The places of Vincenzo Rabito's literary tale

Well included in the IWB register of the Sicily Region (The Places of the literary, cinematographic, television story) - Sector "The Places of the literary tale by Vincenzo Rabito

The places of the literary, television and filmic narrative are the physical spaces described in the literary pages or which, being film or television set scenarios, have promoted the cultural identity of Sicilian landscapes.

A war-torn existence. Passed through the trenches of the First World War, the bombs of the Second, the "rofianiccio" of the Twenties, the scourge of a terrible mother-in-law, the atavistic hunger of the peasant South, the sudden well-being of the "beautiful ebica" of the economic boom, and finally a very private and extreme battle to deliver this autobiography to posterity. With its language invented day by day and its tragicomic, unstoppable narrative step, Terra matta speaks to us of the very character of our country, standing out, page after page, like an extraordinary epic of the dispossessed. A Sicilian farmhand locked himself in his room and every day, from 1968 to 1975, without giving any explanations, waging a fight against his semi-illiteracy, typed his autobiography on an old Olivetti. He wrote, one after the other, 1027 zero-spaced pages, without leaving a centimeter of top, bottom or side, in an attempt to tell all of his "ill-fated and very troubled and very desprezed" life. 

The result is a monumental work, perhaps the most extraordinary among the popular writings ever to appear in Italy, both for the expressive power of this language mixed with Italian and Sicilian, and for the narrative talent with which Rabito has managed to return from a absolutely unprecedented perspective more than half a century of Italian history. 

Unpredictable, very human and amazingly vital, Terra matta tells us about the vicissitudes, the cunning and the exasperated subterfuges of those who have had to fight all their life to free themselves from misery; to save his skin, little boy, in the slaughterhouse of the First and then of the Second World War; to secure a future by pursuing (with "that head of old bargain for Africa") the fascist dream of the great colonial empire in "a miserable desert"; to struggle, in the midst of "brecante and carabiniere", between the hypocrisy, confusion and hunger of the second post-war period; to try, in his own way ("impriaco di nobilità"), the social climb with an arranged marriage and finally enjoy the well-being of the Sixties, the "beautiful ebony" that happened to his children ... and then always, or almost always, find himself "Like the turtle, who was arriving at the traquardo and at the last staircase I fell".

Here it is, therefore, Rabito's book, proposed for the first time to the public in an abridged version but exactly as he wrote it, without changing even a word of those that the author has carved, with difficulty, in the last battle of his war-torn existence. (Einaudi Libri)

This is the list of places entered in the LIM register:

  • Chiaramonte Gulfi (province of Ragusa);
  • Comiso (province of Ragusa);
  • Modica (province of Ragusa);
  • Regalbuto (province of Enna);
  • Piazza Armerina (province of Enna);
  • Vizzini (province of Catania);
  • Licodia Eubea (province of Catania);
  • Grammichele (province of Catania);
  • Scordia (province of Catania);
  • Augusta (province of Syracuse);
  • Catania;
  • Syracuse;
  • Palermo;
  • Ragusa
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