The Godfather’s Sicilian School

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This little book makes a big narrative leap in time, media and imagination. Starting from an iconic film on the Italian-American mafia and its use of a classic Sicilian-Tuscan opera, it stages a fantasy of return to the school of poetry that flourished in medieval Sicily and marked the origins of Italian poetry. This is a story within a story. It blurs the line between the inside and the outside, undoes cliches with classics, reads poetry with popular culture. This is not a book about the mafia and opera as such, but about a certain idea of Sicily that brings them together. The place that this idea holds in the popular imagination raises some crucial questions about Italian history and identity. Across a thousand years of cultural and colonial inventions of Sicily, from its American fantasy to its Arab legacy, from cinema to sonnet, this book wants to reframe these questions for a concise and critical introduction to the Italian poetic origins.