Description
Paolino Rasura had a dream: to leave Santafarra to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. Now he is thirty years old, he is no longer Paolino, he has started his own family and lives in Palermo, he works as a cart painter and feels he has wasted his chance. In December 1967, the failed artist returns to his hometown for the funeral of Filippu, the eccentric sculptor who had instilled in little Paolo the love for art. The death of Filippu is for Paolo the opportunity to pick up the pieces of his past life, but he finds only shards: he feels like a stranger even among his brothers, and Filippu’s works, which once spoke to him, helping him face the world, now speak to a group of kids led by the combative Francesca who, with the help of the heads of Rachel Carson and Federico García Lorca, is working to prevent the expropriation of the Garden and the demolition of the sculptures to build the expressway. A transformation is underway, and while Paolo enviously watches the lives he could have had that instead belong to others, the town becomes a theater of massive real estate speculation, unscrupulous hustlers, mysterious antiquarians, and buried secrets that could bring everything crashing down. After Pelleossa, Veronica Galletta returns to Santafarra and, with the mastery that guides her pen, gives voice to a place tormented from which many of today’s cracks and distortions originate, giving us a part of Sicily at the dawn of the 1968 earthquake.
– Special award “Giorgio Patrizi” at the Literary Prize Città di Lugnano
