Barbara Bellomo talks about Sicily at the beginning of the twentieth century in ‘The Orange Wrapper’

With ‘The Orange Wrapper’ Barbara Bellomo returns to tell about his Sicily and entrusts a historical novel with the task of giving voice back to a world of women who led social transformation through work.

The book is set in Catania in 1906, a city crossed by contrasts: the fish market, the port, poverty, commercial enterprise, the first signs of industrial modernity. At the center is Rosetta, a teenager who grew up among the fishmonger’s stalls, who moves in a harsh but vital universe, where dreams often seem destined to remain on the margins and where instead an idea capable of changing the course of things can be born.

Rather than chasing the plot twist, Bellomo builds a story of formation and redemption. The meeting with Concetta Campione, owner of a printing house where only women work, opens up the protagonist’s possibility of imagining a different future.

In that printing laboratory, among papers, colors and machines, Rosetta glimpses a job and a new idea of ​​herself. The novel thus moves along a narrative line that intertwines female emancipation, craftsmanship, social mobility and invention, with the motif of the orange becoming a concrete symbol of territorial identity and vision.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book lies precisely in its historical structure. Bellomo sets the story in a Catania alive with sounds, smells and crafts, and links the narrative to a precise production tradition, that of citrus fruits and their marketing, to the point of evoking the “mystery” behind the practice of wrapping them individually.

To give further depth to the book is the relationship between documented reality and narrative invention. The character of Concetta is inspired by the real-life figure of Concetta Campione, a woman who between the end of the 19th century and the mid-20th century helped many young women and ran her printing factory in Catania with her husband. In ‘The Orange Wrapper’, as in Bellomo’s other works, “true and plausible are intertwined”: a useful indication for understanding the ambition of the book, which aims to tell an individual story, but also to bring to light forgotten stories and a female memory that remained in the background for a long time.

From this point of view, ‘The Orange Wrapper’ fits coherently into Barbara Bellomo’s authorial path. Graduated in Literature, PhD in Ancient History, engaged for years at the University of Catania and now a teacher of Italian in a high school in the city, Bellomo has combined her scholarly activity with a narrative production in which the connection with history and with the Sicilian places it is central.

Before this title he published with Salani ‘La ladra di memoria’ (2016), ‘Il Terzo Relitto’ (2017), ‘Il peso dell’oro’ (2018), ‘Il libro dei sette sigilli’ (2020) and ‘La casa del carob’ (2022); with Garzanti, ‘The Library of Missing Physicists’ arrived in 2024.

Bellomo loves to combine research, imagination and narrative tension. His novels often arise from an accurate historical background, but are not limited to period reconstructions. Rather, they seek a form of storytelling capable of give substance to the charactersto the conflicts and shadows of the past, making them close to the contemporary reader. In ‘The Orange Wrapper’ this approach seems to find a particularly effective synthesis, because the precision of the context is combined a protagonist who grows page after page and goes through pain, work and the discovery of one’s own voice.

It is therefore not a novel to be presented as a simple saga setting or as a sentimental costume story. It’s quite a narrative that looks at popular and productive Catania of the early twentieth century to talk about the courage to imagine change.

Against the light, Bellomo also seems to question the present: who can afford to choose their own destiny, and at what price? It is in this question, even more than in the plot points, that the book finds itself its attractive force.

With ‘The Orange Wrapper’, Barbara Bellomo thus confirms her interest in female figures who challenge the limits of their time and for the stories in which local memory becomes fictional material. A book that smells of citrus fruits and printed paper, and which promises to accompany the reader inside a city, a profession and a passing season, without losing the pace of the story.