A conference that illuminated, “for future reference”, two central figures of Italian literature and culture, Leonardo Sciascia and Mario Tobino, a psychiatrist from Viareggio, poet and writer, anti-fascist and partisan: «Sciascia-Tobino: literature between social commitment and care», organized in Racalmuto by the Sciascia Foundation in collaboration with Casa Sciascia and with the Amsi (Italian Association of Doctors and Writers) in two days, the first in which they were privileged the literary aspects and the second in which the speakers discussed «The value of the word in the Care Relationship».
On the first day, coordinated by Salvatore Nocera Bracco, a medical artist from Agrigento, Annamaria Sciascia Catalano, Sciascia’s daughter, Isabella Tobino, niece of the writer-psychiatrist from Lucca and president of the Mario Tobino Foundation, Antonio Di Grado from Catania, Italianist and literary director of the Sciascia Foundation, author of «L’adorabile Sciascia», Paola Italia, professor of Italian Literature at the Sapienza University of Rome and curator of the Meridiano for Mario Tobino, Paolo Vanelli, essayist and author of «Beauty and truth, the narrative work of Mario Tobino» (Maria Pacini Fazzi publisher), and with them the students of the “Ugo Foscolo” classical high school in Canicattì who oversaw the reading of pages by Sciascia and Tobino. Interventions which, together with the exhibition curated by Edith Cutaia and Vito Catalano with the correspondence between Sciascia and Tobino, documents and books preserved in the Archives of the Sciascia Foundation, together with a bibliographic exhibition of Mario Tobino’s works curated by Pippo Di Falco and displayed in the rooms of Casa Sciascia, were a fascinating journey which revealed previously unknown aspects of the friendship between the two writers.
The memory of Anna Maria Sciascia is moving, “daughter of a special father”, and witness to the friendship that linked her father to Tobino as well as to other dear friends, “true and profound friendships, knowledge sublimated by the stories and reading of the correspondence that my father did in the evening when we sat in a circle around the brazier, friendships born and grown between special people linked together by affinities for which the name of a writer, the title of a book can sometimes sound like that of a homeland”.
It was in fact a very young Sciascia, nineteen years old, said Professor Italia, who wrote to Tobino in 1940, after having read seven of his poems published in «Il Selvaggio». A reading which began their exchange of letters and which was a prelude to the essay «Notes on the poetry of Tobino», fifteen years later, when in 1954 Sciascia wrote: «It was a season of hermeticism and those seven poems of his, later merged into the collection “Of poison and love”, naked in the immediate essence of love and hate, of idyll and invective, seemed so new to me that that sheet still remains among the living discoveries of those years.”
A recognition of a “charm of humanity” that Sciascia revealed in their shared passion for literature, as well as for politics, which brought him closer to the author of “Il clandestino”, “Bandiera nera” and “Le libera donne di Magliano”. And that Tobino reciprocated by talking about Sciascia in his «Diary», a sort of counterpoint to the letters exchanged with the other. Tobino, whom Sciascia would have met personally in June 1953 in Lucca, was for Sciascia «a poet to be read in friendship and it is clear that we understood the word friendship in the secret meaning of anti-fascism».
Antonio Di Grado spoke about pity, a central theme that illuminates the entire work of Sciascia and Tobino, «pity for a world and for man ensnared by impostures and oppressed by injustice. A pietas that Tobino poured into his novels even when they dealt with the anti-fascist resistance, but even better in the painful purgatory where the free women interned in Maggiano groan. And right there, in the infamous mental asylums in which he worked, Tobino poured that mercy as a psychiatrist to save his sick, innocent victims overwhelmed by the general incomprehension, also following the Basaglia reform, and which Tobino undertook to welcome again, a battle in which it was no coincidence that Tobino had the support of his friend Sciascia”. Professor Di Grado then focused on «Il clandestino», a novel on the anti-fascist resistance with which Tobino won the Strega prize in 1962, but different from the previous narrative on the resistance due to its sometimes picaresque, sometimes intimate tone.
Tobino perfectly expressed the ideal dialogue between scientific and humanistic knowledge, according to Paolo Vanelli. But the narrator Tobino, who has ranged between multiple themes, madness, evil, war, follows the red thread of memory, so that his entire work could be defined as «a disguised autobiography, a theology of memory, where places, people, experiences, of the war as of Africa, or of “his” madmen, become stratifications of a wonderful narrative interweaving between memory, autobiography and fiction».
Books that are an attempt to save oneself from the offense of death and oblivion, to open up to others, even using contemptuous disdain towards injustice and ignorance. And “care” in the relationship with the other who is the patient was the central theme of the work of the second day of the conference coordinated by the doctor Giuseppe Ruggeri, a session in which the doctors Antonino Mazzone, Nino Sandullo, Salvatore Nocera Bracco, Giuseppe Barbagallo, Raffaele Barone, Giorgio Pini, Giuseppina Ancona, Giovanna Di Falco spoke.
