Leonardo Sciascia: the conscience of Sicily

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and 

even religious proofs are called into question.

Salvatore Quasimodo

The nordafricani Sicilians, closer to Tunis than to Rome, are a mixture of races from endless historical invasions and occupations—including Arab, Norman and Byzantine—and speak an incomprehensible dialect.  This backward, impoverished island, cut off from the mainland, is notorious for its feudal landowners and fat village capi; for Mafioso corruption, lawlessness, violence, “honourable” revenge, omertà (code of silence) and “wet work” leading to toe tags.

The novel and film of The Godfather accurately portray the Mafia, and its themes derive from Leonardo Siascia’s milieu.  The Corleone (“Lion Heart”) family takes its name from a village north of Palermo, and emphasises respect and close domestic ties to justify their ruthless murders.

Genco, the family’s legitimate olive oil business, is not a corporate but a Sicilian family name.  The Mafia extortionist wants only to “dip his beak” into his victims’ scarce money.  The racehorse’s bloody head in the producer’s bed had an actual parallel in real life: the severed head of a favorite Alsatian dog was sent to its terrified owner.  The film also showed the Ambrosiano Bank scandal and suicide of the chairman, Roberto Calvi, who hanged himself from a bridge in London.

Caroline Moorehead’s A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul (Chatto & Windus, 295p, £25) is perceptive and elegantly written.  As the subtitle suggests, it portrays the novelist Sciascia in the historical, social and political context of Sicily, and analyzes his major works.  There’s no edition of his correspondence and Moorehead quotes only a few unpublished letters.  The text has 31 black-and-white photos, including one of naked, thin, crouching, underground sulphur workers, who look like the condemned in Dante’s Inferno.

Sciascia (1921-89) was born in Racalmuto, a remote, impoverished town of 12,000 inhabitants, 20 miles north of Agrigento in western Sicily.  Superstition was rife, and people believed the dying could carry messages to the dead.  The main industry was the inhuman and suffocating sulphur mines, constantly threatened by fires and floods, which killed many workers.  Sciascia’s father escaped the mines and worked in the company office.  The family had a beloved summer retreat, La Noce (“The Nut”), four miles from Racalmuto.

In 1935, when Sciascia was fourteen, the family moved to the slightly more civilised Caltanissetta, 40 miles north of Agrigento (and not on Moorehead’s map).  Sciascia grew up under Mussolini’s Fascism from 1922 to 1943, followed by the Allied military invasion and occupation of the island, accomplished with the help of Lucky Luciano and other criminals freed from American prisons.

The homely Sciascia had a high forehead, deep-set eyes, long upper lip and thin mouth.  He was personally unexciting and had no love affairs.  He took trips to Paris and to Spain, always by train, but usually stayed close to home and led an uneventful existence.  He followed Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and ordinary in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work”.

A heavy smoker and temperate drinker, Sciascia liked the local dishes prepared by his three maiden aunts.  His character was modest, timid and reserved, introverted, quiet and retiring, erudite, punctual and precise, “solitary, obsessive, brave and outspoken”.  He was given to long meditative silences, while listeners waited impatiently for him to speak.  In 1940 his low weight and extreme thinness excused him from military service in World War Two.  In July 1944 he married a teacher in his village, and had two devoted daughters.  Four years later, his depressed 25-year-old younger brother, Giuseppe, shot himself, a tragedy that overshadowed the rest of Sciascia’s life.

In October 1949 he began teaching in his old school in Racalmuto.  In a grim passage, Moorehead writes: “The boys came to school barefoot, or in their fathers’ army boots with gaping holes, or in wooden clogs with leather straps.  Some wore their mothers’ woolly berets.  Very few owned socks and in winter, when ice formed into crusts on the windows that the locals called ‘cattle horns,’ their feet were covered in mud. Their sweaters were full of holes; the more fortunate wore overcoats made out of military blankets.”

Sciascia was a passionate reader, avid book and print collector, but a wretched literary critic who attacked the greatest modern French, English and Italian writers.  Proust’s memories “were no more than a ‘reductive’ approach to reality typical of a gran signore”.  “Joyce’s language was indecipherable, addressed only to himself and to the utterings of Babel.”  He condemned Lampedusa, an infinitely greater author than Sciascia, as an apologist for a worthless class, for “his unacceptable pessimism and denial of progress”.  He most admired Stendhal and Pirandello.  “Montaigne introduced him to benign scepticism and Voltaire to the light of reason.  But it was [the 19th-century Italian novelist] Alessandro Manzoni who had made him see writing as a moral act.”

