"The ages, the seasons, blurred in my heart. I saw her again over there, in the mountains of Sicily, among trees suffused with sunset, her cerulean irises gazing calmly before a distant sea. The grandmother, in her black shawl, bent over her, all rose-coloured. Oh yes, wherever she was born, and then migrated, she was of those mountains, of that sea; Sicilian. I recognised her by her long face, her serious forehead; her melancholy. We walked holding hands; I forgot the years; all the kinship, the living and those beneath the ground, became, I don't know how, one; and my daughter was one of my blood, a sister. And so, as mists of vision arose from all sides, I no longer saw the Fedoz valley, the Engadine; but my mountains, the valley in which I was born".
FIRST STOP: BIRTH
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"I was born on a mountain peak that looks out on all sides: the valley, other mountains, a stretch of sea.
It is very turquoise and remote. The mountainsides step aside, like burly courtiers, to reveal the view".
G.A. Borgese, Tempesta nel nulla, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2023 [I ed. Milano, Mondadori, 1931], edited by Gandolfo Librizzi – Preface Salvatore Ferlita, p. 697, 698.
SECOND STOP: GROWTH
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"I grew up before those vast horizons and heard sounds from afar. The rivers, flowing through the woods at night, had voices of love; the lights of the farmhouses were dimmed on the cliffs to let the stars come closer.
In the summer, when my brother and I would come from Palermo on holiday, we would stop at the Forrione pass and ride into the wind.
From there, Polizzi, our village, appeared to us at the top of a climb.
A suspended air, a silence composed of secret humming, enveloped it. The air was mixed with honey and freshness.
The houses, grey and pink, lined up all over the mountain peak, looked like a ship about to set sail. Ours was the last one; clinging with stone pillars to the edge of the cliff.
Red earth, vividly coloured, under the mule pass! The last gorse bushes, still aflame, on the top, with sacred flowers!
The mint and thyme, the herbs beloved of goats, spread religious aromas along our path. Just before arriving home, the vineyards of La Scaletta were such a dark green that they gave off flashes of indigo, like a piece of the sea".
G.A. Borgese, Tempesta nel nulla, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2023 [I ed. Milano, Mondadori, 1931], edited by Gandolfo Librizzi – Preface Salvatore Ferlita, p. 697, 698697, 698
THIRD STOP: THE BORGESIAN LIBRARY
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"What does it matter if, materially, the characters and emotions of profoundly and avowedly Sicilian landscapes do not play a starring role in my work, when the 'Sicilianity' of fundamental inspiration is present everywhere and certain local visions appear to the most benevolent of my readers? Nor do I believe that this is merely because of the critical prejudice that categorises, a priori, the best of every contemporary writer in his or her geographical inspiration, precisely the best of what I, as a novelist have been able to give. Allow me to recall (certainly not out of arrogance, but rather out of homage to the land from which I have received these small gifts) La Siracusana, a novella of the purity of love; L'arcobaleno, and another of poor martyred passion, Il ragazzo; and another, La centenaria in which I seem to have felt with a certain intensity some aspect of Palermo's architecture and family life in the city where I spent my childhood; and more than all these fleeting aspects, the Calitri [sic] of my first novel, the town high up in the mountains, which can be seen from the sea of Campagna a Mare, a town almost sacred in appearance, there among the clouds, and which I have situated (as some sort of fantastical alibi) in Calabria but which is, in reality, a transfiguration and expansion of the view obtained from the valley in my home town, Polizzi".
G.A. Borgese, Discorso sulla Sicilia (ai siciliani?), 1931, Fondo Borgese presso Biblioteca Umanistica dell’Università agli Studi di Firenze; now in G.A. Borgese, Una Sicilia senza Aranci, a cura di Ivan Pupo, Roma, Avagliano editore, 2005, pp. 93-94
FOURTH STOP: TOWARDS PIAZZA TRINITÀ
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"In the midst of children's battles, I alone stormed Trinity Hill, running up through the stones, sure that no one could hit me...".
G.A. Borgese, Tempesta nel nulla, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2023 [I ed. Milano, Mondadori, 1931], edited by Gandolfo Librizzi – Preface Salvatore Ferlita, p. 699
FIFTH STOP: AFTERNOON
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"What a light comes over my native hills on September afternoons! Gold are the corn stubs, old gold the hazelnut leaves that are already beginning to turn yellow, and the motionless olive groves have, in the limpid blue that pervades them, glaucous gleams that almost come from the sea, a turquoise shadow that now flickers on the other side of the turquoise mountains, when the light is not too harsh".
G.A. Borgese, Re Cuono, in “Medusa”, No. 6, Florence, 9 March 1902
SIXTH STOP: SUNSET IN THE LARGEST AND MOST BEAUTIFUL SQUARE IN THE ALTE MADONIE
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"When sunset comes, gold dust glistens on all the peaks.
The most beautiful of all is the mountain of Termini, with two blue domes that meet the sky.
The red clouds pause a little like the chariots of goddesses. Small sails criss-cross the sea like marble flowers. Then evening descends".
G.A. Borgese, Tempesta nel nulla, Milano, La nave di Teseo, 2023 [I ed. Milano, Mondadori, 1931], edited by Gandolfo Librizzi – Preface Salvatore Ferlita, p. 698
SEVENTH STOP: TWILIGHT
BORGESE GENIUS LOCI
"Today, perhaps never experienced, nostalgia for Polizzi, especially for the second valley and the passes from which one can see such great things. The gardens of Santa Venera. The dialect that seems, though composed Latin words, to have Greek sounds".
G.A. Borgese, Diario I, 12 maggio 1929, in Cinque diari americani (1928-1935), edited by Mariagrazia Macconi, note di Luciano Canfora e saggio di Gandolfo Librizzi, Firenze, Gonnelli, 2020, p. 83