And what does Sciascia say?

There is an almost completely unknown exchange (1969-1978) of a bundle of letters between the Sienese Mino Maccari and the Racalmutese Leonardo Sciascia. Then there are the pages of Maccari’s unpublished «Diary», where the name “Sciascia” occurs eleven times in eleven years. From the private archive of one of Sciascia’s friends from Palermo transplanted to Milan, a box with drawings and material about which nothing was known then emerged in June 2018. The cards found help
to retrace the friendship between two heretics and eccentric narrators of our twentieth century.

If we had to engrave, thirty years after the death of both, an epitaph for Maccari, to be compared ideally to what should have been that of Sciascia “He contradicted and contradicted himself”, but we would not feel like writing “He enjoyed and enjoyed himself”, because – Sciascia observes as early as 1969 – «under the amused appearances, under a fantasy that seems hilarious, there is in Maccari’s things something similar to the Pirandellian” pain of living like this, the sense of the trap “». So we discover – even before going into the merits of the letters and scattered sheets – two characters of Italian culture who in contact have produced sparks of intelligence, wit, provocation.

In collaboration with Amici di Leonardo Sciascia.