Let’s imagine that in the great theater that is Sicily a curtain opens and you choose to enter one of the doors that are on the scene to find yourself in the rooms of the past. To travel those rooms, to cross their imagination and its memory, to return them to both an individual and collective story, is The journalist Giuseppe Cerasa with «Sicilian curtain. Stories of women, passions, secrets, mafia and heroes without glory “ (Nino Aragno Editore), proposed by Antonio Monda at the Witch 2025 Award.
There are many ways of telling and living Sicily, and Cerasa, a long experience journalist, since its militancy per hour and then to Repubblica where he directed the chronicle of Rome of the newspaper for eighteen years, to live it he writes it, to save what he risks being forgotten. Moreover, even if “Sicilian curtain” is his first book, Cerasa his Sicily and Italy told it in the “guides” of Repubblica, formed by him to move to the stories and places of our country.
And so this book that has certainly been for a long time within him comes out, perhaps to fill some gaps with writing, even with the risk of opening some wounds, certainly to testify, with so much nostalgia, a personal story of passion and freedom.
“Stories of women, passions, secrets, mafia and heroes without glory” recites the subtitle of the book (on the cover the beautiful image of a Ulysses-Everyman, by Mimmo Paladino) and it is as if a photo album that tell ordinary moments and pieces of life and burning days of passion of the author: “a composite collection of memoirs that is like a succession of studio showcases under the lens of a studio. Microscope, tales in which memory is investigated with the polished awareness of the reporter, “writes Stefania Auci in the preface.
We begin with stories of “micromonds who have thrown the seed of epochal social and political, but also criminals” recalls “recalls Cerasa, of courageous women- the teacher Marianna, the embroiderer Sarina-, of people eager to grow in that difficult Sicily of the difficult post-war Italy, and stop, with a sort of nostalgic Madeleine, on the preparation of the preparation of Sicilian cuisine.
Then, the Memorial-Civile one happens to the Memorial-Evocative Cord when the curtain opens on “Corleone as a trademark”, where Cerasa, a student at the “Guido Baccelli” classical high school in the country of Liggio, the Provenzano, of the Riina, of the Bagarella, of the Navarra, a young “hero” who in that “laboratory”, between “revolutionary,” revolutionary “, Factual reality, overlooks a horizon full of dreams: one above all, become a journalist.
The newspaper as a tool of struggle, denunciation, liberation, since the interview with Leonardo Sciascia signs on the “newspaper” of the “newspaper”. And in the story of those battles, even of those terrible days on the scene of massacres, there is the controversy of the journalist who testifies, between mourning and light, the mystery and beauty of this Sicily, of this Sciascian and Camillerian Italy.
But To close the curtain is the bright figure of Sergio Mattarellato which the author is linked by the reverence of a student first and then friend, of the president of all of us, “one of the few witnesses of a clean and respectable Sicily, synthesis of the aspirations and the best dreams of Italians”.