the Hotel Villa Carlotta in Taormina also makes a good base for an excursion into the literary world of Sicily through parks devoted to the island’s greatest writers. The history of Italian literature owes much of its international fame to Sicily and its writers. All of them, from Tomasi di Lampedusa to Verga – to name just a couple – reveal a profound sense of identification with the island in their work, with marvellous descriptions of its social customs and history.
The literary parks were created in order for people to find out more about the places where a great literary work was created, allowing people to visit houses, streets, hills and harbours that have inspired great and unforgettable writers and to relive the authors’ visual and emotional experiences. And this new way of preserving, re-evaluating and renewing the literary heritage is happening in Sicily too. Four parks can easily be reached using the Hotel Villa Ducale in Taormina as an ideal base.
Modica and the Torre Saracena in Roccalumera are the places which inspired Salvatore Quasimodo. In the Catania hinterland, the wide open spaces crossed by Giovanni Verga predominate, while further north, towards Messina, Cape Peloro is home to the park dedicated to Stefano D’Arrigo. In Palermo and its surroundings (Santa Margherita del Belice and Palma di Montechiaro) it is possible to visit the places of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) as described by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
The Salvatore Quasimodo Literary Park
The Salvatore Quasimodo Literary Park has two central places: Modica, where he was born, and the Torre Saracena in Roccalumena. Some of his prose passages refer to the town (the most famous is “Saluto a Modica” (Greetings to Modica) and poetry inspired especially by the type of vegetation – carob and olive trees – as for example “La lunga notte” (The Long Night), “Vicolo” (Alley), and “Lamento per il sud” (Lament for the South). The house of his birth, in Via Posterla, is still intact, providing a perpetual memorial to the writer. But what makes Modica so unique and fascinating is chiefly its Baroque aspect. The historic centre abounds in churches and buildings with splendid architecture and in picturesque alleys and streets lined with old shops and workshops. Near Taormina, the Torre Saracena in Roccalumera, used in medieval times for the defence of the coasts from attacks by Saracen pirates, inspired the poem “vicino a una Torre Saracena…” (near a Saracen Tower) and is the principal element in the Park in this Ionian village.
The Giovanni Verga Literary Park
The Giovanni Verga Literary Park allows the visitor to enjoy the pleasure of discovering some corners of Sicily, seeing them afresh through the eyes and the pen of this great verist writer. The project boasts a cultural distinctiveness which specifically involves all the “lands” of the writer. The places involved cover a huge area: from the hinterland of the “Vizzini lands”, surrounded by the Iblei plateau, to the plain of Catania; from the slopes of Etna to the coast of the mythical Cyclops to relive Verga’s epic novel “I Malavoglia” in the town of Aci Trezza. In Vizzini, (Verga’s birthplace), a cultural association organizes days designed to offer visitors original activities in direct contact with the Vergian world of the “vanquished”, through walks in the medieval area, readings from Verga’s works, tasting of local specialities, and live theatre. (www.vizzinidascoprire.it)
The Stefano D’Arrigo Literary Park
Stefano D’Arrigo is famous for his much-criticized and controversial work entitled Horcynus Orca, which took him twenty years to write. It is a complex and refined work, constructed in a new language that has its roots in the ancient Sicilian language, and it deals with the myth of nostos, the wandering hero present in literature from its origins up to the world of today.
There is an imaginary line that connects Sicily with Calabria which D’Arrigo calls the line of the "two seas", because it is here that the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas meet: this ideal line is the linchpin around which the events of Horcynus Orca revolve and is also the central axis of the Park inspired by D’Arrigo’s novel. The Sicilian location is situated in the fortified complex known as Torre Peloro (or Torre degli Inglesi - the Tower of the English) on the edges of the lagoon complex of the same name. Visitors can choose from activities such as fishing for swordfish to thematic itineraries of all kinds – nature, ethnographical, historical, artistic – in the area of the Straits “between Scylla e Charybdis”.
The Gattopardo Cultural Park
The Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Literary Park project is the result of collaboration between Palermo, Santa Margherita del Belice and Palma di Montechiaro, all places linked with life of the writer. The Park is located in Palermo, in Neve all’Alloro street and has a small Café-Galleria designed to be a "place of refreshment”, a special place where people can have authentic and significant experiences, finding out information and communicating; there is a small library open to everyone, film and documentary showings on request, and guided tours along historical-literary itineraries following in the traces of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s sources of inspiration, both in the historic centre of Palermo and outside the city. Like Palma di Montechiaro, Santa Margherita del Belice also represents feudal Sicily in the Tomasian world, and it is linked to his happy childhood memories and much loved mother, whose family owned the building in which Giuseppe spent the summers as a child and teenager, and on which he based the house of Donnafugata, the setting for several memorable scenes in The Leopard.
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