onza (plural onze): a Sicilian currency no longer in circulation, coined originally in gold and then silver. At the time of Italian unification, 1 Sicilian onza equaled 12.75 lire. The average salary of a day laborer rarely exceeded 50 onze yearly.

orbace: a coarse impermeable wool, traditionally dyed black, whose weight made it notoriously difficult for seamstresses to handle

paese: literally “country,” but also used to refer specifically to one’s village or place of birth

pastina:the smallest form of pasta, generally added to broth

prosciutto:either cooked or salted and cured ham

quota (plural quote): a small tract of land

savoiardi:ladyfingers

scappularu (plural scappulari): a Sicilian term for the heavy, hooded cape worn by shepherds in harsh weather conditions

signora: Italian equivalent of missus

signore: Italian equivalent of mister

ssù: a Sicilian term for signore or mister used when addressing laborers or men of the lower classes

verismo:a literary movement in late-nineteenth-century Italy that promoted realist fiction

verista (plural veristi): a writer of verismo

Afterword

Afterword

In his lifelong quest to better understand the Sicilian people, Leonardo Sciascia concluded: “It is better to trust literature, to trust the writers who have represented [Sicilian] life and essence, in the mutability of its reality and variety of its characters. For Sicily, that means Verga, Capuana, De Roberto, Pirandello, Brancati, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Bonaviri, Consolo, to name only a few in a rich, intense, coherent tradition” (Sciascia 1991, 3: 522). Sciascia’s rediscovery of Maria Messina’s writings in 1981 ended her fifty years of literary obscurity and added a new dimension to this male-dominated canon, opening the door for a discussion of Sicilian reality from a distinctly female perspective. Since most of Messina’s works, published between 1909 and 1928, portray provincial Sicilian life with a particular focus on women’s lives, their recovery has generated considerable interest among proponents of women’s writing in Italy. But we must remember that although Messina denounces treatment of women in Sicily, her love for Sicily and her powerful identification with what she herself termed la mia sicilianità (my sense of being Sicilian) endure.

Understanding Messina’s views, as well as reconstructing her life, have been challenging tasks for scholars. What was presumably a substantial literary archive (Messina never married and dedicated her life to writing) was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Pistoia shortly before the author’s death in 1944. Messina left no critical writing, nor did she produce a personal memoir or autobiographical novel, as did her better-known female contemporaries Sibilla Aleramo, Neera, Grazia Deledda, and Ada Negri (Zambon 1989). Only twenty-three surviving letters to Giovanni Verga, discovered in 1979, and information gleaned from interviews with her late niece, Annie Messina, provide a loose chronology within which to examine the events and influences that shaped the direction of her writing.