Newcastle U3A Italian Culture Online Learning Dear Italian Culture Friends

Newcastle U3A Italian Culture Online Learning Dear Italian Culture friends, It was nearly 7 AM, just before the bell of San Ignazio's church sounded, in the square in Rome to which it gave its name, that General Taddeo Bottando, head of the Italian National Art Theft Squad, paused to look at a painting, possibly a Gentileschi, one of the pictures (recovered at the successful conclusion of an art theft enquiry) which lined the corridor between the flights of stairs. As he did so, Flavia di Stefano, a young woman he had recruited straight from university in Turin, stopped next to him. They had just received a phone call from the Carabinieri, from near the Campo dei Fiori, she told him, and they were bringing round to them a man they had arrested breaking into a church and who had an odd story to tell. And so began a series of books about art crime stories which came to be called the "Jonathan Argyll Art Mysteries". The protagonists are Bottando, his assistant, and effectively his deputy, and a young Englishman, a graduate in Art History - the subject of the arrest - Jonathan Argyll. Their story and the crimes they unravel are told in beautiful English by Iain Pears, himself an art historian and journalist, who in the best possible sense loves the characters he has created. Throughout the series of 7 mysteries the relationship between the rather diffident young man and the beautiful Italian research assistant, - she never becomes a police officer - blossoms (eventually). The introductory novel is "The Raphael Affair" and it is followed by:- The Titian Committee (set mostly in Venice), The Bernini Bust (predominantly in Los Angeles), The Last Judgment, (Paris, Rome and England), Giotto's Hand (mostly Italy), Death and Restoration (mostly the Aventine Hill, Rome) and The Immaculate Deception (mostly Rome and Tuscany). During the course of the series we meet a rich, honest art dealer with a gallery near Bond Street, and a female professional art thief (and murderer), who's a thoroughly good egg. As the Guardian put it 'Good, clean art scam fun . the plot is layered as a forger's paint; Italophiles and gallery gazers will love it'. Pears intersperses real and non-existent places, churches, art galleries etc. and it is great fun to establish which are which. His love of Italy, and especially Rome, is like a beacon and the books are un-put-down-able. I have just read the whole 7 of them for the third time in less than three years. Just the thing for the lock-down. Leonardo Sciascia was born in 1921 in Racalmuto, Sicily. When he was 14 his family moved to Caltanissetta - west of Elba. The suicide of his brother in 1948 made a great impact on Sciascia. He became an elementary school teacher in Racalmuto and based on his experience there he later wrote an autobiographical novel entitled "Le parrocchie di Regalpetra" (The Parishes of Regalpetra). He married Maria Andronico, also a school teacher in 1944. He was 29 when he was published for the first time. The work was a satire on fascism in italy and was called "Favole della dittatura" ( Fables of the Dictatorship). It included 27 short poems. This was followed two years later by "La Sicilia, il suo cuore" (Sicily, it's heart). He moved to Rome in 1957 where "Gli zii di Sicilia" (The Uncles of Sicily) was published. This book dealt with, inter alia, the influence of the USA and of communism in the world, and the Unification of Italy in the nineteenth century. Then he returned to Sicily and wrote "Il giorno della civetta" (The Day of the Owl). This, possibly his most famous book, is a crime story about the mafia murder of a man in a small town in Sicily in broad daylight. A man running for a bus is shot twice in the back; the bus which is going to the market has many townspeople on board. But no-one has seen anything, no-one saw the killer. The victim, the owner of a small construction company, has refused to pay "protection" money to the local mafiosi, and they have decided to make an example of him. The crime is investigated by a Carabinieri captain from Parma (Emilia Romagna), and so a 'foreigner' - carabinieri are always posted to work away from their home towns. The carabinieri officer using dubious methods traps one man and through an informer manages to trap another whose stashes of hidden money lead to connections between the criminals and government sources. The death of an eyewitness who was prepared to give evidence leads to the collapse of the case and the carabinieri officer is taken off the case and the story ends with him telling friends back in Parma about the case and the two faces of Sicily, of which island they could see only the idyllic side. It's a very different face of crime from the stories Iain Pears writes, albeit there are some very unpleasant people in Pears' books, and not all of them are criminals. Sciascia was elected to the Palermo city council as an independent (on a Communist slate). His objection to PCI (the Italian Communist Party), from which he resigned, is explained by his book "Recitazione della controversia liparitana dedicata ad A.D." (Recitation of liparitana dispute dedicated to A.D.). The book was dedicated to Alexander Dubcek the deposed leader of Czechoslovakia. He also wrote "The Challenge", "One Way or Another", "The Council of Egypt", an historical novel set in Palermo, "The Disappearance of Majorana", "Open doors" and finally, "The Horseman and Death". This is not a comprehensive list. He died in Palermo in June 1989. I remember that reading a Sciascia novel in an Italian restaurant gained me a free glass of the best grappa from the manager who was surprised to find anyone reading Sciascia ("The Day of the Owl") in his restaurant. .

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