Syracuse’s most celebrated writer is Elio Vittorini (1908-1966), and the novel that sealed his bond with his hometown—which he left for good at age 20—was Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily), written between 1937 and 1938. The book’s memorable opening lines have rightly become part of the 20th century Italian literary canon: “That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies.” And then, “I saw friends for an hour or two without speaking a word, and I hung my head; and I had a girlfriend or a wife waiting for me, but I didn’t say a word with her either, and I hung my head with her, too.” And yet, the vision of “doomed humanity” in wartime, and “not burning to do anything about it” led to a sudden resolution: hopping on a train and returning to Sicily. An action that, as has happened countless times, set the island outside of history, making it a sort of alternative to a present world that no longer allows a glimpse of any future. But in Vittorini, there is no memory of “a childhood […] amid prickly pears and sulfur, in the mountains” motivating his return, but rather a mother back in his hometown, still living in poverty. The train journey is an opportunity to explore the possible fates of a humanity that, in the arc of the writer’s trajectory, shifts slowly from a Sicilian vignette to a global scale.
In the postwar period, Vittorini became one of the leading figures on the national cultural scene, launching magazines like Il Politecnico and book series like I gettoni, and taking on important roles, at different times, at many of the major publishing houses of the period, from Mondadori to Einaudi. As he sharpened and developed his experience over decades spent in Florence or in his beloved Milan, he always kept his Syracusan starting point in mind, as demonstrated by a passage from his acclaimed Letter to Togliatti:
I laugh at those who would reduce popular culture to a matter of mere simplification, when I think of how I saw its challenges met, when I was thirteen, or fifteen, or sixteen years old, by a group of young Syracusan workmen with whom I shared books and tastes. We never hesitated when faced with difficult readings. For example, we picked up Vico’s La Scienza Nuova, and if we didn’t understand anything upon a first reading, we read it again, and understood something, and then a third time, and understood something more… and those fellow readers of mine found time to do this after eight-hour days of manual labor. And they weren’t geniuses, either.
The reader Vittorini is ideally addressing here is the perpetuation, the next wave, of these Syracusan workmen.
