“And they called it Vigata. Sicily in the heart” is the title of the book by Pasquale Hamelpublished by Spazio Cultura Edizioni, which will be presented at 6pm Wednesday 3 July in Bagnasco square.
One of the events of the 2024 season, proposed by the association “Piazzetta Bagnasco”, which is animating one of the social places of the city by offering opportunities for meetings between the many actors of the territory, in synergy with the world of business, academia, art and the Third Sector. A program created in collaboration with the bookshop Modus Vivendi and I Love Sicilyand with Cappadonia Gelati and Liberto Motisi flowers come sponsor.
The journalist Giovanni Pepi and Professor Gabriella Maggio of the “Circolo dei Lettori” of Spazio Cultura will be in conversation with the author on Wednesday afternoon. The publisher, Nicola Macaione, will be present at the meeting.
THE BOOK
«A collection of stories – we read in the book’s synopsis – the result of memories, personal experiences or narrations passed down by relatives or friends of the author. For the most part, they are short profiles – almost impromptu sketches without pretension – on which the Pirandellian lesson hovers with hyperbolic instalments in the absurd.
The protagonist is the eccentric, the different one who breaks the norm without, however, this taking on the character of a scandal and which instead generates amazement and, in some cases, turns into a bitter life lesson.
The environmental setting is decisive, an everyday life marked by repetitive conventions of which a thin veil of irony, present even when the tragic dominates the narration, reveals the many contradictions that pervade it.
Porto Empedocle, La Marina, Vigata, many names for a single place – but not only that – where many of these actors physically reside and where they cultivate their aspirations which are almost always frustrated by what they consider to be an irrational course of things. Lives suspended, mortified by the expectation of outcomes that are not always obvious, imbued with an annoying respectable morality which, apparently, cannot be done without. Appearance, because reality, a vermin of irrational instincts and passions, lies in the background tragically ready for the first good opportunity to come out in all its bitter crudeness».
THE AUTHOR
Pasquale Hamel, born in 1949. Sicilian by birth, but a citizen of the world, he lives in Palermo. However, he has lived for a long time in Milan and Brussels. He has directed important cultural institutions, collaborating with Italian and foreign universities. He has dealt mainly with the history of contemporary Sicily.
With the publisher Sellerio he published, among other things, Brief history of Sicilian society 1780-1990now in its fourth edition; with Marsilio, The Conspiracy of Freedom; with Rubbettino, The Long Reign e Constance of Hauteville. You have collaborated with RAI and numerous national and local newspapers.
