Sicily, when it tries to tell its story, multiplies. It becomes childhood and poverty, vocation and desire, music and blood, province and crime news. It is from this fracture that Giuseppe Sottile’s “Palermo of guitar and knife” was born (Einaudi, pp.176 €15.50): a book that does not limit itself to chasing personal memory, but transforms it into a sentimental map of the island. A long-time Sicilian journalist and keen observer of customs, Sottile talks about the seminarians and musicians, the mules replaced by the Moto Ape, the discovery of the sea and then, later, the Palermo of the Ora reporters and the murdered dead. «I tell these minimal stories of a Sicily that is not that of the Leopard: this tiny Sicily, built around the chests that were there at that time, these professions, including that of my father, which were defeated and then overwhelmed by industrialization», states the author. «The blacksmith is finished, my father who made saddles is finished. Just like when the ready-made suit arrived that put an end to tailors. The ancient professions are overwhelmed and the great emigration begins.”
In the exergue there is a quote from Gesualdo Bufalino, “the writer is never innocent”.
Do you agree?
“Absolutely. I’m not for the objectivity of information. Or rather, as my teacher, Vittorio Nisticò of L’Ora, stated, no one in this profession gives you information for free. Whoever chooses what to tell is already exercising a choice and directing his gaze. What matters is to always have intellectual honesty towards your readers.”
Your Palermo of gardens and fragrant jasmine, what happened to it?
«That was completely razed to the ground, torn apart by modernity. Palermo has disappeared a little because it was eaten up by politics, devoured by a mafia system that undoubtedly existed, exists and continues to exist. Although – let’s be careful – the great mafia, that of the massacres, was defeated, because the State won there. But those residues remain, the rotten breath of a mafia culture which is that of saying and not saying, of winking, of insinuation. This one survives and still injects its poison. This is the problem of Palermo.”
This story is a compendium of murdered deaths, of the mafia and the half-mafia. Does music represent a form of resistance?
«Certainly but not only. I went to boarding school from six to sixteen years old because in my town, in Gangi, once I finished primary school, which was already a rural school, I didn’t have the means to study and there were few alternatives. Almost all the kids of my generation had to fake a vocation to become priests. We were looking for vocations to survive and I had to go to the Salesians in Pedara, in the province of Catania.”
And what happened?
«With my father we left on this bus that took six hours to get from Gangi to Catania, but during a long break to catch the Pedara connection, my father took me to see the sea. It was the first time.”
And once you get to college?
«With the Salesians the encounter with culture took place, the encounter with knowledge, with knowledge, just as the reading of the Holy Scriptures is a school of education in beauty which still today never ceases to amaze and excite me. This is why I often cite Isaiah as an epiphanic moment: “My abandonment lasted a moment, with such tenderness I take you back.” A very high poem, and we are at the second Isaiah, that is, 800 years before Christ. The same amazement with the music that Don Frattallone who, to bring us closer to God every day, dragged us into that theater of the infinite that is music. He taught us who came from the village and ate almost with our hands, that there was a composer called Beethoven and that in the Fifth Symphony the first modulation began with three tones and a semitone. That’s what education was for me, the discovery of a world that was unknown.”
But why do you write?
«I write because I have read. There is no better answer.”