The Day of the Owl

You don’t have to go to Sicily to loll in an armchair and read Il Gattopardo and Sicily.

If you do go, you may read more history – gosh, Sicily has a lotta history – and you will be enchanted by the Norman architecture and mosaics. Fly to Palermo and land at Falcone Borsellino airport. Lovely to have an airport called after a hat, only Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino did not make hats; they were lawyers treading on the toes of the Mafia and were murdered in 1992.

You cannot visit Sicily without reading Leonardo Sciascia’s short novel The Day of the Owl (Il Giorno della Civetta). Published in 1961, it broke new ground and shone light where there had been none.

“The novel is renowned as “the first fictional work for a mainstream readership to openly call the Mafia a criminal organisation, one pervading Sicily and thriving on the silent collusion of its citizens who claim to see and hear nothing, even when someone is gunned down before their eyes.”

As the author wrote in his preface of the 1972 Italian edition, the novel was written at a time in which the existence of the Mafia itself was debated and often denied.” (Wikipedia)

Sciascia (I think pronounced Sha-Sha) nails his subject elegantly and with considerable courage. Unlike many Sicilians he died of natural causes in Palermo aged 68.

There are longer, more recent and fact-filled books about the Mafia, like Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily (1996) and Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (2004) by John Dickie, but if you only read one it should be Il Giorno della Civetta.