Less known attractions of Rome that you will appreciate

Lungotevere and St. Peter Basilica at sunset (picture
by Olga Lenczewska)

by Olga Lenczewska

Many people, if not all, dream to visit Rome one day and experience the place where such a big part of the Western civilisation was created and developed. Rome has the ancient Forum Romanum and the Colosseum, it also has the beautiful Baroque fountains and churches. If you go to Rome, however, make sure you don’t end up in a touristic ‘bubble’, which is not only pricy and overcrowded, but also doesn’t present the whole picture of Rome’s splendour. 

If you’re a fan of ancient history or art, one not-to-be-missed site is Ostia Antica: a big archaeological site situated very close to Rome, which is bigger, quieter, and calmer than the Forum and the Colosseum. You can find it near Ostia, by the Mediterranean Sea. Ostia Antica used to be Rome’s river port and a first Roman colony. It was built on the remaining of an Etruscan town Veio, and therefore is not less multicultural and aristically eclectic than the centre of Rome. Its most impressive buildings include the military camp that dates back to 3rd century BC, and the Capitolinium, where the gods Minerva, Juno, and Jupier were worshipped. 

Another ancient site worth visiting is the Theatre of Marcellius, located five minutes away from Piazza di Venezia, next to the Jewish quarter and the Tiber River. It was built at the sunset of the Roman Republic as an open-air theatre for all kind of performances. What is interesting about it nowadays is that half of it is Renaissance, as in the 16th century a new part was added on top of the ruins. This eclectic design looks very unique, but the two parts blend in really well.

Piazza del Popolo (picture by Olga Lenczewska)

As for the Baroque features of Rome, Piazza del Popolo is a must. Nowadays, it is the favourite spot for both classical art enthusiasts and modern street performers. The first may admire the ancient Porta Flaminia, build during the reign of the Emperor Aurelius and two symmetrical Baroque churches designed by Bernini, where Rome’s most fashionable street Via del Corso begins. The latter may listen to Rome’s best street performer Emiliano Fiacchi, who resembles Michael Jackson like no one else.

For those of you who are Christian, it is worth noting that there is a much better opportunity to see and pray with Pope Francis than the famous Sunday blessing at noon, which is only in Italian. Each Wednesday morning St Peter’s Square holds an ‘audiencia’, during which the Pope reads the gospel and gives a homily in a number of languages as well as greets the many groups that came to listen to him. This is the best opportunity to see the Pope, listen to his message, and pray with him. The (free) tickets for this ‘audiencia’ can be obtained up to one day before from the Vatican office located on the left side of the square.

Finally, if you have experience all of the above and feel tired of all the Roman sightseeing, you can have a relaxed walk alongside the boulevard of the Tiber River. This alley is melancholic and peaceful, shaded by plane trees. You can admire the sunset over St Peter’s Basilica as well as the beautiful ancient Ponte Sant’Angelo, with its ten sculptures of angels created by Bernini.

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Experiments, cards, and the machinery of narration

Italo Calvino

by Olga Lenczewska

In the late 1960’s and throughout all of 1970’s, Italo Calvino lived in Paris and belonged to a French group of experimental writers called Oulipo. Influenced by its founders, George Perec and Raymon Queneau, who played an important role in the development of the ever-growing structuralism movement, as well as Roland Barthes, whose seminars he attended, Calvino eagerly participated in the creation of new, combinatory, labyrinth-like and reader-oriented literature.

In a lecture entitled “Cybernetics and Ghosts”, Calvino explicitly expressed his fascination with structuralism and semiotics as well as more specific problems within these fields, such as: the importance of the author, the role of the reader, the construction of a narrative, the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities. This focus on the relation of words to each other as well as the relation of words to their meanings had been first analysed by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, who claimed that our use of language is central to our understanding of the worlds and the events in it, emphasising that it is the very relation of concepts to each other that create the meaning of every one of them by means of “differential relations”. The natural consequence of this observation was the fact that one can only understand a given word or concept if one is familiar with all other elements of the same “system”, that is, in the context of other elements which together constitute a system of communication and conceptual understanding: language. Because literature is created primarily by means of language, the meaning one reads into a text depends heavily on these “differential relations” – not only between single words and concepts, but also between more complex elements that constitute a book, such as single stories, chapters, characters, types of narration, and so on.

Let’s look at how Calvino’s literary experiments in his book “Il castello dei destini incrociati” contributed to the creation of a new type of literature which came from the structuralist movement. “Il castello dei destini incrociati” consists of two quite distinct parts: “Il castello dei destini incrociati” and “La taverna dei destini incrociati”. The two parts are composed in a similar way, both telling stories of different protagonists with a use of a deck of Tarot cards, but the settings and the decks are different in each of the halves, and so are the variations in the cards’ order. The action of both parts takes place in an obscure place and features characters who have just met. All of them have suddenly lost their power of speech and thus struggle to tell the others what has happened to them. Once presented with a deck of Tarot cards, one by one they decide to use it as a means of communication which therefore from now on happens by symbols and images, not words. The narrator, himself a participant in the gathering, attempts to understand the stories they tell (or perhaps interpret them, as we are never sure whether his description is right).

The very idea for the book’s composition came from Paolo Fabbri, who in 1968 delivered a lecture that Calvino attended. However, already in one of his previous works, “Il cavaliere inesistente”, Calvino begins to explore the idea of pictorial, non-linguistic story-telling. Some critics have, in fact, compared “Il castello dei destini incrociati”, to a giant card game, in which both the protagonists and the readers participate. In the book’s first part, the physical arrangements of the cards right before the narrative begins is such that the stories of all the protagonists are reflected by a series of cards, either read horizontally or vertically, either forwards or backwards, which sums up to a total of twelve stories. In the second part of the book the cards are not read sequentially, but in a rather random order.

One of the experiments Calvino put to test in his book was that of narrative units and various ways of combining them. In “Il castello dei destini incrociati”, by constructing different stories on the basis of various order of the Tarot cards, Calvino attempted to prove that a narrative is able to be reduced to a finite number of elements or meaning that can be combined in a infinite number of ways, resulting in infinite narrative solutions. Moreover, by providing the Tarot cards decks on the margins of “Il castello dei destini incrociati”, Calvino ensured that his text would be self-referential. The cards are used as a narrative combinational machine, as the meaning of each of them strictly depends of the card that preceded it and that will follow it. The cards, in reality, have no real existence until given meaning by a player or, in this case, a reader of Calvino’s book, and such meaning can differ, depending on the card’s place in the deck and the story. For example, in the first story of the first part of the book, a card called Strength that depicts a man that beats an animal signifies a knight in a forest who was trapped by a brigand, whereas in the fifth chapter the same cards means an African invasion on Catalonia.

