The Viceroys Read Free Page B

There, opposite the great monastery façade (for the Italian State Monopoly rarely changes sites) is still the tobacconist’s where reigned his mistress, the ‘Cigar-woman’. To create these macabre grandees, near-brigands or near-saints De Roberto had to combine traits of feudal families all over Sicily, and his Uzeda stand out like Goyas, exceptional beings demanding exceptional treatment. For such a conception gentler sides have to be played down. The Princes of Bìscari, Paternò Castello, were Maecenases of the arts with a liberal tradition since their ancestor corresponded with Voltaire and befriended Goethe; the Dukes of Càrcaci, Paternò Castello, still have the most civilised manners in town (‘Wherever there is a Càrcaci one can
breathe
!’ says a young American resident). A more obvious model was the late nineteenth-century Marchese di San Giuliano, Paternò Castello, who became Foreign Minister of Italy under Giolitti, and whose character and career are freely sketched into the young Prince Consalvo. Palazzo San Giuliano may well be the original of the Francalanza palace of the book, for it fills a whole side of its own square on Via Etnea and is so vast and imposing that, with its entrance covered in commemorative plaques of royal visits, it is often mistaken for the town-hall opposite. Although now housing a bank, numerous shops and businesses and a large hotel, high on its main façade can still be seen two shuttered windows on rooms which are never opened, due to some tragedy, rumour has it, or perhaps some monster … In Catania the monstrous and improbable are never very far away, particularly among the established classes. Even poor old Don Eugenio, the only Uzeda who was perhaps an artist manqué, had a prototype, an old beggar often seen within living memory around the smarter cafés, who would take alms only from nobles of rank equal to himself.
    Later, Vitaliano Brancati extended this panorama to the middle classes, whose predicament between the two wars was brilliantly and terrifyingly caught by his novels,
Il Bell’ Antonio
and
Don Giovanni in Sicilia
.
    Since the late ‘nineties De Roberto had spent part of each year at Catania, and eventually ill-health decided him to settle definitely in his beloved city. This return to origins did not have the psychic effect on him that it did on Verga, whose displacement home from cosy Milan brought about one of those mysterious crises of Sicilian inertia, so that he never wrote more than an odd chapter or so of his great planned cycle about
I Vinti
(‘The Defeated’). De Roberto, as well as directing the city’s museums and antiquities, kept up a flow of varied productions; studies, short stories, plays, essays, they appeared regularly, uneven, original, all stamped somewhere with a directness, at times an acrid immediacy, that was becoming increasingly rare in Italian letters as D’Annunzio’s influence grew. Occasionally he produced something outstanding, such as his tales of military life during the first world war; one short story written at this time,
La Paura
, about a soldier’s fear, treated battle so frankly that it was not published until after his death. Such writing has only been appreciated in Italy during the last few years, partly through the influence of Hemingway, who might have written these stories himself.
    Sometimes De Roberto’s choice of plots make an unconscious pattern; an old lady gambles away her last cent with her chaplain; a confessor is tempted by his penitent; an anarchist prince murders his mistress; love natural and supernatural is found and lost and twisted. Among his most impressive stories are
Il Rosario
, about an old woman reciting her rosary as she refuses to pardon a dying daughter;
Il Sogno
, a successful piece of experimental writing, on a man’s thoughts to the rhythm of the train in which he is escaping from wife to mistress;
La Messa di Nozze
(1911), a short novel whose plot turns on a moving and