THE SULPHUR MINE
At the beginning of the 20th century, in the imaginary Sicilian village of Castellatani, we meet Teresa, whose ambition is to become a school mistress. However, that is not what local tradition requires of her and she is pressurised into marrying Giovanni, a sulphur miner whom she grows to love.
We learn about local customs, the expectations that the villagers have of women and the suffering of the men and boys (the carusi) who work in the sulphur mine on the hill.
Teresa and Giovanni have two children, who grow up with more hope of fulfilling their ambitions than their parents had and eventually Teresa goes to work for a rich couple in Palermo. The contrast between the lives of rich and poor is brilliantly drawn but what was most striking for me was the very believable account of the cruelty and uncaring attitudes of the mine owner, his colleagues and enablers.
As I come from Wales, where there have been many tragedies in the coal mining industry, this is a story that I can relate to. I literally could not put the book down, as I wanted to know what happened to Teresa and her children. There is a fair amount of Sicilian dialect in the text, but if you read Italian you will probably be able to work it out.
Now, as a language teacher, I will give you a tip: When you are reading in a foreign language, do not stop to look up words you do not know. You will need around a B2 level in the language to do this, but try to deduce meaning from the context. If you stop to look up every unfamiliar word, you will get fed up and hurl the book across the room. Please do not do that to this wonderful book! (I have studied four languages in my time on this earth, have a degree in two of them and have been a language teacher all my working life so maybe this old lady knows what she is talking about!)
La Zolfatara is the best book I have read in Italian this year and I learnt a lot about the sulphur mines. The last sulphur mine in Sicily closed in 1986.