In “Il castello dei destini incrociati” the cards, as units of the system of communication and at the same elements of the story, only gain genuine meaning in relation to each other, as every preceding and following card influences each other. Calvino subverts language, challenging the meaning of its elements, showing us through the use of cards that even if the elements of the communicative system remain the same, their reading and interpretation can constantly change if the relations between the elements change, and so all kinds of stories and meanings can be found the our world, too.

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“Tante veritá e bugie”: the mysterious affairs of Zeno Cosini

Italo Svevo

by Olga Lenczewska

Zeno Cosini, the main protagonist of Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza de Zeno, is perhaps one of the most amusing and complex literary characters in modern Italian literature. Whilst telling his story in the first person in a form of a autobiography, as ordered by his psychoanalytic doctor, he manipulates the facts and lies to the reader – or maybe he is not sure himself what happened in reality and what happened in his head. Zeno is the first literary example of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Svevo was influenced by – yet after having read the novel, one is not sure if psychoanalytic treatment really works.

Already in the opening chapter, Prefazione, written by the psychoanalytist who treated Zenos, the reader is warned about the unreliability of the following Zeno's account of his life. The doctor refers to Zeno's autobiography as a collection of “tante veritá e bugie”, not providing moreover a means of distinguishing between the truths and the lies: “Se [Zeno] sapesse quante sorprese potrebbero risultargli dal commento delle tante veritá e bugie ch'egli ha qui accumulate!”.

Zeno's way of viewing the world results in his alienation from the reality. Every decision he makes is not entirely “his own” but made in order to please somebody else or to falsely appear as a certain personality. This is strengthened when Zeno often visits the Malfenti family. He feels foreign and maladjusted to it, and therefore does or says things he normally would not do or say. As comments a literary critic Vittorini, “Zeno si presenta come lo straniero (xénos) che viene ammesso nel microcosmo del salotto dei Malfenti (un “paese del tutto sconosciuto”)” [Vittorini 2003: 72]. By achieving partial detachment from the society Zeno hopes to escape the social determinism. Yet he does not escape the social determinism but rather follows its norms without consciously deciding to do so or applying a special meaning to them (as for example in the case of the proposal to Augusta). He mimics the behaviours of the others and repeats the schemes of the society: marriage, commerce, family, and death, which are not simply chapters of a book but a thematic autonomy that represents the norms of the society to which Zeno conforms.

I will focus on portraying the protagonist's undecidedness and maladjustment to the society by analysing the reasons for his decision to marry Augusta Malfenti and the general story told in the chapter La storia del mio matrimonio. At the beginning of La storia del mio matrimonio Zeno confesses that “puó perció essere che l'idea di sposarmi mi sia venuta per la stanchezza di emettere e sentire quell'unica nota”. This is clearly not a common reason for wanting to get married, especially as Zeno decides to do so not because of having found the love of his life, but through analysis of the very concept of being a husband. The social normativity and the things that are regarded as “typical”, such as getting married, begin to dominate his own free will and the ability to make responsible decisions based on his own, individual needs. Zeno chose (or was driven into) proposing to one of the Malfenti daughters. This was perhaps the effect of the close bond he had with Giovanni Malfenti. It can be said that the paternal affect of Malfenti which was reciprocated by Zeno was the cause of him wanting to marry one of Malfenti's daughters. He did not so much choose one of them for her own qualities, as for the perspective of having Malfenti as his father-in-law.

Zeno decides to propose to Ada, a woman he truly admires and perhaps is in love with. Yet when she rejects him, he immediately goes on to propose to Alberta and Augusta almost in one go. This grotesque situation – proposing to three sisters at the same evening – is quite amusing to the reader but at the same time reflects a serious problem of Zeno's: the inability to feel something deeply, to be hurt by the rejection of the beloved one, to stop himself from acting without thinking it through first. The act of proposing loses his meaning, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that gains a different one: that of being an element of the social game, of conforming to the norms. In effect, Zeno becomes Augusta's husband without wanting to or loving her. The choice of Augusta, the least appealing of the Malfenti sisters, is portrayed as random and absolutely unpredicted.

Once married, Zeno comes to realise he loves his wife. What he admires in her is the stability of her life and the order she imposes on things. Augusta truly loves Zeno, too, and brings to his life comfort and order; she consoles and absolves him. She is a mother-figure in the book, not only to their children but also to Zeno himself, and in fact she reminds Zeno of his mother. He finds in her something totally opposite to his own character. Augusta has an opposite view on the truth to Zeno. Whilst for the protagonist the semantic meaning of the words alternates from one situation and social context to another, and the truth is often not what actually happened but what Zeno wishes had happened, Augusta is far away from Zeno's truth relativism: “Da ogni sua parola, da ogni suo atto risultava che in fondo essa credeva la vita eterna. Non che la dicesse tale: si sorprese anzi che una volta io, cui gli errori ripugnavano prima che non avessi amati i suoi, avessi sentito il bisogno di ricordargliene la brevitá. Macché! Essa sapeva che tutti dovevano morire, ma ció non toglieva che ormai ch'eravamo sposati, si sarebbe rimasti insieme, insieme”. Moreover, she lives in the tangible reality and controls the present issues whilst Zeno tends to be absent-minded and the major part of his life is happening inside him, in his reflections and analysis, what is reflected by both the novel's title and the dominance of descriptions of his thoughts over dialogues. As a result of this, Zeno and Augusta have two opposite views of the world. Neither changes the other's view. There is a huge distance between the “A” of the Malfenti daughters and the “Z” of Zeno; it represents a distance from the beginning to the end, from a word to a life. Zeno is detached from the reality and lives in his own world of illusion and projection that is more familiar to him than the reality; he views everything that happens through the lens of his desires and wishes.

