Trinacria

Trinacria

Editalia

Rome

1996

In folio

Leather with case

Italian

Used

280

Artisan binding, hand stitching, calfskin cover, with vegetable tallow tanning, hand-buffed with aniline, silver bas-relief on the cover plate, wooden container covered in calfskin with colored mirrors, edition of 50 copies, numbered from 1 to 50 - The volume traces a history of Sicilian literary culture from the 13th to the 19th century, highlighting the intertwining of two themes, that of fidelity to the characteristics of the island culture and that of openness to a broader dimension breadth, national and European. The double track on which Sicilian culture proceeds can be widely deduced in this broad historical-literary survey: the poems of Jacopo da Lentini are placed alongside the popular 'contrast' of Cielo d'Alcamo; the fourteenth and fifteenth century sacred representations to popular stories; the 'laments' in Latin or in the vernacular on the destiny of man in the cultured or popular theater of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the dialectal Petrarchism of Antonio Veneziano to the heroic (and heroic-comic) production of the seventeenth century and to Paolo Mura's songbook; the opera of Giovanni Meli to the realism of Domenico Tempio. Without forgetting the eighteenth-century theatre, in which Metastasian melodrama and the 'vastasata' of the Palermo porters are intertwined; the Puppet Opera and its extraordinary reworking of classical culture; and the rich traditional repertoire of legends, beliefs and tales of the 'cuntastorie', witnessed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by great scholars of popular traditions. The 999‰ silver bas-relief (24x33 cm) is made by the State Mint from a sketch original by Marco Saliola of the Scuola dell'Arte della Medaglia issued in 50 copies numbered from 1 to 50, each copy is marked with the IPZS hallmark. A female figure is depicted in the center of the composition, taken from a nineteenth-century lithograph, she is the Personification of the Sicily which brings with it symbolic elements of the nature and culture of the island. The rich composition that forms the frame is freely inspired by the stuccos that decorate the oratory of the Confraternity of San Lorenzo in Palermo, the work of the Baroque sculptor Giacomo Serpotta (second half of the 16th century). In the centre, at the top, the symbol of Sicily stands out.