Scicli - Cinema may rightly be considered a “guiding” art form for Italy, as were the opera during Romanticism and architecture during the Renaissance. Italy is a land of cinema, and Italian film has always been loved and appreciated by directors from all around the world.
Sicily is a land of myth, art and culture. Unblemished nature, a land lost in the Mediterranean. Sicily is a place where different cultures and traditions meet, it is its people. Sicily has always been a “natural film set”. Films, directors and actors have carried this land on screens all over the world. To represent a landscape, to see it, means in a certain sense to possess it. It is well-known how, especially in Italian painting, the first frescoes of landscapes or cities had the symbolic function of representing dominion. In other words, what was being presented, both in secular and religious representation, was the symbol of a possession with the purpose of legitimising it before society. To see is both a form of control and a way of being.
From this premise derives the idea of an inventory of the places shown in the films featuring Montalbano, and of a specific place in particular: Fornace Penna di Contrada Pisciotto.
This book is, in fact, for the use and information of the visitors to a specific building. In it are told the events surrounding its conception, the hopes and the labour involved, the destruction and its ultimate abandonment.
The editorial work thus derives from the evidence of a wide public success and interest for the places surrounding Ibla, chosen as the territorial environment for the filming of Montalbano's adventures. The text accompanies the visitor in the understanding of the places and of their history. The transposition into television of Andrea Camilleri's novels, which began in 1998, was widely successful, to the point of becoming a media sensation. One of the best products of European fiction of the past few years, capable of making both critics and public agree, and of deserving, together with the books, international recognition.
Ediz. Ellj Nolbia. Traslation by Lorenzo Bellia.