‘You, young Corbera, who probably obtained your position at the newspaper thanks to a note from some Party official, you don’t know what it is to prepare for a competition for a university chair of Greek literature. For two years you slog away, to the limits of sanity. I already knew the language fairly well, fortunately, as well as I know it now; and I don’t say so just for the sake of it, you know … But the rest: the Alexandrine and Byzantine variants of the texts; the passages cited, always poorly, from Latin authors; the countless connections between literature and mythology, history, philosophy, science! I repeat, it’s enough to drive you mad. So I studied like a dog, and also gave lessons to students who’d flunked the subject, to pay the rent on my place in the city. You could say I subsisted on nothing but black olives and coffee. On top of all this came the disastrous summer of 1887, one of those truly infernal summers that we have every so often down there. At night Etna vomited back the fire of the sun that it stored up fifteen hours a day; if you touched the railing of a balcony at noon you’d have to run to the emergency room; volcanic paving stones seemed on the point of returning to their liquid state; and almost every day the sirocco swatted you in the face with sticky bats’ wings. I was on the verge of collapse when a friend came to my aid. He found me wandering the streets, exhausted, muttering Greek verses I no longer understood. My appearance troubled him. “Look, Rosario, if you stay here you’ll go mad, and then so much for the competition. Myself, I’m off to Switzerland” – the fellow had money – “but in Augusta I’ve got a three-room cabin twenty yards from the sea, far from the village. Pack a bag, take your books and go stay there for the rest of the summer. Come by my place in an hour and I’ll give you the key. Just wait till you see, it’s something else. Ask for the Carobene place at the station, everyone knows it. But you’re really got to leave – tonight.”

‘I followed his advice and left that same evening. On awaking the next morning, rather than the toilet pipes across the courtyard that used to greet me at dawn, I found before me a pure expanse of sea, and beyond it a no longer pitiless Etna, wrapped in the morning mist. The spot was completely deserted, as you said it still is now, and of a singular beauty. The little house’s dilapidated rooms contained just the sofa on which I’d slept, a table, and three chairs; the kitchen, a few earthenware pots and an old lamp. Behind the house were a fig tree and a well. Paradise. I went into the village and tracked down the farmer of the small Carobene estate, and worked out that every few days he would bring me some bread, pasta, vegetables and kerosene. Olive oil I had, from the supply my poor mother had sent me in Catania. I rented a dinghy that the fisherman brought round that afternoon along with a wicker fish basket and a few hooks. I’d decided to stay there for at least two months.