Stories of Southern Italy

Preface by Ella Carr

The story of Southern Italy, and perhaps the rest of Europe,
begins in Sicily. It is, as Goethe put it, ‘the clue to everything’.
Famed for its extreme natural beauty and proverbial fertility,
no part of Europe has been dominated by a greater number
of races – the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Goths, Byzantines,
Arabs, Normans and Spanish among them – each of
whom have left their traces in the island’s cultural DNA. As
one of its greatest writers, Leonardo Sciascia, observed, the
palimpsestic culture of Sicily can be seen as ‘a metaphor for
the entire world’.
 
In his novel The Skin, Curzio Malaparte attaches similar
primordial significance to the ancient city of Naples: ‘that
terrible, wonderful prototype of an unknown Europe, situated
outside the realm of Cartesian logic – that other Europe
of whose existence he [the American protagonist, Colonel
Jack] had until that day had only a vague suspicion, and
whose mysteries and secrets . . . filled him with a wondrous
terror.’ This ‘wondrous terror’, I would argue, speaks to
the baroque sensibility of the whole of Southern Italy. If
Florence and Rome represent the light and reason of Italy’s
Renaissance, the Mezzogiorno is its primeval underbelly,
both more beautiful and more terrible.
 
Southern Italy is characterized by extremes of light and
dark, the unutterable beauty of its landscape sitting side by
side with its legacy of violence and suffering. After Italian
unification in 1871, the Southern economy suffered greatly;
brigandage, poverty and organized crime, already longstanding
issues, became entrenched, with economic difficulties
persisting throughout the twentieth century.
 
These poles of light and dark are reflected in the literature
from this region. Like a Dutch vanitas portrait, Peter Robb’s
almost indecently voluptuous description of Palermo’s food
market captures Sicily in all its unbridled vitality, while
simultaneously auguring death and decay – a metaphor
for the ever-present threat of the mafia. This double-edged
sword of beauty and horror haunts many of the stories in this
anthology, of Sciascia, Somerset Maugham, Dacia Maraini
and Elena Ferrante among others, as do the themes of corruption,
hardship and injustice.
 
Exile and return is another running theme. Vito Teti’s
‘Clouds and Back Streets’, based on his hometown in
Calabria, explores the experience of being left behind following
the mass emigration to la merica in the latter half
of the twentieth century, which decimated much of the
region and contributed to what Teti calls ‘the restless and
precarious state of mind of the Calabrese, of being “here and
elsewhere”’. Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily, which
follows the narrator’s return home after eighteen years away,
is equally suffused with Proustian longing for a vanished
world, and with the sounds and smells of Sicily.

The classical Greek inheritance of the Mezzogiorno is
evident in the stories of Malaparte, Lampedusa and Elsa
Morante among others. In its earliest times, Southern Italy
was said to be populated by gods and demi-gods, monsters
and heroes, some of whom feature in the stories of Theocritus,
Virgil and Ovid: the giant Typhoeus for example, on
whose shoulders the island of Sicily creaks, the Cyclopes who
inhabit the caves of Etna, as well as the infamous sea monsters
Scylla and Charybdis located at the Straits of Messina.
 
While the travel writing Southern Italy has inspired could
have filled this anthology many times over, my focus was on
native Southern Italian authors, with a sprinkling of notable
exceptions. The literary centres of Sicily and Campania
are inevitably over-represented, but I hope that the stories
from Calabria, Basilicata and Apulia will give at least a taste
of the literary character of these regions. By necessity, this
anthology can only skim the surface of what Southern Italy
has to offer, but I hope it will set the reader on course for an
odyssey of discovery that endures well beyond the final page.
 
--Ella Carr