Sciascia’s early Fables from a Dictatorship, influenced by Orwell’s Animal Farm, portrayed “a world in which the strong win, the weak go under and society, unconstrained by ethical considerations, is ruled by cruelty”.  Moorehead defines his themes as “injustice, poverty, corruption, power and memory driven by a strong sense of morality and the consciousness of being Sicilian”.  But there’s never a satisfactory resolution to any of the corrosive problems portrayed in his novels.

Moorehead describes Sciascia writing about four of the most important Mafia murder cases: the cadaveri eccellenti (“illustrious corpses”) of policemen, magistrates, judges and reformers gunned down in Sicily by the vengeful Mafia:  Salvatore Giuliano, the most famous bandit, finally betrayed, caught and killed by the police; Enrico Mattei, the industrialist killed when a bomb blew up his plane; Aldo Moro, the head of the Christian Democratic Party, kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades.  Sciascia condemned the government for refusing to negotiate, and argued that “Moro alone, denied, betrayed, could have been saved, but had been allowed to die by a State, which, unable to protect him, had no moral right to be so intransigent.”  Sciascia was fiercely attacked when he foolishly criticized the political appointment of the crusading prosecutor Paolo Borsellino.  If, as Carlo Levi wrote, “Christ stopped at Eboli” in the province of Salerno, He never even came close to visiting Sicily.

In the early 1950s Palermo became the centre of the drug trade, whose raw materials were imported from the Golden Triangle of Burma, refined in Sicily and smuggled to America.  During the narcotics wars “between 1980 and 1982, some thousand people were strangled, shot, poisoned, crushed or bombed and then dismembered”.  The murderers, who gave “immediate perdition”, ignored the Cardinal of Palermo who threatened them with “eternal perdition”.

Sciascia wrote with an Olivetti 22 typewriter.  “He liked to complete two pages each day, set them aside, return to them next morning, reconsider them and write two more.”  In this way, he composed 43 books of about 150 pages each.  He created novels, detective stories, essays, literary criticism, history, pamphlets and autobiographies.  His best and most successful book The Day of the Owl (1961), a detective novel that has sold half a million copies, is “a portrait of Sicilian culture and criminal power that provided a convincing and uncomfortable picture of corruption and illegality imbedded in the very heart of the island.”

The Day of the Owl film poster

Moorehead does not explain why in 1979 Sciascia stopped writing fiction for ten years,nor why his close friendship with his publisher Elvira Sellerio suddenly ended.  His undated meeting in Rome with Jorge Luis Borges, whom he greatly admired, is not mentioned in the Argentine’s biography.

In 1975 Sciascia, “the conscience of the nation”, was elected to the Palermo City Council and in 1979 to the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, but found political life a tornado of hot air, a complete waste of time.  He died in 1989 of a rare form of cancer that attacked his blood plasma cells.  Like the character in Edgar Poe’s story, he had a horror of premature burial and asked his family to make sure he was really dead.

It’s surprising that Sciascia never mentioned D. H. Lawrence, who lived in Taormina from 1920 to 1922.  In his Introduction to Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo (1923), Lawrence emphasised the powerful contrast between the exhilarating landscape and the depressing peasant life: “Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood.  It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek.  Yet the lives of the people all seem so squalid, so pottering, so despicable: like a crawling of beetles.  And then, the moment you get outside the grey and squalid walls of the village, how wonderful in the sun, with the land lying apart.”

Note: Many modern Italian writers are Sicilian and many of the best films, both serious and comic, take place on that strange and violent island.  The writers include Giovanni Verga (translated by D. H. Lawrence), Federico De Roberto, Luigi Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Salvatore Quasimodo, Vitaliano Brancati and Elio Vittorini.  Danilo Dolci and Norman Lewis `provide eye-witness accounts.

Mafia films are La Scorta (which brilliantly portrays the drama of a brave prosecutor who defies the Mafia); Salvatore Giuliano, Open Doors, The Sicilian Girl, Mafioso and The Day of the Owl, based on Sciascia’s novel.  Other notable films set in Sicily are The Leopard, Seduced and Abandoned, Bell’Antonio, Divorce Italian Style, Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino and Malena.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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