The immobile island, in continuous movement. This is perhaps the paradox that unites the reports on Sicily contained in the latest issue of The Passenger. The Passenger is a collection of investigations, literary reports and narrative essays that form the portrait of the contemporary life of a place and its inhabitants. Culture, economy, politics, customs and curiosities seen through the testimony of local and international writers, journalists and experts. Many stories and different voices that make up a multifaceted and eclectic tale, to discover, understand, delve deeper and be inspired.
And the new issue is dedicated to Sicily. It is the first time that the series published by Iperborea abandons the cities to focus on an entire region.
Looking at a map, an island gives us the illusion of being a small world unto itself. With its well-defined borders it seems to contain a society impervious to the passage of time and seasons, more immediate to decipher because it is sheltered from the changing complexity of the world. But it is a mystification, even more so if – like Sicily – it lives in the shelter of one of the most overbearing and unshakeable imaginaries that such a small place has ever managed to create.
Behind the island «built and rebuilt by books, films, paintings, black and white photography» today there is a new one, hidden, but no less real. The urban and metropolitan one, that of landings, that of wine and tropical fruit. A Sicily that is sometimes invisible like the poisons that Europe’s second petrochemical center discharges into the sea and air. Like the migrants arriving in Lampedusa, kept at a distance by the trajectories of tourists and locals. Like the outgoing population flows that give it the sad record among the Italian regions for emigration. A place where extremes coexist, like the central neighborhoods of Palermo, where the capital of culture vibrates and the invisible city of crack thrives. Sicily where climate change is transforming the agricultural landscape, increasingly at risk of flooding and desertification, and someone is taking advantage of this to replace the vine with coffee and avocado.
For the occasion, the research and investigative project involved leading authors of the island’s literature, but also external observers who were attentive to the Sicilian reality. This is how a truly interesting volume was born, full of facts, news, numbers, also accompanied by images of the photographer Roselena Ramistella.
Articles by various authors:
Gaetano Savatteri’s Sicily as it once no longer exists
It’s time to update our image of Sicily, too often portrayed as a place of immutable laws and codes. Let’s forget about ocelots and flat caps and enter a new era of refined wines, trendy street food and classy books.
Tropic of Sicily by Giacomo Di Girolamo
The increasingly torrid climate is leading to a transformation of the island’s landscape and agriculture. Citrus fruits and vines give way to tropical fruits that were once unthinkable in these latitudes. Here is an excerpt from Il Post.
The promised land by Evelina Santangelo
Lampedusa is a European outpost on the African tectonic plate, a land of landings that many would like to hide. The efforts to give a name to the migrants who die at sea are an attempt to oppose the marginality that unites those who arrive and those who welcome.
The strange case of the petrochemical center of Syracuse by Fabio Lo Verso
A quarter of Italian fuel is refined along the coast north of Syracuse. Kingdom of paradoxes, the inhabitants find themselves victims of an environmental disaster that has continued for seventy years and complicit in its concealment, for fear of driving away tourists.
In search of never lost concrete by Veronica Caprino and Claudia Durastanti
Sicily is the capital of an Italian specialty, unfinished works, an interweaving of a thousand local vices and misdeeds. Perpetually waiting for a “turning point” that will reopen the construction sites, they often become works of involuntary land art.
The custodians of the temple by Stefania Auci
The writer from Trapani talks with Luigi Biondo, director of the archaeological park of Segesta, on the overlap of cultures that characterizes Sicily and on how to enhance the historical and artistic heritage of the island.
I didn’t want to come by Vanessa Ambrosecchio
In 2001, the ministerial bureaucracy assigned the young teacher Vanessa Ambrosecchio to a middle school that didn’t even have a name, in the seaside village of Arenella. It is the beginning of a journey of discovery of a part of Palermo marked by the abandonment of economic and industrial activities.
A story of violence by Viola Di Grado
Harassed by bullying during her school years, the writer from Catania reflects on the ways in which the violence she suffered during adolescence interacts, in her memory, with the local language and the landscape.
Sicilian visions by Costanza Quatriglio
How to describe a place where “reality surpasses fantasy”? The Palermo director Costanza Quatriglio retraces the Sicilian television production of the last twenty years, to understand where the collective imagination comes from.
The volume closes with Davide Enia with his noir toponymy of Palermo, and Colapesce who draws up a ranking of essential Sicilian musical things. As is tradition for this series, the proposed playlist is available for listening on Spotify.
