The Quaderni di Regalpetra are a beautiful series published by the Calabrese Rubbettino and curated by Vito Catalano (nephew of Leonardo Sciascia and also a writer), «a small library that aims to present not only essays and studies on the work of the writer from Racalmuto, on his correspondence, on what has been written about him over many decades, but also texts on subjects that interested him or that he dealt with or that start from one of his pages or from one of his intuitions».
And from that Sciascian universe-magisterium that he approached so many times with his writings, the journalist and writer from Agrigento Matteo Collura has drawn out a “new” idea, «Luigi Pirandello-Leonardo Sciascia. A conversation (im)possible» (Rubbettino). An idea born right in the Biblioteca Lucchesiana in Agrigento (which Pirandello describes in the novel «Il fu Mattia Pascal»), and which has become a “little volume” with a preface by the author and an afterword with a text by Sciascia on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Pirandello’s death.
A literary text (perhaps the only place where people who lived in different eras can meet) which then in turn became a real conversation between Collura and Fabrizio Catalano, director and writer (brother of Vito and like him beloved nephew of Sciascia), a show already performed, from the Teatro Antico of Taormina to the living room of Manzoni’s house, in Milan, and which on August 26 at 7 pm will be on stage in another evocative place, the Teatro Antico of Tindari where, as part of the second edition of «Il sorriso degli Dei», literary meetings curated by Anna Ricciardi, Matteo Collura and Fabrizio Catalano, introduced by Mario Patanè, will give voice, respectively, to Luigi Pirandello and Leonardo Sciascia.
So, in the famous audience that Pirandello gives every Sunday morning, from eight to one. to his characters, Sciascia presents himself, initially fearful in front of his “master” who «has “ruined”/enriched his life with his works», but then enterprising in the determination to conduct a conversation with him that goes into the lights and shadows and the mystery of being a writer. But also of being fathers, not only of one’s biological children, but also of other writers, and of readers, and, again, between humorous jokes and literary (from Tilgher to Manzoni to Croce) and political (from Pirandello’s anti-parliamentarism due to the scandal of the Banca Romana to “his” fascism) and amusing misunderstandings from which, Socratically, a series of truths emerge. That truth of literature, and that civil commitment of writers, claimed by Sciascia at the end of the text, and alive even when they are no longer there.