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Bagheria
Author(s): Dacia Maraini (Author), Elspeth Spottiswood (Translator), Dick Kitto (Translator)
- Publisher: Dufour Editions
- Publication Date: January 1, 1995
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 119 pages
- ISBN-10: 0720609267
- ISBN-13: 9780720609264
Book Description
The author visits her Italian hometown, Bagheria, in an attempt to make peace with the aristocratic family she has rejected and condemns the destruction of Sicily’s artistic and architectural treasures in its transition into a modern city
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Bittersweet memoirs make the most interesting reading. This one, of Italian novelist Dacia Maraini, is full of contradiction and as pungent as black olives grown in Mediterranean soil. Maraini journeys back to Bagheria, her Sicilian hometown, to make peace with family ghosts and revisit the place her heart calls home. Tea with her eccentric aunt at the old family villa inspires refreshingly acute perceptions of family history and foibles, precisely remembered. Maraini encounters her past in every room, photograph, conversation, and landscape. She decries the blight of modern Sicily, its urban sprawl, the destruction of its artistic and architectural treasures, and the ruin of her family’s estates. Yet she rejects her family’s aristocratic pretensions and has no interest in its survival. She paints her self-portrait in dry, suggestive brushstrokes, with the natural self-possession of the aristocratic bloodline she was so desperate to reject. Maraini’s assessment of modern Sicily is also a personal condemnation, a rejection, and a purging. Disenchanted and out of step with the rigid traditions of family and culture, she remains an observer who comes to an uneasy acceptance of that which has formed her. Deanna Larson
