Literary paths in the Agrigento region
“he used to come back every summer, and then less frequently. And at every return his imagination soaked the grotesque and pitiful facts that happened in town and that family and friends told him about: these made thicken and crowd those which were strongfully alive in his memory. Until the Second World War Girgenti was the town of his childhood inhabited by characters pushed to the edge of madness by their paroxysmal, hypertrophied self-love: sharp analyzers of their feelings and their troubles, taken up to the point of delirium by their passion for “reasoning “even stronger than that for women and for property, obsessively intent on defending their appearance from their being in front of the others and sometimes of themselves – or suddenly suited to melt away from appearances, to elect themeselves “dropouts “, “creatures “in the flow of life. Characters in Search of an Author”
Literary paths around the Valley of the Temples
The land of Agrigento is extraordinarily fruitful from a literary standpoint, a land full of geographical locations with literary and mythological associations that have always provided material for story telling and inspired memorable pages of world literature
In an area of a few square kilometers, in fact, we find the Girgenti (Montelusa Miragno, Richieri, Zunica) of Luigi Pirandello, the Donnafugata of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the Regalpietra of Leonardo Sciascia and the Vigata and Montelusa of Andrea Camilleri. But also the Camico of the saga of Daedalus and Minos and the “Paradise on earth” of Sergio Campailla. Real and imaginary places in which characters such as Gengè Moscarda, the Prince of Salina, Captain Bellodi and Inspector Montalbano live.
And again, Christian paladins and Saracen warriors such as Orlando, Brandimarte and Agramante, mythological figures such as Daedalus and Minos, young women chasing an impossible love such as the heroine of a short story by Boccaccio, landowners, peasants, sulhpur miners, historical characters.
Our tours allow you to visit the Agrigento region guided by the great writers of this land and discover known and unknown places, described in their works. Our literary routes can be adapted to the needs of individual travelers, cultural associations, schools and universities.
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