Midnight in Sicily is a fantastic and frustrating book, written by Peter Robb an Australian with a deep abiding love for the Mezzogiorno and its people.

Midnight in Sicily - Wikipedia

Fortunately, there is still an important part of civil society that refuses to give up. The hope is that it will finally prevail and transform Italy into a truly European and independent country. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2020-07-29 08:03:38 Boxid IA1888020 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Midnight in Sicily: on Art, Food, History, Travel and La Cosa

The art and literature of the south also feature heavily. The artist Renato Guttuso’s story is emblematic in more that just one way. His La Vucciria is not only considered the image of Palermo and its most famous market, but also Sicily and its way of life in general. But Guttuso is also connected to the Rome of Andreotti and the Christian Democrats. The description Robb provides of the end of Guttuso’s life is, like most of the tales with which Robb furnishes his book, extremely interesting, deeply unsettling and without a clarifying conclusion. That’s because there isn’t one, or at least it hasn’t been written yet. La Vucciria (1974), Renato Guttuso.

Big refrigerated lorries carried off the entire catch every morning before dawn. Shellfish, however, abounded. They were for the locals. There were glossy mussels, sleek brown datteri di mare, sea dates who lived inside narrow holes they burrowed in the soft yellow tufa below the waterline, cannelicchi, which were Chinaman’s fingernails, pipis, taratafoli, vongole, others whose names eluded me, though not the memory of their shape and flavour, the smooth mottled shells and the dark grooved ones. Spending fourteen years in southern Italy, Peter Robb recounts his journey into the Italian mezzogiorno - chiefly Sicily, but also Naples, and reveals its culture, history, art, literature and politics. The book also explores the dysfunction and impunity that intertwined with the organised crime world or Mafia world of the area from the post World War II era up to the 1990s, and the role of seven-time prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal. A look at the post-war rise of Cosa Nostra and its intertwining with Italian politics (what with most of the Government’s ministers apparently being either a part of or closely tied with the group), this was an interesting although sometimes confusing book.

First and lasting impressions of Palermo: Midnight in Sicily

One of my favourite books, I've just re-read it for the third time (I've got an appalling memory, so it almost reads like new each time if I allow enough time to pass). A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

I had thought of leaving this out on the grounds that it tells us more about Goethe than Italy. But it is one of the first accounts – and the most beautiful – of how the chaotic, impulsive, sensual south seduces we ratiocinating northerners, making Goethe, the creative outsider, “feel at home in the world, neither a stranger nor an exile”. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.” Less popular and humorous than his best-selling Italian Neighbours, Parks’s sequel does more than any book I know to explain how Italians become Italians. The title is inaccurate: it is not about schooling, and ought really to have been called An Italian Upbringing. Wonderfully perceptive on relations between and within the generations: “When a mother calls out Amore without further specification, she is calling for her son.” The case of Giulio Andreotti is an example well explained by the author, with overwhelming and detailed evidence.

Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb | Waterstones

I enjoy travelling by train, it is comfortable, reasonably inexpensive and easy to do, especially in Italy. It’s a good idea to travel in Sicily by train as you can see a fair amount of the countryside as the line takes a coastal route, but for a few moments in the odd tunnel, you get primarily uninterrupted views. It’s a little slow, but today I’m not in a hurry, so I’m happy to look out the window and soak up the sunshine. That being said, it cannot be doubted that the detailed narrative shines a very illuminating light on a host of figures who deserve opprobrium. Robb centres on Giulio Andreotti, several times Prime Minister of Italy and his associations with various corrupt, murderous ‘Men of Honour’ from Michele Sandona who caused the largest banking crash in Italian history, to Shorty Riina, a corpulent brutal butcher of a man, who all but waged war against the Italian state in the early 1990s as he attempted to bend the entire Mafia and Italian government to his will. The central place of Andreotti in the book works very well, once one becomes used to the way the narrative jumps around, providing an insight into how interlinked with crime key political players were.I was happy to get the opportunity to journey to Palermo by train and walk around for a few hours to give me my first taste of the city.