The book: "Sicily is an island so to speak" is many things at once: a book of humor, a clear account of a much-loved land, a curious and irreverent travel diary, an instruction manual for assembling and disassembling the myth of "Sicilianity." Mario Fillioley is well aware that he is facing a place that has been overly narrated, shrouded in its tradition that—from the cycle of the defeated to television dramas—has accumulated and absorbed an endless series of versions, always on the border between topos and stereotype. And he knows that to narrate that place, in its infinite manifestations, he has only one winning weapon: irony. Avoiding both rhetorical and anti-rhetorical poses, Fillioley speaks to the reader as if he were a friend, without tricks and without hypocrisy. Thus, he succeeds in an apparently impossible feat: saying something new about the island that is too large, too complex, the island so to speak. Telling, with lightness and loving disillusionment, a different Sicily, not definitive and therefore all the more true and credible. The author: Mario Fillioley was born in Syracuse in 1973. He is a literature teacher in a public school and has translated several books from English. He has a personal blog, Aribiceci.com, and a blog on the Post. Various of his stories and reports have been published in IL. One of his texts is part of the anthology Non si può tornare indietro, published by Marsilio in 2015.