When Zeno he decides not to tell Carla, his lover, that he actually loves his wife (she thinks he does not), he tries to justify it by saying that in fact he is not sure whether he loves Augusta or not, and that none of the moments he spends with Carla is appropriate to reveal the truth. Similarly, during his affair with Carla he admits that he has more excuses to innocently visit her than needed, admitting thus that the official reasons are just excuses to make love to her, whereas after having ended the relationship he presents himself as a passive victim of circumstances and Carla's seduction, saying that the love for music was the primary rational motive for the many visits he paid her.

In sum, Svevo's La coscienza de Zeno describes a few episodes from the life of a character who is a literary representation of the first generation of people suffering from an existential condition called “life”. He analyses the reality rather than simply lives it, and, consequently, the life he leads conforms more to his own alternations and projections of the reality than the authentic, “objective” world. Thus he is maladjusted to the society he is supposed to function in and every decision he makes is not truly his own, but a means of conforming to the society's norms. The most prominent example of such an act is, as I tried to show, his decision to propose to and marry Augusta, the least appealing of the Malfenti daughters. Zeno is, moreover, unable to face the consequences of his previous decisions (he, for example, repeatedly cheats on his wife) and lies to himself about the morality of his actions.

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Fate in the works of Giovanni Verga

Giovanni Verga

by Olga Lenczewska

Fate, a notion largely explored and realised in art, philosophy, and literature from ancient times until the present day, can be generally defined as a condition predetermined by a Divine being or nature, invincible necessity, a power which projects one's future. As opposed to the notion of planning which involves an agent organising his own future, fate is supposed to be both independent of one's will, and necessary in its occurrence. In Giovanni Verga's works, however, this notion is substantially challenged and adapted to the society and times he depicts – let us take a close look at that.

Verga, born to a rich Sicilian family during the times of the island's poverty and Italy's social underdevelopment, was inspired by the French naturalism to think of the role of literature as that of portraying the reality as it really was. His particular focus in his mature works such as “I Malavoglia” and “Vita dei campi”, however, was not the “gran mondo” with which the French movement and Alessandro Manzoni dealt, but the “classi inferiori” of the southern Italian villages that, Verga claimed, suffered the most from the difficult economic situation; in the opening story from “Vita dei campi” entitled “Fantasticheria” he clearly presents his ideology: “per poter comprendere siffatta caparbietá, che é per certi aspetti eroica, bisogna farci piccini anche noi, chiudere tutto l'orizzonte fra due zolle, e guardare col microscopo le piccole cause che fanno battere i piccoli cuori”.

Verga’s interpretation of the notion of fate is clearly visible in his portrayal of a boy nicknamed Rosso malpelo, a protagonist of one of the short stories from “Vita dei campi”. The boy was called Rosso malpelo because, according to the villagers, ginger hair was an attribute of malicious people. The reasoning of the peasants may be evidenced by the use of a causal “perché” in the following statement: “aveva i capelli rossi perché era un ragazzo malizioso e cattivo, che prometteva di riescire un fior di birbone”. From a commonsensical point of view the prejudicial assumption of the peasants seem absurd and it is rather them who 'create' the boy's destiny than himself. Moreover, it is not only the boy's hair colour, but also the popular opinion concerning his father, that contributed to Rosso malpelo's bad fame: the boy 'inherited' the bad fame from his father who, also unjustifiably, was negatively perceived by the society which would judge his stubbornness and hard-working manners as arrogance and selfishness. When the father died during work only he was brave to do, the fellow workers judge Rosso malpelo's mourning as a nasty, arrogant, even animalistic behaviour. A number of animalistic comparisons appear also in other parts of the story, for example, when the reader finds out that even the boy's mother believed he was a malicious just because people were saying so, putting the opinion of others over the bond of family: “La vedova di mastro Misciu era disperata di aver per figlio quel malarnese, come dicevano tutti, ed egli era ridotto veramente come quei cani, che a furia di buscarsi dei calce e delle sassate da questo e da quello, finiscono col mettersi la coda fra le gambe e scappare alla prima anima viva che vedono, e diventano affamati, spelati e selvatici come lupi”. Even more tragically, the boy seemed to be aware of his situation in the village and surrounding him injustice, but unable to free himself from it, accepting is and taking for granted instead: “Mio padre era buono, e non faceva male a nessuno, tanto che lo chiamavano Bestia. Invece è là sotto, ed hanno persino trovato i ferri, le scarpe e questi calzoni qui che ho indosso io”. It becomes clear that it were the villagers' prejudicial opinions, not some higher power, that projected and directed Rosso malpelo's fate.

Moreover, the boy felt obliged to work were his father used to, even though he died there and the place was not only extremely dangerous, but constantly reminded Rosso malpelo of the tragedy. Despite his unwillingness to do so, the boy believed he was born into working at his father's trade: “Certamente egli avrebbe preferito di fare il manovale, come Ranocchio, e lavorare cantando sui ponti, in alto, in mezzo all'azzurro del cielo, col sole sulla schiena, - o il carrettiere, come compare Gaspare, che veniva a prendersi la rena della cava, dondolandosi sonnacchioso sulle stanghe, colla pipa in bocca, e andava tutto il giorno per le belle strade di campagna (…). Ma quello era stato il mestiere di suo padre, e in quel mestiere era nato lui”. Also the job itself seemed to be linked to fatal fate. The ultimate tragism of the injudicious opinion shared by the society the boy lived in is represented and particularly stressed at the very last sentence of “Rosso malpelo”, when the boy goes away, convinced that nobody will look for him anyway: “Così si persero persin le ossa di Malpelo, e i ragazzi della cava abbassano la voce quando parlano di lui nel sotterraneo, ché hanno paura di vederselo comparire dinanzi, coi capelli rossi e gli occhiacci grigi”. The public fear of Rosso malpelo remained even after he had left his home and went missing.

In sum, the short story “Rosso malpelo” from “Vita dei campi” presents the fate of the protagonist as being in hands of the society he lives in that shared injudicious prejudices based on his physical appearance and his mourning after the death of his father; a negative social opinion greatly influences his and his family's life. Moreover, despite not willing to work where his father did, the boy believed he was born into continuing his father's trade and did not see any other possibility, thus being unable to free himself from his family's 'heritage'. The notion of fate in “Vita dei campi” is based on, or mainly expressed by, the social beliefs and opinions shared by the locals of the villages the plots are set in. Finally, the notion of fate in Verga's works directs the protagonists' lives from the 'bottom' – by the society, fellow locals – rather than from the 'top' – by some kind of Divine and omnipotent power, even if the protagonists themselves do not realise this and attribute this force to God. This might be due to the fact that for the protagonists do not want to accept they are controlled by their society's values and other people rather than by God, as they would not be able to explain and accept their course of life otherwise. Such definition of fate as coming from the 'bottom' is very different from its original definition from ancient times of the Greek tragedy. Thus it can be questioned that the force that controls Verga's protagonists cannot really be called fate. Obviously it depends how liberally we treat the definition of fate, but in my opinion it cannot be; I would rather call it 'social inescapableness', which transform the notion of 'fate' into a power that does not bear the notion of a Divine being projecting one's life.

