It is an act of love towards Sicily «Come l’arancio amaro», the beautiful novel – which is at the top of the charts and conquers the hearts of many readers every day – by Milena Palminterifrom Palermo, curator of notarial archives, a “late debutante”, as she herself says, who since she left Sicily, has looked at it from the other side, from Salerno, where she lives.
«Part or a lot of this book – says Palminteri –, an experimental novel for me, for which I did a lot of research and which captivated me so much that I explored what I liked, completing the journey of each character, was written to recapture the Sicily that was slipping out of my hands».
A story with an ancient flavour, which restores the breath of an era, and makes us reflect on the destiny of women, confirming how far women have come and how much they still have to go.
The Sixties, Agrigento. Carlotta is the director of a notarial archive that by chance from an inventory report of the baron’s inheritance Carlo Cangialosiwho died in Sarraca («a small seaside village that spies on Africa from Sicily», an invention of Palminteri that alludes to Sciacca), province of Girgenti, in 1924, the same year in which she was born while her father Carlo died in an accident, learns of a serious complaint against her mother, the bourgeois Nardina Aricò and her mother Sebastiana, accused by the other grandmother, a baroness, of having organized a scam against her son, making him believe that the newborn was his daughter, when she was not. But then whose daughter is Carlotta? This is where this beautiful story begins with the strong-willed Carlotta, free and alone in the world, who to find out more turns to the ninety-year-old lawyer “uncle” Peppino Calascibetta, very close to Carlotta as to her family even if without blood ties.
And so we go back in time, with fascism, war, the mafia in the background and the “feudal” habits of the nobility in the foregroundthe daily rituals, the endless lunches with sumptuous traditional cuisine (the author used a small calendar of her great-grandmother’s recipes), the holidays in country villas, the gap between the male and female worlds, between masters and servants, between the emerging bourgeoisie and the aristocracy.
So, Milena, a special debut…
“I put myself on the line, writing was my passion, neglected, or, better, never cherished because my work, which by the way gave me the push to start this novel, took me somewhere else entirely. Among the thousands of notarial deeds that pass through our hands, some of which are even “archaeological finds”, which are the most interesting, I found the seed of the story: a notarial deed, a mandatory inventory report of inheritance dating back to the early twentieth century, which recorded the situation of a child “passed” from a biological mother to a mother who had “purchased” him for her own personal, very prosaic purposes, because as a young woman married to an old man she feared that nothing of her husband’s estate would remain. The woman in fact ended up in court because the numerous relatives of her husband did not believe that this child was theirs and added as proof that the newborn had been raised inside a “basket” in the room of the woman who had faked the pregnancy.. After that I invented the rest from scratch. An act found in Salerno, but which I moved to Sicily, because I wanted to do a “return” job.
It was also a linguistic “return” job.
«The sound of my dialect that I feared I would forget I found again in my writing; sounds and terms that I cultivate by passionately reading all the Sicilian writers, but also (and this was a recent rediscovery) many interesting Sicilian women writers from the beginning of the century who have been forgotten».
Even the beautiful title alludes to the “return” to Sicily.
“I was looking for a special title that would evoke Sicily, the countryside, and that would fit Sabedda and the story of her being seduced and pregnant (the grafting, exactly like that of the bitter orange in other plants) by Stefano, a noble but with inconsistent feelings. The fruit of this encounter is the new branch: Carlotta, capable with her strength alone of starting to change habits and prejudices, of opening a crack in the code of silence and giving women who have always been submissive the certainty that change is possible. Sabedda has only known the thorns of the bitter orange, but the scent of its white flower, that of freedom, is Carlotta’s.”
But how did that seed that sprouted from the notarial deed become a novel?
«I attended a writing school, “La linea scritto” by Antonella Cilento, not because I had something in particular in mind, but because after retirement I thought it could be a nice way to give space to a dormant passion, and also to “learn” to read. A weekly commitment that gave me joy and thanks to which I learned the technique and discipline. From the beginning I tried my hand at Sicilian stories, of love, of betrayal, almost all set in the last century. Then the memory of that notarial deed came out and from there it all began. After all, my generation has also been subjected to family conditioning, even that made for a sense of protection or opportunity by our parents. I myself would have liked to do other studies but then, advised in this direction, I followed a long family tradition of jurisprudence».
So Carlotta has a lot of you, you gave her a role and, it seems to me, also determination.
“Carlotta is certainly more determined than me. But I can say that I find myself in all three of the main female characters: Sabedda, Nardina and Carlotta, as if I had completed all the evolutions within myself. As for the male characters, I put my hands on those I know, but someone like zù Peppino, I trained. In any case, it is the feminine energy that holds the novel and the world together.”
