With the flavor of nostalgia that makes Vulcan the scene of a detective story, as yellow as its sulphur, Leo Salinas returns in «Yellow as Sulphur» (HarperCollins), the young journalist born from the pen of Giuseppe Di Piazza, a Palermo writer, journalist for Corriere della Sera, who has given Salinas, since «I quattro canti di Palermo» (Bompiani), a connotation that reflects a season of his life. Di Piazza covered crime news for many years when in the 1980s he was a “little blond” on the Palermo Ora, light and at the same time terrible years suspended over a city traversed by violence and blood and which needed to become narration. Even in “Giallo come lo sulfur” Salinas, known as “Sleep Eyes” (in the morning when he arrives at work his eyes are always clouded with sleep) is still the young twenty-four year old with many questions about his dreams and life, despite the mafia massacre of those years.
It’s a day at the end of August 1984 when Salinas runs in Palermo on his “Vespa” because they killed a judge, but holidays await him and Vulcano is the destination chosen with his friends Fabrizio, Serena and Lilli, «to get away from work, from the murders, from Palermo». First, however, in the incipit, the writer mentions an ancient story: in Lipari, in 1902, in front of a notary the Scottish entrepreneur Christopher Mc Load is selling the island of Vulcano which he owns for a paltry sum.
Thus begins, in the name of mystery, the story which unfolds on two temporal levels, because those distant events are intertwined with the holiday of the Palermitans who landed on the island in 1984 with their R4. In fact, they will make friends with a charming young Scot, Jamie McLoad, who arrived from Glasgow to Vulcano to find out what was behind the mysterious sale of his great-grandfather. All not without twists and turns, with an engaging, warm story which, while maintaining the tension of the detective story, takes us into the fascinating atmosphere of the Aeolian island, which was still wild at the time.
Leo Salinas returns in an entirely Aeolian mystery…
«Salinas is the protagonist of my novels set in Sicily in the 1980s. Born as a character in 2010, he is a young journalist who deals with crime news for a Palermo newspaper, which is along the lines of Ora, where I worked from ’79 to ’84, so he is an alter ego of mine, but, like all literary alter egos, better than me, much more alert and intuitive than me. He’s a “little blond”, not yet hired, but he works twelve hours a day and after the very tiring summer of ’84 he goes on holiday to the Aeolian Islands and there he comes across a detective story that has very ancient roots. As for Vulcano, for me it is a piece of my heart, I went there for the first time in 1970 with my parents, and the island, like the Aeolian Islands of those years, had the same atmosphere that I recreated for Salinas.”
In an invented story, you take inspiration from an ancient fact, the only historical one.
«It was in Vulcano that I discovered that the island, from 1870 to 1903, was owned by a Scottish entrepreneur, a certain James Stevenson (McLoad in the novel), which sparked my imagination for this story. Stevenson then sold it, and it later became part of the state’s assets. The Scotsman discovered that together with the sulfur there was alum, but in addition to taking care of the mines he also began to grow grapes and made a slightly sulphurous wine which sold well in London. Around this real fact I invent a plot with a mix of sentimental and passion.”
In this story, however, there is also the carefree daily life that Salinas and his friends live, including days at the beach, barbecues, music from the tape player, skirmishes…
«For the first time I wrote in a lighter way, because I removed the mafia as a “heavy” presence and introduced the story. I enjoyed writing, even if managing two time frames is complex. There wasn’t yet the mafia as we know it in the early 1900s, there were the precursors of the mafia; what was then essentially “the black hand” was becoming the mafia and above all thanks to the landowners whose campieri then become mafia leaders. While I imagine that the mines also had a similar system, that is, that there were families who guaranteed the safety of the mines. Sulfur was important for us Sicilians because it was supplied throughout Europe. As for lightheartedness, I tried to make the group’s relationships simple, tender, without any real conflict. I wanted to represent a sort of small island of balance there in Vulcano. And the music, always the soundtrack of my novels, is what we heard in those years, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Crosby and then the great Italian singer-songwriters De Gregori, Dalla, Guccini, hearing which was a compass for us, they were truly flashes of awareness.”
There is, in fact, a whole epic of the 80s. A tribute to that generation?
«It’s like this. My generation in Palermo lived in a sort of permanent civil war, they had to deal with the fact that as twenty-year-olds, like Solinas, they wanted to live a normal life in a city that wasn’t normal. Years for me extraordinarily dedicated to beauty because they were the magical ones of youth. But I lived in a city where there was nothing magical. For me, always, the memory of the ’80s is in balance between the beauty of having been 22-25 years old, the music, the girls, the friends, the motorcycles, and on the other hand the same days in that hell, between murdered people, massacres, fear, the State on its knees, the mafia that won.”