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The courage to change. A review of Edoardo Falcone's film “Se Dio vuole”

by Olga Lenczewska

The Italian film “Se Dio vuole” [“If that’s what God wants”] came out in cinemas a few days ago. It has been directed by Edoardo Falcone, a screenwriter who decided to take on a new role of a film-maker. For the Italian cinematography, it was a good decision, because “Se Dio vuole” turns out to be the best of both artistic worlds – a very witty comedy that nevertheless addresses difficult and interesting problems.

Despite what one may infer just from reading the film’s title, the story presented by Falcone doesn’t openly and trivially indoctrinate towards Christianity. It merely shows how faith affects our lives in different ways and presents a vast scale of the ways in which the interaction of the atheists and the believers may proceed.


The film begins when the main character’s son, Andrea, confesses to the family he has decided to become a priest. To his father, Tommaso – a renown surgeon, a liberal and modern atheist who puts his career ahead of his family – this news is a hundred times worse than a possibility that his son is a homosexual. He immediately decides to investigate who “brain-washed” his son, unmask him (and thus Christianity) as fake, and bring Andrea back on the right track – which, obviously enough, means studying medicine.

In the meantime, Andrea helps his mother realise what she has known in her heart for a long time: that her life is empty and she is unhappy because of Tommaso’s ignorant attitude towards family, to which she, on the contrary, dedicated her whole life. She leaves the surgeon and moves out (but only to the maiden’s room), yet Tommaso is too busy “fixing” his son to deal with his marriage crisis. In fact, he has always believed in his clear and academic mind inherited only by his son, his daughter - similarly to his wife – being simple, rather shallow human beings, and has always been quick to judge his family members and co-workers.

When Tommaso finds out who inspired his son to enter the seminary, he starts spying Don Pietro, who is known as a charismatic priest who helps people in difficulties. As first, it seems that Tommaso has found something on him; he befriends him and attempts to find a proof that the man’s morality and altruism aren’t authentic and that his Catholic vocation is a cover for some dirty business. Don Pietro isn’t one of these people, though – his intelligence, optimism, tolerance, and authentic willingness to help Tommaso when the latter pretends he’s a poor, depressed man, start slowly getting to the surgeon. Quickly enough, Don Pietro finds out Tommaso’s secret – but instead of turning his back on him, the priest asks him for help at a construction of his new parish in exchange for not telling Andrea what Tommaso tried to do behind his back. At first, the surgeon hates wasting his precious time in a church, but gradually Don Pietro becomes his best friend and Tommaso asks him for advice – this time for real – concerning his family problems.

Don Pietro’s influence, alongside the fact that he doesn’t forcefully try to convince Tommaso to become a believer, changes the surgeon. He becomes less judgmental and more emphatic towards his co-workers in the hospital. Eventually, he also changes his attitude towards his wife and daughter, and thus get his life on the right track. When he finally feels ready to be honest with his son and tell him that becoming a priest will ruin his life, it turns out his son changed his mind long time ago and already has a girlfriend, which Don Pietro has been aware of.

It isn’t, therefore, Andrea’s vocation that is the object of the titular God’s will. It is the gradual transformation of Tommaso’s life that is really at stake here. The film ends with a profoundly symbolic scene: Don Pietro is hit by a car and dies despite the medical help he receives. The ‘physical’ life-saving procedure, in which Tommaso always believed, proves faulty, whilst the ‘spiritual’, or moral, life-saving practise, which he always neglected, has already worked inside of him.
Despite some rather standard plot solutions, the film manages to avoid banality. Don Pietro does not end up being operated by Tommaso, as one might have expected, and Andrea doesn’t enter the seminary, because his faith isn’t mature enough. Nor are we sure whether Tommaso actually started believing in God. And that’s because “Se Dio vuole” isn’t only about taking the “leap of faith” – it’s also about open-mindedness and the courage to change one’s attitudes and to become a better husband and father.

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Una recensione di “Il nome del figlio”, film diretto da Francesca Archibugi

di Olga Lenczewska

La maggior parte delle discussioni, specialmente quelle che avvengono durante una bella serata tra amici, svaniscono presto senza lasciarsi dietro importanti conseguenze. Questo non è vero, però, nel caso del litigio che apre il nuovo film di Francesca Archibugi, “Il nome del figlio”, remake italiano della pellicola francese “Cena tra amici”. Concentrandosi su una singola scena “indoor”, tipica della rappresentazione teatrale (una scena che non è, comunque, statica), “Il nome del figlio” mostra come uno scherzo innocente possa evolvere in modi imprevisti, sfidando le opinioni comuni su certi “tipi” di persone e rivelando segreti e atteggiamenti dei protagonisti che essi non vorrebbero mostrare. 

Nonostante siano cresciuti insieme, i protagonisti sono molto diversi. Paolo è un “self-made man”, un affascinante agente immobiliare di successo. Sua sorella, Betta, insegna al liceo ed è una mamma molto impegnata, mentre il marito di Betta, Sandro, lavora all’università e non presta molta attenzione alla realtà oltre i libri. Il loro amico single, Claudio, è un musicista eccentrico che ha assecondato i suoi sogni adolescenziali. La moglie di Paolo, la giovane Simona, è l’autrice di un romanzo best-seller con i classici atteggiamenti da “diva”.

I flashback occasionali rivelano gli anni dell’adolescenza di Paolo, Betta, Sandro e Claudio, e raccontano i conflitti con la generazione precedente, quelli che oggi hanno i loro stessi figli. Ma con il tempo la vita dei protagonisti cambia e insieme muta anche la prospettiva attraverso la quale vediamo le loro relazioni.

