Thinking back to Cani di bancata by Emma Dante. Mammasantissima’s androgynous costumes

The essay reflects on Emma Dante, the unusual and versatile artist (theatre manager, actress-author, film and opera director). Emma Dante’s story condenses different and apparently conflicting experiences and knowledge (the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome, the teachings of Vacis in Turin, the laboratories with Cesare Ronconi) before the foundation of the Sud Costa Occidentale group in Palermo, in 1999, with its subsequent transformations continuing until today. The result is an irregular figure of a “matriarch”, in the fruitful vein of new Sicilian dramaturgy, which takes nourishment from the land of origin but with which she feeds a collective and authorial theatre. This theatre is both dramatic (indeed tragi-comic) and post-dramatic, with European depth, and it is not spared of controversy and criticism, as it is awkward and uncomfortable. The analysis of her performance in Cani di bancata (2006) aims to highlight themes and styles connected to a feminism that goes beyond gender in the strict sense but that is able to become a metaphor of a world and a human diversity that involves and disturbs us through an irreverent gaze.

From Sicily to Spain, from Spain to Sicily: Leonardo Sciascia as a Travel Writer

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War represented a pivotal moment in Leonardo Sciascia’s ideological development, as it pushed him towards an anti-fascist passion that would make him an engagé writer over the years. In fact, the news of Lorca’s assassination and Ortega y Gasset’s volumes had a lasting influence on the writer: he began to read Spanish and about the Spanish world, thus discovering Spain and its language, literature, and culture. In fact, it was a rediscovery, since, in the eyes of the Sicilian author, the common Arab domination and the long Spanish hegemony in Sicily had already connected the island and the peninsula in an intricate web of “similarities.” The present article aims to examine the distinctness of Sciascia’s Sicilian-Spanish imaginary that is present in the reports that he published after his numerous trips to the Iberian land starting in the 1950s. After having often been dismissed as paraliterary, those works will be analysed as travel writing so as to better appreciate them. Ore di Spagna, the volume that collects most of those journalistic articles, will be considered as one of the best examples of reporting in the 20th century, far beyond the boundaries of essay production.

Mafia and politics – Antagonism or interdependence?

Many researchers of the history of Sicily and the current events on the Island claim that Sicily became enslaved by mafia. However, if one performs a deeper analysis of this land, he may draw a conclusion that Sicily was never free. Starting from the mythical Cyclops, there was no invader who would not be lured by legendary fertile and beautiful piece of land – a bridge between Europe and Africa. Organized crime in Sicily emerged as a resistance against the foreign presence on the island.