Stories of women, passions and secrets in ‘Sicilian curtain’ by Giuseppe Cerasa

Passions, memories, small stories that represent collective memories and events. Passions that describe the soul of a people and the deepest and most true identity of Sicily. Giuseppe Cerasa captures the spirit of the island, dissecting it in ‘Sicilian curtain’, published by Aragno
publisher. The book, writes the novelist Stefania Auci in the preface, stages “small snapshots, composite paintings that depict real life, collective memories and family memories from which the image of a Sicily rich in shades emerges”.

At the center of the story emerge stories never seen or heard, part of a heritage of emotions that cross almost seventy years of Italian events: worlds that light up and certainties that go out. A story that winds through loves, passions, indispensable rites, unheard of violence, trampled rights, revolutionary flashes, literary stories not always written yet described with strength and lyricism. And on everything, as Auci notes, Sicily stands that “remains at the center of the narrative, always: it is when the private moments, with almost lyrical features, alternate with the stories of civil commitment. It is also in the disenchanted and bitter story of the More difficult years for our island, those of the mafia wars, where politics and underworld often had the same face “. This is because “the mafia is the stone conviction in every event that involves the island”.

Hopes and violence alternate in these pages, life and death, light and mourning, as the history of Sicily has taught in recent years, inspiring and often anticipating scenarios that have imposed themselves at the turn of two centuries in the world. Among the many elements treated by Cerasa there is also the long path of emancipation of Sicilian women, an essential reference point of the island. “Personally – says Stefania Auci – I really appreciated the story of the tiring emancipation of women who, from the closed of family homes, passed through the world of work for example through teaching. The women depicted by Cerasa are sometimes shy creatures, Sometimes resolved and determined that have lived on the margins of a world hostile to them. and yet they are equipped with courage and awareness, and are not afraid of taking their responsibilities or defending their own and their families “. Because women, after all, are “the real backbone of Sicily”. A message that, concludes the writer, Cerasa “passes in a clear way, without a bladder”.