Il litigio comincia quando Paolo svela quale sarà il nome di suo figlio. Questa scelta controversa diventa lo sfondo per una discussione ideologica, che si trasforma presto in un argomento molto personale. Benché Betta, Sandro, Paolo e Claudio si ascoltino con attenzione e provino meticolosamente a risolvere il conflitto appena emerso, ciascuno di loro ha una parte di sé che gli altri non comprendono. Sandro aspira ad essere trattato al di sopra degli altri perché è un professore e conosce le materie umanistiche molto bene, ma purtroppo non è capace di applicare quello che sa alla propria vita: non capisce sua moglie e vive una vita parallela tra romanzi e social network, perdendosi la vita vera. Betta, completamente dedita ai suoi figli e al marito, è sempre più fiaccata dalla routine della vita quotidiana. Paolo, invece, è orgoglioso di esser un elegante uomo d'affari, liberale e moderno; tuttavia sua moglie Simona di lui non apprezza altro che l’aspetto estetico, non ha nemmeno letto il suo romanzo!

Nonostante la loro complessità, i quattro vecchi amici sembrano più “in gamba” del quinto personaggio, Simona, che rimane alquanto estraneo fino alle ultime scene. Solo alla fine del film si comprenderà, infatti, la sua capacità di “leggere” i commensali, comprendendone i dolori e soprattutto aprendo gli occhi sul loro snobismo e sulla ristrettezza di vedute che dimostrano; per esempio, quando giudicano il libro di Simona banale senza neppure averlo letto, oppure quando dipingono troppo frettolosamente Claudio come omosessuale.

“Il nome del figlio” è una buona e sofisticata commedia che vi farà ridere, ma allo stesso tempo interromperà la tendenza a giudicare gli altri attraverso schemi prestabiliti e sulla base di pregiudizi, e vi incoraggerà a riconsiderare il vostro atteggiamento verso gli altri. Uscirete dal cinema con animo nervoso, ognuno in modo diverso, e ciò che vi renderà nervosi sarà proprio quello che dovrete rivedere nella vostra vita.

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70 years after. Auschwitz in the eyes of Primo Levi

Primo Levi

by Olga Lenczewska

In 2015, the year to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, it is important to remember the significance of those events, in the hope that they will never be repeated. In the United Kingdom, a new documentary on the liberation of Auschwitz has been recently released. André Singer’s documentary “Night Will Fall” uses original footage collected by the soldiers in 1945 and powerfully reminds us of how easy it is to live unaware of the tragedies which take place in a country neighbouring one’s own. It is also worth reminding ourselves about literary testimonies from that time, amongst which prominently figures Primo Levi’s ‘Se questo è un uomo’ [‘If this is a man’] – one of the most crucial books on Auschwitz ever written.

What was Levi’s goal when he was starting to write ‘Se questo è un uomo’? Why did he decide to immerse himself in the horrifying experience once more, and again and again, writing about it so much during his whole life after Auschwitz? Would it not have been easier to simply forget, or at least try to forget? The author answers these questions himself in the preface: ‘Il bisogno di raccontare agli ‘altri’, di fare di ‘altri’ partecipi, aveva assunto fra noi, prima della liberazione e dopo, il carattere di un impulso immediato e violento, tanto da rivaleggiare con gli altri bisogni elementari; il libro è stato scritto per soddisfare questo bisogno; in primo luogo quindi ha scopo di liberazione interiore’.

From the very moment when Levi decided to write not only a testimony, but a collective description of the Auschwitz imprisonment on behalf of those who died and cannot speak for themselves, it was clear that his work would be much more than just an account of his days in Auschwitz, in the centre of events that shaped the modern Western cultural legacy and changed the way we look at the man. Levi underlines the need to both remember and sanctify those who died in Auschwitz – the need that existed inside him during his time in the death camp and was nearly as strong as the hunger or cold. To save himself from Auschwitz was not enough; to save the others meant to write about the sufferings and to consecrate them. ‘Auschwitz mi ha segnato, ma non mi ha tolto il desiderio di vivere: anzi, me l’ha accresciuto, perché alla mia vita ha conferito uno scopo, quello di portare testimonianza, affinché nulla di simile avvenga mai più’, Levi writes in the afterword to his book. By passing the essence of his memories to future generations the author attempts to ‘normalise’ his experience, which he himself finds hard to believe in. It is only when he realises that he must write about his past that he undergoes an ethical turn from involuntary to voluntary memory.

In one of the most important chapters of the book, ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, Levi raises the moral problem of salvation. Who could be saved? How could one be saved? Who deserved being saved and why did I survive? These disturbing and repetitive questions indicate how hard it was for Levi to remain unemotional, not to go beyond a mere description of facts. He portrays the prisoners and the whole Lager society through philosophical aspects such as ‘the value of man’, ‘the value of human personality’, ‘the value of moral responsibility each of us towards others’. Moreover, the author analyses people as equal human beings, paying no attention to the ethnic categories that were in fact crucial to the Nazis. The discourse, carried out in a way that leads to universal ethical statements, is therefore separated from the Auschwitz law. In ‘I sommersi e i salvati’, he compares the Lager’s set of rules to a juridical system. He also, almost academically, defines Auschwitz as a perfect example of injustice, providing a historical and biblical context for his hypothesis: ‘Nella storia e nella vita pare talvolta di discernere una legge feroce, che suona ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’. Nel Lager, dove l’uomo è solo e la lotta per la vita si riduce al suo meccanismo primordiale, la legge iniqua è apertamente in vigore, è riconosciuta da tutti’.

In ‘Se questo è un uomo’, Levi truly engages the reader in his philosophical discourse and the description of the loss of human dignity. His work is subjective, coherent with the facts (although not always chronological), and at the same time truly academic, as it manages to philosophically analyse the Holocaust phenomenon. Such a range of various approaches allowed him to create an original book that cannot be labeled as just one literary genre. Thanks to Levi’s determination and faith, we can now be aware of what had happened not that long ago and what can happen in the future if we do not respect each other, for, as it wrote Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Those who seek to protect the body at all cost die many times over. Those who risk the body to survive as man have a good chance to live on’.

