The main idea of this essay is to read Sciascia in his own words, by removing from his words the timeworn layers of interpretation. Perhaps I am exceeding the ambition that inspired those who made and continue to make their way in the study of the Sicilian writer, yesterday armed with ideology and today with philology. And yet, armed with the words chosen for my reading, ‘people’ and ‘morality’, I tried to be more detached from myself. Rather than being moved by the words of the writer, my 2007 book Le farfalle di Madrid. L’antimonio, i narratori italiani e la guerra civile spagnola (Roma, Bulzoni, 2007; Spanish trans. by M. Manrique and J. Joaquín Blasco Zaragoza, Mariposas de Madrid. Los narradores italianos y la guerra civil española, Prensas Universitarias Zaragoza, 2009) had deployed an army of critical readings and cultural approaches: the second edition of Gli zii di Sicilia (1960), which included L’antimonio, was almost besieged by a ‘pluralistic method’ and, at times, even by deliberate ‘misreadings’. Without regretting the interpretive impetus of youth, which I always regard with admiration, today I try to stand by the people that speaks in Sciascia’s La zia d’America and Il quarantotto, two remarkable stories that are part of Gli zii di Sicilia, because this essential collection, already from its first 1958 edition, was designed to reconnect the Sicilian people with its modern history and even with its genetic background, which carries in itself a silent (but strongly present and active) hope and a clear ‘loyalty to the principles of morality and dignity’.
