Why study Italian in Sicily?

I have always been motivated to make Sicily better known to lovers of the Italian language and culture, to teach them about the enormous cultural heritage of this island, the island of the sun, my homeland, an island overflowing with art, history, and culture. When I started teaching Italian for foreigners in Florence, before founding my first language school in Sicily, it was really inconceivable to me that international students who wanted to study Italian and Italian culture did not have the opportunity to study in southern Italy and in particular, in Sicily.

Up until that time, those who wanted to attend an Italian course for foreigners could only do so in Italian schools located on the Rome-Perugia-Siena-Florence axis, for the most part, and in any case all the language schools were located in the centre and the north of Italy. None existed south of Rome nor in Sicily. 

It was really difficult for me, as a Sicilian, to accept that foreign students who loved the Italian language and culture did not have the opportunity to learn about the enormous cultural heritage that resides in Sicily.

I wanted people to know more about Sicily

I thought it absurd that foreigners who love the Italian language and culture did not know anything about the empire of Syracuse, which at the time of Magna Graecia was an immense empire defined by some as ‘the First Empire of the West’. They did not know that it extended as far as Tuscany where it came into contact with the Etruscans (the period of the Hellenisation of Etruscan culture), as far as Le Marche (the colony of Ankon, today known as Ancona) and Veneto (the colony of Adria). It was an empire so large and powerful that it struck fear into the great Athens to the point that it declared war on it three times. Syracuse’s fame in the days of Magna Graecia drew men of culture from all over and made it a base of art and science. There were men such as Plato who wanted to form his ‘Republic of the Philosophers’ there, Pindar who dedicated verses of poetry to it and Aeschylus who presented his play ‘The Persians’ for the first time at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse. Indeed, the great mathematical inventor Archimedes ‘of the highest wits, guide and master’ lived in Syracuse too.

I could not believe that foreigners did not know that the first book on gastronomy – the Hēdypatheia, or The Poem of the Gourmet – was written in Sicily in the 4th century BC by Archestratus of Gela.

I thought it was crazy that foreigners did not know about the literary and architectural marvels of the Islamic era in Sicily, from the poems of Ibn Hamdis to the marvellous mosques later converted into Christian churches by the Normans.

I thought it was ridiculous that foreigners did not know that in the Middle Ages the language of the Sicilian Poetic School, in use at the Court of Frederick II, Stupor Mundi, constituted the first Italian literary language. They did not realise that the sonnet was invented in Sicily and that this greatly influenced the Tuscan Stilnovists. Dante himself wrote in his De Vulgari Eloquentia: “We shall first investigate the nature of Sicilian, since we see that the Sicilian vernacular attributes to itself a fame superior to all others: that everything the Italics produce in the matter of poetry is called Sicilian … “ giving recognition to poets of the Sicilian School and showing the importance, not only chronological, of the formulation of a poetic code of the “language of yes” (“quod quidem retinemus et nos, nec posteri nostri permutare valebunt“).

I thought it was incredible that foreigners did not know that the oldest parliament in the world was convened in Sicily for the first time by King Roger II in 1130 in the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo.

It was unbelievable that foreigners did not know that the first film with underwater shots was made in Sicily in 1946 by the Panaria Film boys, or that in 1939 Ugo Saitta from Catania presented the first short animated film in Italy at the 7th International Venice Film Festival. His film was the first example of a film with ‘wireless’ animated puppets, entitled ‘Teste di legno’ or ‘Pisicchio e Melisenda’, a forerunner of what would later become cartoons.

I thought it was unacceptable that foreigners did not know that the first democratically inspired happenings came from Sicily and the first protests of a mass socialist movement in Italy, the Fasci Siciliani, took place in Sicily in 1891.

From a literary point of view, I wanted foreigners to know that few regions in Italy can boast such a vast heritage. From the two Sicilian Nobel Prize winners for literature, Pirandello and Quasimodo, to the verist school of Verga, Capuana and Rosso di San Secondo. From Tomasi di Lampedusa with his Gattopardo to the post-war Sicilian writers Sciascia and Vittorini, Brancati to Consolo, Bufalino to Camilleri.

In my opinion it was therefore absolutely unacceptable that instead Sicily was used as a synonym for the Mafia and that Sicilians were automatically stereotyped as being mafiosi, as if it were a genetic distortion. It is humiliating that the spotlight of national and international attention is always on the Mafia and never on the anti-Mafia movement. Unfortunately, we often forget that those who fight on the front line against the Mafia are also Sicilians themselves. Tenacious, proud, courageous Sicilians.