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Giuseppe Ungaretti’s war poetry of solitude and solidarity

Giuseppe Ungaretti

by Olga Lenczewska

Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, where his Italian parents moved to find a job at the construction of the Suez Canal. Although they were from Lucca, Tuscany, the poet has not visited this or any other place in his home country until he was an adult. Having completed education at a French school in Egypt, he went on to study at Sorbonne in France. The first collection of Ungaretti’s poems, L’Allegria (The Joy), consists of his works from the period of First World War (1914-1919). Most of the poems from the collection present antitheses, such as happiness-sadness, life-death, nationalism-cosmopolitanism, or solitude-solidarity. In Ungaretti’s view, poetry cannot evolve in a static environment, and to write about the essential human experience is to wander well beyond the habits and boredom of everyday’s life. It is constant energy and movement that create true poetry, and the essence may be captured beyond the words only if they are full of tensions, antitheses, and dilemmas.

When First World War began, Ungaretti decided to be a soldier that he was able to get closer to his country by fighting at the Italian front in Carso. That was when he saw Italy for the first time. Due to distinct lack of one national identity and not feeling particularly attached to any country or tradition, Ungaretti faced an identity crisis and longed for national roots – cultural basis that would grant him a foundation for his literary expression and values. He considered his life and journey as a sort of nomadism, perceiving himself everywhere as straniero and admitting in one of his poems In nessuna / parte / di terra / mi posso / accasare (Girovago). As his poetry always expressed his direct experience and feelings, solitude in his writings manifests itself in this very experience of not having a fixed identity and constant need to search for a home. Solidarity, on the other hand, is linked to the poet’s experience of war as a soldier, where he had to cooperate with other soldiers who were the witnesses of the challenges and extreme situations he faced and who were undergoing similar to him internal changes.

To give a practical example of the dichotomy of solidarity and solitude in Ungaretti’s war poetry, I will briefly analyse one of him poems, Fratelli. This meditative poem draws its inspiration from a meeting between two patrols of soldiers. Even though war is an antithesis of peace, Ungaretti pictures the two patrols as groups of fragile people facing the same drama of fear, tiredness and uncertainty as to what is going to happen tomorrow. Thus, the poem is a description of a situation that unites the war partisans in the same experience and feelings. Their moral frailty is represented by a synecdoche of trembling words (Parola tremante / nella notte) and metaphorically expressed as a young leaf trembling in the shell-convulsed night air (Foglia appena nata). It is this very situation and war context that enable the soldiers realise how little and vulnerable, when facing the universe and the wheel of history, they are. The scarcely born leaf hints also to the fact that many of them are young and inexperienced, which makes the First World War a background of their process of becoming fully grown up. This notion of losing the opportunity to have a normal youth can be found also in Italia, where Ungaretti defines himself as il frutto (...) / maturato in una sera – somebody who, because of the war context, was forced to grow up too quickly.

The title of the poem gives primacy to a single, crucial word fratelli, which means both comrades and brothers. The notion of brotherhood shows how close the soldiers are linked, almost as if they were one body. Solidarity and strength unite the soldiers against their own precariousness and fragility. On the other hand, there is a single solider (uomo) to whom his fragility is presented. We can thus see the tension between a singular intense experience of sinking the existential individuality of a lonely and fragile person which is contrasted by the plural fratelli that symbolizes the solidarity of a brotherhood discovered in the tragedy of war.

As Ungaretti believes it is constant tensions between words and concepts that create true poetry, solitude and solidarity are never separated from each other and every poem that deals with these themes is a philosophical journey through human existence and crucial for life experience. As a poet, Ungaretti wanted to be heard by many of us and to do that he constantly searched for his national and cultural identity and roots that would grant him a foundation for his literary expression and values, for only by doing so could he pass this experience to future generations and stay close to his own feelings and dilemmas. His collection L’Allegria reflects thus what he thought to be true poetry: Ogni vera poesia risolve miracolosamente il contrasto d’essere singolare, unica, e anonima, universale [Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo].

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Higher education systems in Italy and England

by Olga Lenczewska

I study Italian and Philosophy at the University of Oxford in the UK, but this year I’ve been spending some time away from the Anglophone world and dreaming spires of Oxford, as a visiting student in Italy at Università degli Studi di Pavia.

It isn’t all that different. Pavia, unlike the majority of Italian universities, has colleges, each of which, just like at Oxford, comprises student accommodation, common rooms, a few lecture halls, a dining hall, and a library. At Oxford or Cambrdge, however, a college is a must, and all of them are academically equal. At Pavia belonging to a college is optional. Even if you do, only four out of eighteen are considered “di merito”, prestigious, because you have to maintain excellent academic results each semester in order to stay in. The two oldest colleges, Borromeo and Ghislieri, in their beauty and traditions resemble the Oxonian colleges.

The higher education system at the two universities is quite different. Pavia doesn’t replicate the famous Oxbridge system, where, apart from lectures and seminars or labs, students have to produce as many as two essays a week and discuss them in one-to-one meetings with a professor. In Pavia, like in the rest Italy, there are no essays or tutorials. Instead, however, the number of lectures per subject per week is much higher than in England. What’s more, Italian students can’t choose what classes they take, whereas in England there’s a lot of flexibility in this respect. We basically study only what we are really interested in, but this means that we can decide to specialise in a certain area very quickly or not to specialise at all.

Moreover, Oxford allows you to study two courses at the same time and, funnily enough, every student has the same amount of work, regardless of whether he/she is doing one or two courses. This means that if you study only one course, you can take more subjects in it. In Italy, on the contrary, it’s impossible to be enrolled in two departments at the same time.

The most dreaded thing amongst students, exams, are organised differently, too. At Pavia, you need to take exams each semester, but their length and form depends on individual professors. At Oxford, we have exams once a year (or ever rarer, depending on the course), but the are all crammed into one or two weeks and organised in a standardised way: for each subject we take a three-hours’ long, essay-based paper. Producing a bachelor thesis isn’t compulsory in England like it is in Italy and, for those who decide to write it, it usually substitutes one of their final exams.

Finally, I find the student life at Oxford much more diversified than in Pavia. Anything you’ve ever dreamed of doing surely exists in Oxford: from crazy Doctor Who societies, salsa classes or Quidditch teams, to more serious political, religious or cultural clubs. But, to even out, Italian students are generally more open and eager to spontaneously make friends on a night out, endlessly walking around the city centre “in giro”. All these differences taken aside, one thing is sure: you’ll never appreciate what your university gives you if you don’t get a chance to study at a different one on your year abroad!

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Truth, theatre and reality in Pirandello’s “Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore”

by Olga Lenczewska

In my last article about Pirandello’s “Enrico IV”, I analysed the notions of sanity and madness and illustrated Pirandello’s concept of truth by the vagueness of the distinction between sanity and madness in his “Enrico IV”. This time I will illustrate the concept of truth by the opposition between theatre and reality, which is the main theme of his “Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore”. It is worth reminding the readers what I have already written in my last article, namely, that the theatre conveys always its own version of truth – the one that is true within the newly-created world, and presented as such on stage. In Pirandello's works, the notions of truth and illusion within any play not only constantly intertwine, but intertwine to such an extent that the notion of truth gets lost in the way, and one does not know any more what is an illusion and what is not. 

The opposition between theatre and reality in the light of the notion of truth, that is, the distinction between being a stage character and being a real person, is particularly important for “Sei i personaggi in cerca d'autore”, as this play involves an important meta-theatrical discussion. In “Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore” we are immediately presented with two completely different groups of people: one being the actors and their director, all rehearsing for Pirandello's new play, the second being an odd troupe that interrupts the rehearsal. From the very beginning the “personaggi” appear to contain a paradoxical element in their very essence, as they are presented as being no less real than the actors, but at the same time they are called, look like, and define themselves as characters from a certain play. 

Through introducing them to the “normal” world (in the play represented by the theatre's workers) Pirandello clashes two worlds: the real one and the world of imagination, implying that both are equally authentic and legitimate. What is more, the characters claim to exist outside of their author's head, that is, as beings whose existence does not need to depend on another finite mind: “IL PADRE: (…) la natura si serve da strumento della fantasia umana per proseguire, piú alta, la sua opera di creazione”. The philosopher Roman Ingarden would call their way of living “intentional beings”, because, despite being a work of art, their existence acquired an independent ontological status.

As for the truth of nature and appearance of the six characters, one can argue that because of their masks that impose on them a fixed expression throughout the whole play they do not seem very authentic. But, in my opinion, this is not the case – in fact, the masks intensify the characters' emotions and states of mind, marking what is the most distinct human element. The characters, furthermore, turn out to have an extremely complex set of feeling and relations with one another, thus proving themselves to be more and more real as we read the play. Therefore an important distinction needs to be made: the characters may appear as less real because of their nature, but nevertheless they seem to be more authentic and true than the “normal” people on stage; this view is supported in the play by the Father's words: “a essersi vivi, piú vivi di quelli che respirano e vestono panni! Meno reali, forse; ma piú veri!”. It can be said that, for Pirandello, being “more alive” depends on one's internal complexity, not on the external appearance. Furthermore, he makes a distinction within the very concept of truth between “reale” and “vero”, therefore truth cannot be simply defined as information that conforms to reality but carries its own inner truth. 

The notion of truth in Pirandello's plays is presented as relative. What is and what is not “true” or “real” depends on the readers’ or audience’s viewpoint. Reality gains new conditions: it is authentic actions and feelings of the “personaggi” that make them real, and this beats their fictional character. Perhaps for Pirandello what is “vero” (authentic, true) had more significance than a mere formal status of being “reale” (real).

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Truth, sanity and madness in Pirandello’s “Enrico IV”

Luigi Pirandello

by Olga Lenczewska

“Truth” is a piece of information with conforms to reality as it is. It is meant to be objective and commonly shared by a large group of people. The opposite of truth is fiction, therefore also any form of art that alters reality, or even goes as far as to create new characters and events, could be called the opposite of truth. Yet, since any author is a creator of a new world that functions within his works, theatre itself conveys always its own version of truth – the one that is true within the newly-created world, and presented as such on stage. In order to follow and understand the spectacle, we must engage in this game. In theatre, therefore, illusion often becomes truth. In Pirandello's works, however, the game goes much farther – the notions of truth and illusion within any play not only constantly intertwine, but intertwine to such an extent that the notion of truth gets lost in the way, and one does not know any more what is an illusion and what is not. The concept of truth in Pirandello’s plays can be illustrated by the vagueness of the distinction between sanity and madness in his “Enrico IV”. 

“Enrico IV” presents a story of a talented actor and historian falls off his horse while playing the role of Henry IV in a historical pageant. After he comes to, he believes himself to be Henry. For the next twenty years, his wealthy nephew, Count de Nolli, funds an elaborate hoax in a remote villa, hiring actors to play the roles of Henry's privy councillors in order to simulate the 11th-century court. In the play the notions of sanity and madness are defined within its frame and laws: we are confronted with a comparison between a theatrical world that resembles ours and anther one with in that does not resemble ours. The first one is represented by all of the “persone” except of Enrico; the latter by Enrico and the theatre-in-theatre, created by others who are aware of the game. Therefore the distinction between madness and sanity seems initially to be marked by the awareness of the game (everyone but Enrico) or by lack thereof (Enrico). 

A scene from Enrico IV

During the first two acts the reader may establish truth as that what the others say, and insanity as Enrico's behaviour. The situation, however, complicates itself to an unbearable extent in the last act when the reader and the other characters find out that Enrico has been aware for eight years that he is not really the German Emperor, and that the has been playing the game with the others, or he has been imposing the rules of his game upon the others who were completely unaware of it. Who appears to be mad at this point? Funnily enough, we are still inclined to say: Enrico, despite the fact that now we know it was him who was aware and the others that were not. But somehow the criterion of madness changes, and Enrico seems to have been mad by letting the game continue and acting as an insane person. Was this a mad decision? We are inclined to say it was, but nevertheless the definition of insanity is being substantially altered. Finally, it is altered once more at the very end of the play when Enrico, having unveiled the truth about himself to everyone's bewilderment, has a change to appear as sane, and in fact is considered as such by some characters, for example Belcredi: “BELCREDI: (…) Tu non sei pazzo!”. Enrico, however, immediately denies this, shouting “Non sono pazzo? Eccoti!”, and kills Belcredi. This decision seems to have been made by him in order to prove a point, but we get a feeling that a sane person would never kill somebody just to prove a point. 

Is Enrico really mad for doing so? And, is he still mad, or is he mad again but in a different way now? Clearly the definition of madness as well as the demarcation line between sanity and insanity become extremely vague at this point, and much is left to the reader's interpretation and speculation. But that is precisely what Pirandello wants: to leave the search for the truth to the readers; this is the final part of the game. In my opinion, at the end of the play Enrico himself doubts whether he is mad or not, but his decision to kill Belcredi has consequences, and he has to act as mad again (“Ora sí... per forza... qua insieme, qua insieme... e per sempre!”), which is inevitable in the light of his previous decision. The notion of truth seems relative and its objectivity hidden to us (as well as some characters). 

