2023-09-19 13:35:48
Time.news – War, emigration, politics, business, violence but also love and relationships between people belonging to different social classes: the exciting choral story told in I Malarazza (Rizzoli, 490 pages) by Ugo Barbàra, Time.news journalist and writer on his seventh novel, it is a family saga that begins in Castellammare del Golfo, in his Sicily, more than a century and a half ago, but mix all the ingredients of a story that couldn’t be more timely.
The historical era is the same as that of the Leopard: we are in fact in 1860 and Garibaldi arriving with the Thousand will change the history of the island forever. As Tomasi di Lampedusa makes the nephew of the Prince of Salina say, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change”: in the Malarazza it is said instead that “there is no better way to maintain power than to maintain chaos ”.
Here, however, the context is not that of a nobility that would like to continue to be satisfied with the rich revenues of the land and the work of the “viddani”. The fortune of Antonio Montalto and his wife Letizia Battaglia is consequence of their choicesdetermined by historical events but courageous and not obvious: important choices, which involve a whole series of people who benefit from them or, on the contrary, are heavily affected by them.
However, Malarazza is above all a story of emigration. Not the one dictated by need, which had already poured millions of Irish and Germans onto American shores in that period and would have led millions of Italians to cross the ocean in the following decades.
The journey of Antonio Montalto, Letizia Battaglia and their children is a first class journey, and in New York they will expand their fortune compared to the agricultural activity of their land of origin, to the point of founding a bank and a shipping company, meeting senators, deputies and generals and to be directly involved in the American Civil War.
Antonio Montalto is a brilliant and self-assured entrepreneur, whose choices and behavior are sometimes unscrupulous and questionable, but when he obtains for his wife the right to found and preside over a bank, a possibility hitherto denied to women in America, he says that “it was a battle of civilizations”.
© Andrea Giammarinaro
Ugo Barbara
The author describes with historical accuracy what was happening on the East Lower Side of New York, a neighborhood of Manhattan in which immigrants lived crowded together in buildings attached to each other and in terrible hygienic conditions, divided by nationality of origin, in a condition in which the value of human life was minimal and violence was agenda, but also on the battlefields of Virginia and Kentucky, where a fratricidal war “languished bloodily.” A summary that brings to mind the situation of the last year and a half in Ukraine: “Every meter conquered by the southerners was lost the next day to be reconquered the next day. An exasperating tug of war that cost the lives of hundreds of men and was never conclusive.”
Even in the Malarazza, as in the Leopard, the main scene takes place during a big party, even if the carriages that take the guests to the rich Montalto residence move slowly under a heavy snowfall, a climate slightly different from that of Donnafugata. The detailed description of clothes, furnishings and foods allows the reader to feel part of the celebrations and the continuous twists and turns, as well as suggesting a desirable transposition of the novel onto the screen. But it is the ending of the novel, after 500 gripping pages, that leaves us breathless and makes us hope that the author will also give us a sequel.
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