Sicilian Odyssey

Authors: Francine Prose

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““I remember, I was a girl,” she says. “Maybe fifteen. And I went somewhere, to see friends, maybe, and there was a girl there, a young woman from the Tornabene family. She was very beautiful, and she had fallen in love with a boy, a very handsome boy. She wanted to marry him, maybe she had already tried to run away with him, but her family would not allow it, because the boy was not from an aristocratic family, his father was some sort of craftsman. And she was obeying her family, she was going... home to her mother, giving up everything, youth, love, sex, because the family insisted. On the night I saw her, she was brushing her hair, she had very beautiful long hair, she was brushing her hair and weeping, tears were running down her cheeks. I’ll never forget that image of her, brushing her long hair and weeping, brushing and weeping….”
Intensely romantic, theatrical and melancholy, this image of the Sicilian Rapunzel, of the Palermitan Juliet forbidden to marry her working-class Romeo is powerful and memorable partly because it so precisely mirrors the popular image of the Sicilian aristocracy.MoreLess Read More Read Less