Strabuttanissima Sicilia

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.


Pietrangelo Buttafuoco was born in Catania in 1963 and lives in Rome. He is a journalist and writer.
He has published Le uova del drago (Mondadori, 2005, finalist for the 2006 Campiello Prize, reissued by La Nave di Teseo, 2016), L’ultima del diavolo (Mondadori, 2008), Il Lupo e la Luna (Bompiani, 2011), Il dolore pazzo dell’amore (Bompiani, 2013), I cinque funerali della signora Goring (Mondadori, 2014), La notte tu mi fai impazzire (Skira, 2016), I baci sono definitivi (La Nave di Teseo, 2017), Sotto il suo passo nascono i fiori (with Francesca Bocca-Aldaqre, La nave di Teseo, 2019), Salvini and/or Mussolini (ParerFIRST, 2020).
Among the essays, he published Fogli consanguinei (Edizioni Ar, 2003), Cabaret Voltaire (Bompiani, 2008), Buttanissima Sicilia (Bompiani, 2014), Il Feroce Saracino (Bompiani, 2015), Strabuttanissima Sicilia (La Nave di Teseo, 2017); together with Carmelo Abbate Armatevi e Morite (Sperling & Kupfer, 2017).
In 2016, for the seventieth anniversary of the Longanesi publishing house, he edited Il mio Leo Longanesi, an anthology of aphorisms, epigrams and short stories.
In 2018, he wrote the preface to La repubblica dei vinti. Stories of Italians in Salò by Sergio Tau (Marsilio, 2018).

He is the author of plays including: Strabuttanissima Sicilia with Salvo Piparo and Il Dolore Pazzo dell’Amore with Mario Incudine.
He writes for Il Quotidiano del Sud.
His latest novel is titled Sono cose che passano and was published in 2021 (La nave di Teseo).
In 2023 he published with Longanesi Beato lui. Panegirico dell’arcitaliano Silvio Berlusconi.

On October 26, 2023, he was appointed president of the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia.

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