Landscapes of Memory: Sicilian Nostalgia in The Old and the Young by Luigi Pirandello

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the relationship between landscape and memory in the novel I Vecchi and i Giovani, by Luigi Pirandello, and how this interaction is related to the Sicilian subject, analyzing the cases of the characters Mauro Mortara and Dom Ippolito Laurentano. Before reaching this point of the discussion, however, there will be an analysis of the Arab-Sicilian poetry of Ibn Ḥamdîs, a poet who had to go into exile when Sicily was conquered by the Europeans and who wrote verses full of nostalgia and suffering on the island. The intention here is to restore Ḥamdîs to its proper place within Sicilian / Italian literature and to observe connections between his poetry and Pirandello's novel. Understanding that the Sicilian landscape is the result of an ancient historical-cultural sedimentation and that the Sicilian is a nostalgic subject, his connection with the land itself will be paradoxical: sometimes with exacerbated attachment, sometimes with disgust, recalling what the Latin poet Ovidio immortalized in the verses Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum [Neither with you nor without you I can live].