What luck, to find together on the page those two Sicilians: a dizzying narrator and a genius of music (but it is partial, to say about music: his are rather ways of the songs, alchemical and transmitted paths and beaten that calamit all the arts). Elvira Seminara tells us about Franco Battiatothe Master who passed away in 2021 who a few days ago would have turned 80 years old, given that there is a sense, in the first and after which we mark our earthly stories. And he does it in a very beautiful necklace, “customs passages”of the publisher Giulio Perrone, or maps between the scriptures and places, between the characters and their arts and places, “guides” faced with the greatest literary biodiversity.
“In Sicily with Franco Battiato” – which will be presented today (6.30 pm) in Catania, in an event organized by Giulio Perrone and Taobuk, at Palazzo Scammacca del Murgo, with Antonio Mistretta and Mario Incudine and the musical tribute by Giulio Pantalei, e Tomorrow (6 pm) in Messina, in a “author’s place” meeting at the Bonanzinga bookshop -denounces since the subtitle (“courtyards and galaxies of a wandering soul”) its nature as a magnificent oxymoron, of necessary chimera, since making Mastro Battiato by Jonia a guide, “he so dyst-top”, with existential and artistic geometries and artistic and multifaceted geometries, is an impossible challenge.
But the Catanese Elvira Seminara-the most experimental and daring of the Italian authors (her last, indeia of “sand devils”, Einaudi 2022, is manifestly)-is a writer accustomed to challenges and oxymoron: the form-space is close to her, and she torches the torch and pairs and unfold and cut and cook (the beautiful “Atlas of the clothes”. Einaudi 2015, makes a school of literary tailors) and reassembles and flying. So this guide of experimentation, of happy disorientation on the traces of that volcanic “puer, spiteful and flexible as the divine children of Olympus” – who was a very loved friend of the writer, and in fact in the book as an added value there is all “care” of every act of loving devotion – is of rare happiness and beauty.
Each chapter brings the title of a song by Battiato, but the order is not chronological, if anything, chronolyogical and sentimentalan “unusual map” that proceeds – as Mastro Battiato did – for evocations/associations/analogies, “Sicilizing the world and universalizing Sicily”. That for Battiato could be in Persia or Tibet, on the Nevski or Alexanderplatz perspective, in any elsewhere where that certain beat resonated. A sort of “biogeography” “open and irregular, in motion”, just as he was, without a first and after but in that “eternal circular” in which he took shape and sound the art of Battiato.
The points (dis) Cardinals are all there: the Etna, the sea, the sky, the stratigraphy of a city a thousand times stuffed and risen like Catania, its sunny nature and cottonia together, its light and its mourning. Battiato was born in the lost Jonia, inhabited Catania, stops “in the Oasis” by Milo, who is not a refuge but a view of the worlds. Seminara tells us about precious detailslike the love of the master for the rugs (where he found “self -discipline, ingenuity of the hands, care and slowed time”, his essential values, the same as the “Signorine Sarte” of his childhood), the childish delicacy for the desserts. And he draws unpredictable paths: the “acoustic map of Battiato”, his sense of sound (“I think, therefore sound”) not as a reproduction but production of life, of his atomic flow, of his vibration to be pursued in the places, in the voices (“the sound of the words freed from their meaning”: the voice that becomes litania, sacred formula, spell).
And Sicily is profoundly con-fulfilling with this search for “shock, jolts, frictions and fractions of sound”, the Sicily of the frenetic and immobile movement, of the “seismic thought”. A paradoxical search for sound that leads to silence, which is not empty and shutdown (not “accidental or western”) but space conquered and full and lounge. There is a beautiful expression that Elvira sowed Conia – and he did not have time to have time to give it to his friend Franco -: the “strength of cavity”, equal and contrary to the force of gravity, the attraction of the void Which is not dark and absence but light and fullness, and must be carefully cultivated. Here it is, the uninterrupted research of the master.
But there is also a map of taste (it was Arabic of taste, battiato, sugar and giulbous and sweet and sour, between caponata and cassata), one of the smells (The roses of Milo “inspired the amazement and gratitude”; the smells of the childhood “absorbed and experienced in the countryside behind the house” evoked that minimum and remote Sicily of the courtyards, of the Country Occhiuto and yet asleep of the Sunday afternoon, “the Sunday Surreosa of the world limicare, the expected and lifeless life where it ferments every south of the soul”).
The places that we do not know and that this story does not lame, and if we know them we want to see them see them again and savor them sub-species of the Battiati: the Catania market and the Etna Velato di Nebbia, the beach of Santa Maria del Focallo in Ispica and the Ursino Castle, the square of ACI Castello (one of the most exciting pages). We close this “guide” happy to have “misdited ourselves” following one, a thousand slopes: it is the beat of Battiato on which to try to tune in, not to find what we are looking for but what, without we know, urges us.