Museo dell'Immaginario Verghiano

The Museum of the Verghian imagination is a place to visit, a place of memory that exceptionally combines literary identity and historical reality, at times confusing them, as the Verga itself loved to do. Objects, passions and suggestions, of the great veritable writer Giovanni Verga, tell the essence, the personal and family life that is intertwined, almost inextricably, with the characters of his works and the real world in which he grew up, he had formed and which he had drawn for his way of seeing life and his sentimental education. Palazzo Trao - Ventimiglia is a beautiful eighteenth-century palace, although a little 'sacrificed dall'angustia of the road, is the palace of the "novel" Verghiano par excellence, the Mastro don Gesualdo, references to it are many, one of the first reads:

"From the Palazzo dei Trao, above the toothless cornice, one could see, in the dawn that was beginning to clear, globes of dense smoke, in waves, scattered with sparks"; and then again: A real bicocca that house the broken walls, crumbled, corroded, of the cracks that descended from the cornice to the ground; the ramshackle windows without windows; the worn-out coat of arms, discarded, hanging from a rusty hook above the door ".

In reality, the building belonged to the Ventimiglia family of Monforte, a family who arrived in Vizzini in the 18th century and who immediately became very powerful in the socio-political dynamics of the city. One of her last descendants, B.ne Giovanni Ventimiglia, husband of Anna Paternò Castello dei Principi of Biscari, says she still remembers it inhabited in the first half of the twentieth century, by old uncles, even their elderly and sick. Currently it hosts, on the ground floor, an Ethno-anthropological Exhibition of tools of rural life, linked to the specific activities of the city, as in the case of the section relating to leather tanning and related activities, a model of hydraulic mill, as evidence of the factories present in large quantities in the territory, in addition to a series of other objects, related to the harvest, pastoralism and material culture of which I am witness. The large panels, taken from original photos of the early twentieth century, by the Vizzinese photographer Ignazio Lentini, portrayed faces and places of the city for almost the whole of the 20th century. Family photographer, of the anniversaries, from baptisms to the funeral, as he used then and, as per tradition, also of peasants, shepherds and commoners, at any moment of their day, crystallized in time, as in a great illustrated history book . In the noble floor, the relics of the Verga tell of his successes, the Opera par excellence, his Cavalry performed by Pietro Mascagni from Livorno, libretto by Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti and Guido Menasci, posters, sketches and even costumes, donated by the Teatro dell'Opera Rome. In another, the Verga appears in a filigree on the gaze of the people portrayed, family and friends, and in the small objects of everyday life: the comb for his proud mustache, gilet, fashion magazines of the aunts, childhood, donated by Carla Verga, a great-grandson of the writer. Among the friends and the family, light shades of elegant ladies of whom it seems to hear the rustle of taffeta. So the true face of his characters, his "Verga humanity" peasants, factors, women and children of Tebidi, reproduced from the original plates of the writer, his "magic" tools to portray from reality: his cameras and finally He, Giovanni Carmelo Verga, portrayed by the painter Ulisse Sartini, as if through a gash in time. His gaze is alive and detached, at the same time, on the miseries of the world and the false promises of progress. Finally, a section dedicated to cinema: from Mastro don Gesualdo directed by Giacomo Vaccari, to the Lupa by Gabriele Lavia, through the Cavalleria Rusticane, respectively, by the neo-realist Carmine Gallone and Franco Zeffirelli. It was the time when the happy union between cinema and literature made history also of Italian Television. Without forgetting the great Italian Theater that gives a happy intuition of Alfredo Mazzone, director and screenwriter of great skill, to give life, in the early '70s to the Reviviscenza Theater, has since brought to Vizzini the likes of Arnoldo Foà, Regina Bianchi, Pino Colizzi, Umberto Orsini, Giulio Brogi, just to name a few.

Of course it does not end here, but to find out you have to visit us!