Stories of Southern Italy (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593535510 ISBN 13: 9780593535516

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

This dazzling hardcover collection brings to life the magnificent southern regions of Italy, from Naples to Sicily, as seen through the eyes of literary greats from Ovid and Virgil to Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante.

Southern Italy has long inspired one of the most vigorous literary traditions in Europe. Visitors since antiquity have sought to capture the extraordinary natural beauty and cultural riches of the region, and in this wide-ranging collection such notable foreign visitors as Goethe and Somerset Maugham sit alongside many of Italy’s finest writers, including Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Elio Vittorini, and Anna Maria Ortese.
 
The stories here range across the regions of Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Apulia, and Basilicata. Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid describe a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters. In an excerpt from The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, Vincenzo Consolo depicts an island on the frontier of Italian unification. The South’s legendary legacy of organised crime enlivens the stories of Leonardo Sciascia and Joseph Conrad. Curzio Malaparte and Norman Lewis immortalize the wreckage of Naples and the indomitable spirit of its people during World War II, and Elena Ferrante gives us a spectacular portrait of a poor but vibrant Neapolitan neighborhood in an excerpt from the best-selling My Brilliant Friend. Collectively, these entertaining tales provide a portal into a fascinating place in all its drama and beauty.
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ELLA CARR is an editor at Everyman's Library in the UK, and author of the guide Florence Walks. She has contributed to a number of travel and hotel guides, and to publications including The Oldie and Exberliner. She is the editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Classic collection Stories of Florence.

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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

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593535510
• ISBN 13: 9780593535516
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Herausgeber: Carr Ella
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Everyman's Library; https://myeverymanslibrary.com; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar