Anything happened in Sicily between 1943 and 1947. Even that the best German soldier was a woman, Eughenia Lenbach, beautiful and young. A spy selected directly by Hitler for an extremely important mission. Codenamed “Dragon's Eggs”: in the event of the Reich's defeat, she would be the one who would have to organize among the younger generation hotbeds of redemption. To help her, just as the Allies land on the island, eleven Muslims disguised as Capuchin friars. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco stages a true, intricate and fascinating story; and he does so by combining a realism tinged with sulfurous moods with the fantastic rhythm of puppet theater; by merging the coruscating, taciturn world of Nordic sagas with the loquacious Mediterranean sunshine in the most bizarre yet coherent union imaginable, in a novel about power, honor and history written by the vanquished.

It is impossible to put an end to Berlusconi's novel. It is not punctuated by chapters or events that follow a temporal logic, the characters appear elusive, the periods are full of incidentals and subordinates, the side notes constantly evolving. An editor's work would be defeated.
Arcisilvio's story is rather a jumble of scenes, of performances, of short stories where it is possible to state one truth and its opposite.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a man of the theater, knows how to unveil all of Silvio's roles: playwright, set designer, prompter, light giver, performer and director. The curtain never comes down; the protagonist continues and will forever continue to tread the stage because he has imagined, constructed and polished each of his planks.
Buttafuoco thus finds himself, as the great capocomedian that he is, narrating the comedy of the Cavaliere, whose uniqueness coincides with Italy itself. Every day is the right day to bring out this book but every day the text has to be put back in place, and therefore there is no other criterion than that of art, theatrical improvisation, and giammai journalism, to be able to reconstruct the stage machine and tell the extraordinary epic of the Cavaliere.
All genres suit him, all genres are limiting. From Totò versus Maciste to Armata Brancaleone, from Elisir d'amore to Shakespeare's Richard III, from Molière to Goldoni.
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a great acrobat of the word and devotee of mysticism, and therefore of the invisible, identifies and stitches up the supporting pieces, identifies and connects new dots that portray the most contemporary character of contemporaneity, the one who, like Mary Quant, invented the miniskirt and changed the times forever. Let's get with it.

After World War II, the baron of dubious nobility Rodolfo Polizzi married Ottavia princess of Bauci and took her with him to Leonforte, an inland town in Sicily. In that summer of 1951 where, not far away, on the island of Vulcano Roberto Rossellini fell in love with Ingrid Bergman and, in Capo d'Orlando, Lucio Piccolo with his brothers Casimiro and Agata Giovanna - Ottavia's uncles - received the international jet set, at the candid Rodolfo's home came Lucy Thompson, his wife's college companion to awaken the princess's youthful past, all of strange rituals and student sabbaths. Under the eyes of Miss Lia, an enthusiastic witness to an electrifying season, as Baron Polizzi falls ill and the princess is seduced by a foreman, the whole of Leonforte turns into pandemonium. But a few years later Carlo Delcroix, a hero soldier--blind and maimed--pushes her to a crucial but perhaps vain choice.
A novel as seductive and fiery as Sicily, an Italian-style divorce that Pietrangelo Buttafuoco transforms into a modern female Faust.

Are the League and its leader, Matteo Salvini, nothing less than the return of fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini? A part of public opinion is convinced that they are. In particular, the Left wing - which for the author represents the identifying core of the Italian regimented in conditioned reflexes - in fact makes the Carroccio and the Captain, who led it to become the leading party, the Number One danger to civil society. Thus, taking a cue from a title by Ezra Pound - Jefferson and/or Mussolini - where the poet tells in parallel the president of the United States and the Duce, the refined pen of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco - a contributor to Il Fatto quotidiano - compares the two characters. Under the sign of populism, formidable portraits come out, dispelling any doubts about similarities and likenesses. "Like making the comparison between Rita Hayworth and I don't know who, where Mussolini is the Hollywood femme fatale and Salvini is - at most - an Elettra Lamborghini, fitting as an example because the latter is an irresistible influencer."

When, at the point of death, Goethe moved his index finger from bottom to top, the witnesses who were close to him were surprised: for centuries this gesture remained emblematic and inexplicable.

Today, thanks to the evocative reconstruction by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre, we can grasp its meaning: it is a symbolic gesture of shahāda, the testimony of faith that every Muslim must make at the point of death to reaffirm his belief in the one God. Through long and thorough research in Goethe's archives and epistolaries, following the testimonies of those who were closest to him, the authors recount the great German writer's discovery and approach to Islam, tracing its influence in his poetic, theatrical and essayistic work. An influence experienced, however, in an extremely peculiar and entirely topical way, and which testifies to Goethe's ability to fuse in his reflection philosophical and religious elements belonging to Western as well as Arab and Middle Eastern traditions, thus shaping a coherent and vital thought.

Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori offers the reader not only a reconstruction of Goethe's life-from his first reading of the Quran in 1770 to his death in 1832-and a study of his works most inspired by the Muslim religion, but also an opportunity to reflect on the suggestion of a European future linked to "an Islam mitigated by the skies of the Mediterranean," a horizon of peace toward which, according to the authors, the poet directed his deepest personal and intellectual tensions.

Rosario Crocetta goes away and leaves his hole: a chasm in the living flesh of Sicily, due to the inability of a government that only the imposture of a Pappagone Revolution could make survive for an entire legislature. With the complicity of national political leaders, all indifferent to the fate of the most important piece of history and future put at the center of the Mediterranean. And with the wretched social devastation resulting from the lie of lies: regional Autonomy, prime mover of corruption, waste and underdevelopment. As in a constantly updated script, the land of contradictions returns to center stage, with the urgency that the chronicle demands. Actors on stage, with the outgoing governor, his folkloric aldermen, the accursed arsonists who return each summer to set fire to acres of land on the altar of expediency, and the clever ones who mock the fools. But also the eternal giants who make Sicily great, like Andrea Camilleri, and then the fallen, who tell the story of a comeback, like Totò Cuffaro. The result is a merciless and shrewd snapshot, discouraging in its naked truth and at the same time hilarious in the dynamics it portrays. After Buttanissima, here is Strabuttanissima Sicilia to recount the troubles of the land that damned loves itself, a land that even in the face of the evidence of the abyss refuses to want to learn from its mistakes. Tomasi di Lampedusa was right. And we, unfortunately, wrong. Nothing, in fact, changes.

Anton Chekhov said that if a gun appears in a novel, it must fire. It is a fundamental principle of storytelling: novelistic, cinematic, theatrical. But it is not a stage artifice at all: it is simply reality. Because, data in hand, exactly the same thing happens in life: if there is a gun, it is very likely that it will fire; and many guns a lot will fire. Most often in the least desired direction. The mantra of "easy defense," of "gun-toting citizens," is nothing but illusion and deception, an illogical and irrational path, which - in the reality of facts and numbers, exposed here in all their disarming evidence - makes us more naked, more insecure, more victims. It happens everywhere and in every sphere where the recipe has been cooked.

We have committed centuries of civilization to earn a founding value: the state has the right and the duty to ensure the defense of its citizens and to provide for their security. One can only demand it. To give it up, to advocate "do-it-yourself," is as much a regression as it is madness. The slogan dispensed with resigned levity, "Since the state does not defend us," is nothing but illogical and counterproductive sagging. We can only return to subscribe to what is still carved on the cornice of the police headquarters in Lecce: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, no one against the State." Shunning illusory shortcuts.

Those on the right, then, keep in mind that "do-it-yourself" defense is not right wing at all. And everyone, that an accomplished form of gun privatization Italians already know all too well: it is called the Mafia.

Every day, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco-with his commuter backpack-enters the subway, finds himself between the pages of a spell and chronicles it. Every day he faces the underground journey and makes a note of it for his own notebook. Extraordinary encounters in the ordinary rising of dawn. Lovers' tales, poignant spells, songs, dedications and epics experienced among the seats, handrails and escalators of the lines hidden underground. Webs that then unravel in the seductive tangle of railroad transits, automobile journeys and walks along roads of a world pleasantly revealed to the eyes of the imagination. An exercise in observation intended for the notebook. A staging canvas, tearing reality from the everyday to reveal, in the enjoyment of a single moment reflected on the windows of a carriage, the truth of poetry.

Agostino Tassi, a painter, in 1611 began with his established friend Orazio Gentileschi to decorate the Casino delle Muse in Rome. In late February 1612 Orazio brought a lawsuit against him for abusing his daughter Artemisia, also a talented painter. This trial turned into one of the most sensational events of the time, sparking countless rumors that slandered Artemisia, Agostino, and Orazio himself from time to time. "There is only one night in the Western imagination. And it is the night of Agostino Tassi, known as the Smargiasso. It is the night of paintings, of frescoes in loggias and halls of the ill-famed place par excellence, the seventeenth century. ... At the end of a painful and humiliating trial before the Inquisition, the bigamist Tassi gets rid of Artemisia with a yawn...": 60 years after Anna Banti's famous Artemisia and its feminist reading, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, with his sharp and provocative style, offers us an unprecedented interpretation "on Agostino's side."

Leo Longanesi was a polemical and nonconformist innovator, an outstanding writer who embodied the best tradition of Italian journalism and transmitted his spirit to the publishing house he founded. A true enfant terrible, a merciless whipping boy, whose writings still retain years later the same ability to fix the vices and virtues of our country: the few excellences, the many limitations.
On the occasion of his seventy years of life and publications, the Longanesi publishing house celebrates its founder with an anthology collecting his recollections, aphorisms and all his most scathing and corrosive writings. This collection, edited by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco - who has always been nourished by Leo Longanesi - gives us back, with the great personality of the man who liked to call himself "an artichoke under hate," one of the most important chapters of Italian comedy.