The notion of truth in Pirandello's plays is presented as relative. “Enrico IV” introduces so many dimensions that it is virtually impossible to answer, on the objective grounds, the question which of the characters are sane and which are mad. The truth, therefore, becomes a strongly relative concept, or, to put it differently, the objective truth is hidden from the audience (and some characters as well), and what remains visible are just certain viewpoints or perspectives of the theatrical reality. Which scenario is the true one or which characters are real and sane is never explicitly sad, and thus the truth is always hidden from the reader. Moreover, it can be questioned whether a fixed truth even exists in the plays – where would it be? I see no space within which it could exist – it cannot be found in the texts, implicitly or explicitly, and there are many plausible interpretations of what has really happened to the characters before the play. But pondering it might turn out to be useless, as the characters did not exist before the play and, after all, they are mere creations of the author.

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How Sciascia challenges the detective novel genre

Leonardo Sciascia

by Olga Lenczewska

The detective novel is a rather popular and “light” genre of literature that usually serves to entertain the reader without imposing on him any particular ideology or making him reflect on his life. This is the case when it comes to Agatha Christie's novels or the stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle, to list two English individuals that are amongst the most popular crime novels authors in the world. The aim of these novels is to portray a crime story is such a way that the reader feels the suspense is growing and cannot stop reading the book until the very last chapter. At the beginning of the book we are always presented with a murder (or multiple murders) as well as with all the protagonists that are involved in the incident in one way or another. The psychological portrait of the characters is usually very detailed and complicated. Among these people there is always a clever detective or policeman (for example, Sherlock Holmes in Doyle's novels and Hercules Poirot or Miss Marple in Christie's books), whose ultimate goal is to solve the crime. Each chapter of a detective novel, moreover, is supposed to reveal a new trace, either through the investigator's private enquiry or an interrogation of the characters, which will eventually lead to discovering the murderer and his motives - the “truth” about the story.

The structure of the detective novel does not allow its author much flexibility and literary innovation. Perhaps that is why it has not been considered an ambitious genre. Despite this fact, one of the Italian novelists of the 20th century, Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian whose books belong to the canon of Italian literature, chose the detectve novel as the framework for the vast majority of his writings. Although Sciascia's books largely conform to the genre of the detective novel, there are ideological and structural elements that differ.

Sciascia’s novels, such as “A ciascuno il suo” or “Il giorno della civetta”, start with a murder or murders, continue with an individual trying to discover the truth about a murder case by investigating various traces, and end with the killer’s being revealed and the story explained. The incident is always depicted from a few different perspectives and the reader does not know what exactly has happened. Moreover, the act of the murder splits the plot into two parts – before and after, constituting a crucial turning point in the plot. The element of a puzzle – who killed and why – goes back to the classic detective novel of Doyle and Christie. Through deduction and linking various premises in Sciascia’s books, as much as in those written by Doyle or Christie, it is possible to unveil the real story.

However, not everything in Sciascia's novels conforms to the detective novel genre so easily. Often the murderer turns out not to be a single person but a whole criminal institution – the Sicilian Mafia – with all its legal and political tricks. Because of this fact the motives of the murders are usually political and social, not private. Moreover, Sciascia, unlike other crime authors, is aware that the state is not of much use when it comes to uncovering a murder story: “Lo stato – l'istituzione giudiziaria – non é in grado di conferire efficacia al paziente lavorio di ricostruzione dell'ispettore o del detective” [Ambroise, “Invito alla lettura di Sciascia”]. In Sciascia's crime novels the Mafia is portrayed as an institution that defines the mode of existence in Sicily. Against the standard detective novel, the writer goes beyond a simple plot and brings out the evil history of the island, represented by the silence and the collision between the Mafia’a own business and the welfare of ordinary Sicilian citizens. In such a way Sciascia demythologises and re-invents, or re-formulates, the genre of the detective novel.

To give an example, this social situation of the island is symbolically represented in the main protagonist of “A ciascuno il suo” (1966), professor Paolo Laurana. Laurana is the most frequently featured character of the book as well as a private investigator of the double murder which takes place at the beginning of the book. However, unlike the traditional detectives, he is not sufficiently equipped to perform his task because he is a literature teacher and has no experience with dealing with crime. He is presented by Sciascia negatively: he is an introvert, not very successful in his academic job, sexually repressed, and dominated by his mother. Laurana tries to reconstruct the relationship between Manno and Roscio, the two victims of the murder in “A ciascuno il suo”, by interrogating his friends and other citizens. He is not sure who is and who is not controlled by the Mafia, and therefore whom he can trust. Sciascia depicts this difficult situation “usando un rigoroso rispecchiamento di un paese della Sicilia dove la mafia controlla inesorabilmente uomini e cose” [Abruzzi, “Leonardo Sciascia e la Sicilia”]. In the novel the Mafia is opposed by a single person who is not even an investigator but plays a “game” of being one. Despite his honesty and desire to unveil the truth, Laurana fails to complete his task in the world of corruption and lack of definite ethical values. He does not in time realise the dishonesty of the people involved in the murder and in consequence his naivety leads him to death. The reader quickly realises that in Sicily the collision between the victims and the world of politics is so strong that Laurana is unable to change anything. Sciascia's honest and trustworthy detective is alone, and he is the only point on earth where corruption is rejected: his motive is ethical and abstract, and, therefore, incorruptible. The impotence of the investigator is opposed to the power of the Mafia, which reflects the general social and political situation of the Sicily of the 1960's.

In his hands the genre of the detective novel became a reflection on the political system and the social situation of Sicily. The collective and institutional murderer, the Mafia, is portrayed as an institution that defines the mode of existence on the island. The impotence and naivety of the detective Laurana from “A ciascuno il suo” symbolises the inability of the Italians from Sicily to take control over this collective murderer. Sciascia, therefore, re-formulates the genre of the detective novel by introducing the elements I presented above and, in consequence, bitterly unveiling the real situation in the Sicily of the 1960’s. His crime novels may be therefore said to constitute one big detective story which is based on real facts from the Sicilian life of the author and his neighbours.

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