Within the course of “L’Italie méditerranéenne”, programmed by the Département de littératures et de langues du monde of the Université de Montréal, the Italian Cultural Instiute is pleased to present the conference entitled “Things of Sicily“, by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco.
Tuesday January 22, 2019 from 5pm to 8pm
Université de Montréal
Département de littérature et de langues du monde
3200 Jean-Brillant, aula B-3210
Conference in Italian
Sicily is the place where the whole world gathers, where not only the Mediterranean but the various forms of civilization – from ancient times up to the present – they had a Sicilian version. The literature of the twentieth century – with Pirandello, De Roberto, Verga and Tomasi di Lampedusa – renounce any form of regionalism to coincide with the universal. However, Sicily is also pure anarchy, anarchy Baroque, where it remains unchanged acute socio-political contradiction, the real soul of the puppet world. An island where “nobody will say that after the gattopardi the hyenas will come, the jackals and the dogs of mannera. We are still old, very old, anything that smells of death belongs, but we will not repeat itself, with Tancredi, that changes everything to not change “: the same for Buttafuoco.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco was born in Catania in 1963 and lives in Rome. He is a journalist and writer. He has published Le uova del drago (Mondadori, 2005, finalist for the Premio Campiello 2006, republished by “La Nave di Teseo”, 2016), L’ultima del diavolo (Mondadori, 2008), Il Lupo e la Luna (Bompiani, 2011), Il dolore pazzo dell’amore (Bompiani, 2013), I cinque funerali della signora Göring (Mondadori, 2014), La notte tu mi fai impazzire (Skira, 2016), I baci sono definitivi (La Nave di Teseo, 2017). His non-fiction works include Fogli consanguinei (Edizioni Ar, 2003), Cabaret Voltaire (Bompiani, 2008), Buttanissima Sicilia (Bompiani, 2014) and Il Feroce Saracino (Bompiani, 2015), Strabuttanissima Sicilia (La Nave di Teseo, 2017); with Carmelo Abbate, Armatevi e Morite (Sperling & Kupfer, 2017). For the seventy years of publishing house Longanesi, he has edited, in 2016, Il mio Leo Longanesi, an anthology of aphorisms, epigrams and novels. In 2018 he wrote the preface of La repubblica dei vinti. Storie di italiani a Salò di Sergio Tau (Marsilio, 2018). He is author of plays including: Buttanissima Sicilia with Salvo Piparo and Il Dolore Pazzo dell’Amore with Mario Incudine. He writes for Il Fatto Quotidiano and has the daily columns Il riempitivo on Il Foglio and La Dragonera on Il Tempo.