The boys ‘reveal’ the mystery of Laura Lanza in ‘La Baronessa di Carini. Trip to Sicily’

2023-04-22 10:01:21

Two levels of reading which, starting from different points of view, gradually overlap. On the one hand, the historical novel on the tragic story of the Baroness di Carini. On the other hand, a school group from Viterbo today who takes a trip to Sicily with their Latin and Greek teacher, finding themselves experiencing “poor Laura Lanza’s last night”. It is the interpretation with which the Sicilian writer Costanza DiQuattro recounts the terrible bloody event that involved the young noblewoman, killed by her father together with her lover in 1563, in her new novel The Baroness of Carini. You have been on a trip to Sicily to the Gallucci bookshop for a few days.

“I used two different narrative levels so much so that the book is in fact divided into two stories that join only at the end, in the last chapter. Between the first and second part – DiQuattro tells time.news – there are 500 years of The story of Laura Lanza is set around 1560 and instead the contemporary story, which revolves around a school trip, is set in 2022. In fact, in the second part of the novel, a class of students from the classical high school of Viterbo goes on a trip to Sicily with the Latin and Greek teacher, a Sicilian who loves her land in an almost exasperated way. Four boys, who represent four universal types that could have existed even in 1500, become the protagonists of a plot that is a story within a story”. In the last part of the novel, in fact, “these four kids find themselves wrapped up in the story of Laura Lanza experiencing her last night. The story turns into a fantasy”. The boys begin to investigate the death of the baroness of which it is said that the imprint of her bloody hand was imprinted on a part of a room in the Castle of Carini.

The book winks at young readers by drawing them into a plot that sees them as protagonists. On the other hand, for adults, there is a fascination for a real fact, “a must for Sicily, which unfortunately continues to evoke current events: feminicide and the violence of some fathers”. What remains today of the story of the Baroness of Carini? “In fact, that of the Baroness of Carini is the story of an honor killing. A crime – replies DiQuattro – which, in a certain sense, still belongs to us”. Suffice it to say that “we had to wait for 1981 to have a law banning it”. Born in Ragusa in 1986, Costanza DiQuattro, artistic director of the Donnafugata theater, deals with drama. She is the author of four novels: ‘La mia casa di Montalbano’, ‘Donnafugata’, ‘Giuditta e il monsù’ and ‘Arrocco siciliano’. For the theater you wrote ‘Bluebeard’, ‘La flanerie between Bellini and Wagner’ and ‘Tell me about love’.