LA SIRENA

In the late autumn of 1938 two men meet in a Turin to both of them strangers. Paolo Corbèra was born to Palermo, a young law graduate, working as editor of "La Stampa." Rosario La Ciura was born in Aci Castello, is seventy-five years old, and besides being a senator, he is the most distinguished Hellenist of the time, author of an esteemed opera of high erudition and vivid poetry. The former resides in modest quarters on Peyron Street and, disillusioned from amorous adventures of little value, is "in the midst of a crisis of misanthropy." The second lives in "a shabby old mansion" on Via Bertola and is "bundled up in an old coat with a collar of a peeling astrakhan," reads foreign magazines incessantly, smokes Tuscan cigars and spits often. The two strangers meet in a café on Via Po ("a kind of Hades" or "a very suitable Limbo") and, to little to little, enter into a polite and cordial confidence. Amid erudite reflections, shrewd dialogue, cynically ironic banter, the two spend their time conversing about literature, antiquities, old and new ways of life. In an imaginary journey, geographic and temporal between North and South, a world built on passion and ecstasy emerges. To the young man's initial adventures with "sick and sleazy wenches (...), of an elegance made up of knick-knacks and moinettes learned at the movies, to fishing for greasy bank notes in the lover's pockets," is replaced, as sinuously as disruptively, by the old man's love for a creature with a smile that expresses "bestial joy of existence, an almost divine gladness," with a "perfume never heard, a magical smell of the sea," and a voice that sounds like singing.

Although Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is best known for_ Il Gattopardo_, if one looks at the author's albeit modest literary opera , one cannot help to but count among his masterpieces that little gem that is Lighea. Published posthumously in 1961 by Feltrinelli, this tale captivates in countless ways. Striking are the refined semantic choices that range from polished Italian to popular dialect, the precise and careful construction of the syntax, the scrupulous descriptions of places, characters, events, but above all feelings. From the pages of the story set in cold Turin, warm Sicily emerges vigorously: the smell of salt air, the taste of sea urchins, the scent of rosemary on the Nèbrodi, the taste of honey from Melilli, the bursts of perfume from the citrus groves, "the enchantment of Castellammare, when the stars are reflected in the sleeping sea and the spirit of those lying prone among the mastic trees is lost in the vortex of the sky while the body, tense and alert, fears the approach of demons." All these sensations are enriched by the performance La Sirena, accompanied by Maestro Germano Mazzocchetti's music, of which Luca Zingaretti is not only performer but also curator of the direction and dramaturgical adaptation, and in which the richness of the poetry of the Sicilian land, on which that melting and liquor-like stasis of living that connotes much of the landscapes and men, finds space in a journey between the carnality of the Present and the spirituality of Antiquity, seems to throb.