La battaglia delle bambine. Insieme contro la mafia
(The battle of the girls. Together against the Mafia) Book not yet available in English
Summary:
Palermo, August 1991: in a street full of noise, life, and smells, five young girls form an alliance against the gang of arrogant boys who have targeted them. Agnese has brown hair and brown eyes, and her mother works at Sigma owned by Libero Grassi, a businessman killed for refusing to pay the “pizzo” (protection money). Marialuce dreams of dancing with Freddie Mercury and is not afraid of anyone. Elda lives with her sister Marina in a house full of rules and no toys. Aurora looks like a princess, but she hides the biggest secret: her father is a Mafia boss and she knows where he keeps his gun. One day reality breaks in on their carefree games, proving that the Mafia is not just a word on the news, and they believe that together they can defeat it. There is also a brave photographer in Palermo who does not want to miss the faces of these little Sicilian women: one by one, she manages to capture them with her camera… Simona Dolce evokes the vibrant and complex Sicily of the early 1990s, drawing inspiration from the work of one of Italy’s greatest photographers, Letizia Battaglia. [ScopriRete-network of the libraries of Romagna].
Edited by: Centro MeTRa - Università di Bologna (Italy)
Comment:
In this book we find many stimuli for pedagogical reflection, such as overcoming social and cultural barriers, fighting abuse, the winning potential of collective actions, and the courage to let one’s own voice and identity emerge. From a stylistic point of view, there is also the desire to enrich the expressive, literary and cultural background of the reader, through linguistic reflections (“Honest is the best adjective in the world in Palermo”), implicit and explicit intertextual references (from brushstrokes of Sicilian realism to classics for children, such as The War of the Buttons or Mary Poppins) and a broad contextualisation of the socio-cultural background in which the five girls move. The heterogeneous families and social backgrounds that distinguish them are described in an almost didactic way, but functional to the understanding of the exceptionality of their friendship. The interaction that is created between them, between the daughter of a mafia boss and the daughter of a worker, is not immediate, nor is it without moments of incomprehension, but the common sense of injustice that pervades them triggers union, creativity, and a sense of solidarity. We experience this reading also in a sensory way, since the smells, tastes, and sometimes unpleasant but realistic images of Palermo’s working-class neighbourhoods are not at all sweetened, just as the language is not filtered. The atmosphere of oppression, against which the five girls struggle, can also be felt through a spurious language, especially in the dialogues, where the transition from Sicilian dialect to Italian makes more credible the delineation of the social strata and the deference with which the poorer classes still address powerful elites. Simona Dolce manages to convey, at the same time, a strong sense of belonging and deep knowledge of Sicily in the 1990s, as well as a strong sense of female solidarity, curiosity and interest in those places whose beauty she manages to evoke constantly, despite the ugliness of the Mafia.