Stories know it when they are ready to be told, to come out of the closet of the mind in which they are closed to face the flow of narration, they know it when the courage needed to write them becomes a challenge. And «a fascinating challenge» was writing «Dawn of the Lions. The saga of the Florios” for Stefania Auci, the writer from Trapani who with “The Lions of Sicily” (2019) and with “The Winter of the Lions” (2021, Premio Bancarella 2022), the novels that tell the saga of the Florio family, has fascinated many Italian and foreign readers, and won over male and female viewers with the series broadcast on TV in 2023.
Having arrived in Palermo from Bagnara Calabra in 1799, the Florios, with a destiny yet to be invented, had become entrepreneurs who would be able to change their social status and give life to a great economic empire. But what were they like before Palermo? What is their life? Was it the devastating earthquake of 1783 that pushed them to leave Bagnara and face the sea and new realities? Or was there still a desire to grow up and therefore leave the village?
A prequel to this fascinating saga was necessary and therefore Stefania Auci decided to go to the origins of the family and to follow it, chronologically, from 15 October 1772 to 23 May 1799: «A challenge, also because – writes the author in the footnote to the novel – finding eighteenth-century sources is practically impossible, given that the seaside village of Bagnara has been plagued by fate and earthquakes» and by the enormous difficulties that Calabria of the time it lived, marginalized by crises, disasters and political strategies, although with its vast, complex and potential-rich territory it was, ever since the arrival of the Normans, at the center of the interests of rulers and rulers.
But the events of that second half of a troubled Bourbon eighteenth century, in Southern Italy, marked by natural disasters, reforms and revolutions, internecine wars and brigandage, do not change the life of a simple family like the Florios in a still Bagnara, squeezed between sea and mountains, inhabited by minimal existences, committed to following the flow of time with days marked by fatigue to provide for the family and face poverty and ailments. And Auci recounts those existences, reconstructing customs and habits, in the flow of everyday life that follows the current: the great history fades into the background, the castle of the feudal lords Ruffo, Manzoni’s symbol of power, looms like a threat. Meanwhile, among houses and huts, among sailors, masters and farmers, the day drags on, and the questions about love, life and death are not even spoken, perhaps only thought about, due to that atavistic fatalism typical of the people of the South.
As with the patriarchal family of the master blacksmith Vincenzo Florio, who was nevertheless proud of his name, his word and his honesty. This is why when in October 1772 – on that date the narrative curtain opens – Francesco disappears, the young son rebelling against the family rule that would have him work in his father’s forge, the Florios, if they fear for the boy’s fate, also fear an escape from freedom due to the terrible suspicion that he may have joined the bandits. These are the first lines of an engaging narrative which, while with a certain pathos explores, through the gaze of Francesco, an unaware victim, a complex theme such as brigandage, between the fascination of rebellion against social injustice, the desire for freedom and moral ambiguity, at the same time tells the story of the family and the community of the village.
If his father Vincenzo is as hard as the iron he forges, reluctant to change and not very empathetic due to his chauvinistic mentality towards his wife and children, his mother Rosa is the loving pivot of that family group, to which his tireless daily commitment is aimed. A character who shines, in a female homeland of solidarity as opposed to the closed male world, both well represented by Auci: it is the women, despite the awareness of being subjugated to fathers and husbands, in the acceptance of what seems like a destiny common to all, it is they, rational and dreamers, who live, also through sisterhood with others, spaces of freedom stolen from everyday tasks. Like Rosa who, despite her husband’s contrary opinion, continues her work as a seamstress and embroiderer and cultivates small dreams on those silks (Calabria has long boasted a flourishing sericulture, before it too declined). Ready to also indulge her children’s dreams of freedom and love, even if she is aware that it is not easy to contradict reality.
Everything flows, therefore, through Auci’s fluid prose, between marriages, children, hardships, difficulties, until that devastating blow that overwhelms everything, the earthquake of February 1783. Then, nothing will be the same as before, not even consciences, and in that dark space of the aftermath, so difficult to describe, between mourning and desperation, the only thing that can be opposed to stepmother nature is the hope of not succumbing. Or to change so as not to resign ourselves to the inevitability of destiny.
So, for the young Paolo and Ignazio, the adored children of Rosa and Vincenzo, born at the risk of their mother’s life, it is a question of turning their backs on the mountains and looking at the sea. It is 1799, it is the dawn of the lions, in the name of the Florios.
