Carola Parano

59 Posts
The dream: the ladder to the sky

The dream: the ladder to the sky

“A dream that is not interpreted is like a letter that is never read,” runs an ancient text. A knight arrives from Girgenti and charges at the temples of Agrigento—no longer a knight of La Mancha tilting at windmills. And it is Toni Cucchiara, present at the Syracuse premiere, who brings Don Quixote from Girgenti to the stage, a character beloved by Sicilian audiences for over 30 years. He manages to make everyone smile, the learned and the unlearned alike, for that is the nature of Don Quixote and his faithful squire. The cast is exceptional: Vincenzo Volo as the…
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One or two lire is not worth a land

One or two lire is not worth a land

Well, I don’t know, blah blah blah… and how lovely the weather is. This typical Sicilian exchange sums up a whole feeling, dozens of thoughts and deep distrust when you want to say nothing or everything. The Sicily of 1860, Pirandello’s *The Pension*, a short story that seems written today for the eternal anguish of the land, the struggle to cultivate it to stop it going to ruin and the visceral desire to grab it for yourself. And so first one peasant, then another, come across a Maltese man greedy to amass land out of vanity, a bailiff Caloriu, a…
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