“The Wrath of God” by Costanza DiQuattro: the book that tells the story of the devastating earthquake of 1693 in Sicily

There is his beloved Sicily, noble and proud. There is it historical framework facing backwards as always, another inevitable feature of the novels of Costanza DiQuattro, which this time, however, betrays that late nineteenth-century universe to which he had accustomed us in his previous works to take us even further through the centuries, into the last part of the seventeenth century. But above all once again – after the Baron Corrado Arezzo, protagonist of Donnafugata, with which the Sicilian writer made her fiction debut in 2020; after monsù Fortunato or the pharmacist Antonio Fuscowith the habit of gambling who seeks redemption in the friendship with a sick boy with no future, around whom he revolves Sicilian castling published just over a year ago – we find another tormented male character.

Father Bernardo L’Arestia Corbara he is a parish priest from the suburbs, dissolute and disobedient, overwhelmed by love and doubt, who without vocation or conviction, rather forced by the noble family from which he comes, has devoted himself to God but between this and the passion for a woman he does not hesitate to choose the second by living in sin. The wrath of God, which gives the novel its title, falls upon him, at least according to the opinion of the small Iblean community that escapes him by deserting his rectory. And that is the most violent earthquake that the11 January 1693 destroyed everything Val di Noto: one of the most devastating seismic events in the history of Europe, by far the strongest earthquake recorded in Italian territory, with a magnitude of 7.31, sixty thousand victims and 45 inhabited centers destroyed, the author tells us in a note. Underlining how it was precisely from the ashes of this catastrophic event – its seismic swarm continued for three years – that one of the most beautiful architectural areas in the world then arose. The late Sicilian Baroque is in fact the son of those ruins.

And to his Sicily, which falls and gets back up, with this book and with Bernardo’s story, which reflects the very nature of the man who, despite despair, finds the strength to go further, he wanted to pay homage. The wrath of God, fourth novel by Costanza DiQuattroborn in 1986 a Ragusa where he lives and, in addition to writing, directs the Donnafugata Theatre, is in fact a hymn to rebirth, first of all of its land and of the men who built monuments to beauty there. Men crossed by contradictions and doubts that Father Bernardo, although the fruit of the author’s imagination, embodies perfectly.

With his parable of damnation and redemption – right from when we see him, in the very first pages, preparing to say mass like “a man led to the gallows”; full of poison for the baroness mother who she sees as “the devil”; in love with the busty perpetual Tresina and with that newborn son who he can only hold in her arms for a few days; blinded by mourning for a happiness that the earthquake snatched from him; finally illuminated by the project of human rebirth and urban planning – it is precisely in the figure of Bernardo L’Arestiaso well outlined, that Costanza DiQuattro demonstrates further maturity in her writing.

And in the choral portrait of a humanity that has lost everything and yet does not turn its back on the “happiness of discovering oneself alive, capable of getting up after having fallen” hide some of the most beautiful pages of the entire novel. A humanity that has the reassuring smile of Bernardo, “dominated by passions and overcome by responsibilities”, but also the faces of his brother Eligius and the altar boy Gasparino on whom the regret of the mutilation never stands out, of Father Costante, friend of a life that does not condemn even where he does not approve, of «U ciumararu»the «Mecia» and the two spinsters, the only faithful who frequent the canonical chat of sin. Finally, a humanity that the author presents to us through a skilful mixture of high registers – especially in the descriptions of Ibla “worn and tired”, with houses leaning against houses and churches covering other churches – and dialect incursions that contribute to giving life to atavistic and therefore memorable figures. And which confirm how, in giving us this choral fresco of her Sicily, Costanza DiQuattro continues to be inspired by the lessons of the greats. Starting with her beloved Verga.

The book

The wrath of God by Costanza DiQuattro (Baldini + Castoldi, 272 pages, 19 euros)