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Locals in Leonardo Sciascia’s Sicily town fight planned sale of his house

Italian writer, who died 25 years ago, lived in Racalmuto, where residents are campaigning for his former house to be saved
  
  

Locals in Leonardo Sciascia’s home town outraged over house sale plan
Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) in Paris. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Locals in the home town of Leonardo Sciascia, one of Italy's great 20th-century writers, have expressed outrage over the intended sale of his former house and are appealing to the Sicilian regional authority and the government in Rome to help save it as a national treasure.

Sciascia was a novelist and politician whose works were often set in his troubled, mafia-blighted homeland of Sicily. He hailed from Racalmuto in the south-west of the island and lived there for much of his life.

Such is the literary wealth of that corner of Sicily that authorities are planning to create a writers' road, Strada degli scrittori, for tourists, taking in the homes, birthplaces and museums devoted to local boys made good: alongside Sciascia, Nobel prize-winning playwright Luigi Pirandello and Andrea Camilleri, author of the popular Inspector Montalbano detective novels.

These grand plans may have hit a snag in the planned sale of the now dilapidated house in which the author of The Day of the Owl lived as a boy and then later in life – as a married man and burgeoning writer – for more than a decade.

"We cannot let the house be sold to a private citizen," wrote Enzo Sardo, a former mayor of Racalmuto, in local newspaper Il Giornale di Sicilia. Sardo begged the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano, a former Communist, and the regional president, Rosario Crocetta, to step in to ensure the property is bought by a public body, which could then transform the home into a museum.

The home, on the appropriately named road Via Sciascia, is reportedly where the author lived from 1948 to 1957. Sciascia died in Sicily 25 years ago this November.

 

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