Sicily, a Grand Detour
On the occasion of the release of his new book
The Godfather’s Sicilian School:
Mafia, Opera & the Origins of Italian Poetry
(Troubador 2025)
on Tuesday, 15th April 2025 at 5:30 pm
Professor Davide Messina (University of Edinburgh)
will give a short talk with slides and songs.
The talk will be followed by a conversation with
Professor Joseph Farrell (University of Strathclyde),
author of numerous works on Sicily.
About the book
Starting from an iconic film on the Italian-American mafia and its use of a classic Sicilian-Tuscan opera, this book stages a fantasy of return to the school of poetry that flourished in medieval Sicily and marked the Italian poetic origins. This is not a book about the mafia and opera as such, but about a certain idea of Sicily that brings them together. The place that this idea holds in the popular imagination raises some crucial questions about Italian history and identity. Across a thousand years of cultural and colonial inventions of Sicily, from its American fantasy to its Arab legacy, from cinema to sonnet, this book reframes these questions for a concise and critical introduction to the origins of Italian poetry.
Free entry. Please reserve your space below. Please note that the reservation is successful only when you receive confirmation to the email indicated in the form. For any queries, please email eventi.iicedimburgo@esteri.it.
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