"Leonardo Sciascia, Palermo felicissima?"

Leonardo Sciascia’s literary production (1921- 1989) is firmly rooted in his homeland, Sicily, but the writer has always been able to start from his island to reach universal themes. His sentimental geography covers various dimensions, from Racalmuto, not far from Agrigento, where he was born and in whose surroundings, in the country house, he spent all the summers of his life and wrote his works, to "little Athens", Caltanissetta, where he studied, to the capital, Palermo, where he lived for many years, in a complex relationship with the city, between love and distance. The analysis of this relationship is deepened in novels and non-fiction production: for the first area, the city is the essential background of "The Council of Egypt", the historical novel of 1963, which revisits the splendor of the capital in a special phase of its history, that eighteenth-century during which intellectuals dreamt the possibility of a revolution. Of great interest are also the pages that the writer dedicates to Palermo in his essays, for example "Palermo felicissima" in "Cruciverba" (Einaudi 1983), in which he appears involved in interpreting the characters of a city which, in his opinion, «represents the scene of a city», also showing images provided by other authors, including Vitaliano Brancati.