“Whatever seed falls here, instead of the plant you expected, a fable grows.”
The Sicily that Cesare Brandi describes in Viaggio in Sicilia is not just another place: it is a threshold. Every detail — a balcony, a jasmine, a glint on the majolica — becomes literature, legend, memory.
Goethe wrote it in 1787: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the spirit. Here is the key to everything.”
And then: Elio Vittorini, Leonardo Sciascia, Gesualdo Bufalino, Vincenzo Consolo. All of them, in different ways, walked Sicily and turned it into writing. Some left it, some told it from a distance, some defended it in clear and painful words. But for all of them Sicily is never simply a place. It is a mirror. A threshold. A fable.
Many guests arrive here as the first or the last stop of their journey. Some have seen only the east, some only the west. But nearly all of them — before leaving — say it quietly: “I will have to come back. I have not finished Sicily.”
And once, somebody added: “I think I have come down with Sicily.”
Brandi would have had nothing to object to.