Conversations in Sicily

Conversations in Sicily holds a special place in the annals of literature.

It stands as a modern classic not only for its powerful thematic resonance as one of the great novels of Italian anti-fascism but also as a trailblazer for its style, which blends literary modernism with the pre-modern fable in a prose of lyric beauty. Comparing Vittorini’s work to Picasso’s, Italo Calvino described Conversations as “the book-Guernica.”

The novel begins at a time in the narrator’s life when nothing seems to matter; whether he is reading newspaper posters blaring of wartime massacres, lying in bed with his wife or girlfriend, or flipping through the pages of a dictionary it is all the same to him―until he embarks on a journey back to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. In traveling through the Sicilian countryside and in variously hilarious and tragic conversations with its people―his indomitable mother in particular―he reconnects with his roots and rediscovers some basic human values.