Good evening, I believe I can start this short reflection from two significant icons of Sicily, historically well established: Gorgia and Pirandello
two extremely significant icons of the Sicilian cultural tradition
Gorgia, the power of words, of logos
Gorgia said that Logos is a powerful being, so little but so powerful.
Pirandello, the great ruler of a scene that is a reproduction of reality, affecting and representing reality
a reality removed from day-to-day dimension to be reproduced it in the imaginary
they are two souls of Sicily, a Sicily placed amongst the power of words, the oratorical faculties, the rhetoric to understand the world around us
and the Sicily of Pirandello. The Sicily of the representation at any cost "Così è se vi pare". There's no one truth, but rather a thousand.
If I was asked during all my career in teaching at the Italian university, Palermo first and now Milan,
if I was asked during my long experience as writer, intellectual, hermeneutician of our epoch, critic sometimes debunking
sometimes pleasing to a reality surpassing me at high speed
I would say that Sicily is emblematically the representation of a contemporary period in which dialectics or knowledge
a theme-based examination of our time, is somehow expressed through duality between reality and imaginary
In Sicily, nothing is ever as it seems, everything has to be read through two representations, two truths
From this point of view, I believe it is fundamental to understand the way this Sicilian reality is measured through a dialogue between the time when
Sicilian man lives and on the other side this diachronic dimension, as Bergson would say, time as duration, in which many things of ths
land, not only cultural, straggle.
I think it is important to help young people understand all this. Today, there's a great inattention towards reality
We are unable to wonder why, today, we are either absent or shadows, or lost in a culture of inscrutable.
So, from this point of view it is fundamental to help young people by means of literature, writing, words, representation, theatre in order to enter
their time and their reality.
So, for example, a news over the past years in Palermo, where
an International Literary Award is well-established, the first award in Italy making a comparison between Italian literature and other literatures,
Mondello Price, that meets young people universe, young people Mondello.
It deals with an experience in which young people are invited to, on the one hand, listen to their protagonists from their time, young writers,
authors of major works,
on the other hand, to write, so as to break in reality, between imaginary and real.
Aristotele said that poetry is the realm of propable, history is the realm of the truth, the reality.
In Sicily, truth and probable mix up and from this point of view, Pirandello icon represents better than others this type of mix, of experience.
that today lives in our time.
I believe it is fundamental to help young people wonder about the meaning to live in their own town, their own land,
a land where conditioning is often hard, where living is affected by a hostile context
where the capacity to break in the reality is minimum, where world is aggressive and haunting.
So, we can have a solution only when, through the comprehension of text, the power of words, we succeed in breaking into the reality,
turning the real-imaginary into imaginary-real, only thanks to the power of art, poetry and literature.
Sicily is a land where culture and nature meet and merge,
the power of the relationship between natural and built has a particular dimension in Sicily
nature represents beauty, culture is expression of goodness, the old Greek ideal of kalokagazia, beauty and goodness merge
Today, in Sicily, this aspect constitutes one of the different dualities, apart from that one represented by the dramatic nature of daily life
that shows all negative features.
only art, words, rhetorics as means to understand reality
can help young people, and not only them, stay on this earth, looking towards the future
trying not to lose the sense of history and anchored in the present