhere else changes our view of things. We had better be conscious of that.
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North and south
Grammatico begins her story with the line, "After the war we went hungry, we truly went hungry," and the traveler heading into the Mezzogiorno for the first time will find it helpful to keep this bit of context in mind.
The same can be said of the now-thriving Trentino region, way to the north of Italy. Things were still so bad in the mid-1950s that my parents (and many others) emigrated to the U.S. For years, my mother sent "care packages" of my and my brothers' outgrown clothing and toys to her sisters for my younger cousins to enjoy. Now, most of the cousins live in houses far grander than I can afford, and they seem to have very little recollection of the vicissitudes suffered just a generation or two before them. What was Ms. Monardo's point again?
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A brotherly visit to Southern Italy
I enjoyed the article on the charms and challenges of life in Southern Italy. Rome is indeed very far away from the hillside near Rende in Calabria, where my father was born and his father and mother's parents and grandparents before that. My elder brother and I had no idea what to expect on our trip to that region and that hillside in 2003. We found two side-by-side worlds -- a contemporary town and a wrinkle in time on that hillside above the town, where ancient olive trees, fennel, roses and oranges grew in profusion around the jumbled, still colorful remnants of the house of my father's birth.
In the separate photo-essays we each produced online (see the link below), I described this visit to the "hillbilly heartland" of Italy. (I can write that since I now reside in West Virginia.) Darkness? A little. But more felt was richness mixed with the flintiness that produced some tough, intrepid characters. Italians, as my father's brother once observed, "are made of nails."
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Sardinia?
Sardinia is not in southern Italy. It is an island almost due west of Rome. Have you ever actually been there?
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Glad to have the name of some new-to-me Italian writers.
I don't understand why the letters are so hostile to the article. Why so many complaints that these books don't show modern Sicily? Literary writers are not real estate agents. You certainly won't recognize modern Dublin in James Joyce's writings. Both John Banville and Colm Toibin also present an Ireland some would argue with as representtive of the real Ireland. So what! These are the books of literary writers, not Chamber of Commerce pamphleteers.
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Southern Italy today
I have to agree with Ms Jennings.
I literally got off the plane from Rome a few hours ago, having spent the bulk of the past week exploring Puglia.
I chose to make Taranto my base of exploration for various reasons, which in retrospect was a mistake. I tried really hard to love Taranto but it went unrequited.
Frankly, I think the title of the book I saw in Roma Termini station before I left for there ("Taranto Poisonville" - http://www.sartoriolibri.com/terun.html) sums the place up. It's a shame though, because with a little love and a LOT less heavy petrochemical industry, the place could be a nicely polished diamond.
The revelation was Lecce though.
If I could have changed anything about my trip, I'd have spent the week in and around Lecce. Beautiful architecture, tourist friendly, fantastic food...absolutely charming! The place is almost a minature Rome but living la dolce vita and not so bustled up. And a few miles out of town there are olive groves and grape farms so vast they stretch to the horizon.
Brindisi was truly charming and even smaller places in Taranto Province, like Grottaglie and Martina Franca had their charms.
I would encourage more people to "go south"...it was rewarding and, despite the claims and worries of some of my friends, completely unthreatening!
Funny, in retrospect, the only person who was enthusiastic about my choice of holiday was a friend from Torino!