The Poetry of the Black Pearl
Those who love beauty will love this book. A truly one of a kind book. Luigi Olivetti cosmopolitan and traveller, publisher and bookseller, poet and writer has given us a book about an extreme and mysterious place where the primitive breath of nature and the vertigo of light still instill a sense of the absolute. The sense that hovered on the first day of creation.
This place is Pantelleria, the black pearl of the Mediterranean. A place so distant, lost, extreme and alien that it couldn't help but become a mermaid once it was discovered. Anyone who has landed there has written something about Pantelleria: letters, travel diaries, poems, songs, novels, memoirs and stories. All literary genres have something to offer on Pantelleria.
For this reason Luigi Olivetti wanted to collect and comment on the literary texts on Pantelleria, accompanying them with 163 suggestive images in a book that has just been released in bookstores and on the web: La perla nera. literary guide of Pantelleria. Preface by Giulio Sapelli (Guerini e Associati, pp.320, available in book and ebook — with goWare)
In his work, which lasted years, Louis Olivetti he searched and found, with the fury of a humanist in search of the texts of the lost classics, the traces of a literary history of the island which counts it among the designated places of artistic creation. But these texts are not offered to the reader only as a mere anthology, one in sequence to the other. They are collected with a precise strategy that aims to contextualize and combine them with the natural and human landscape where they creatively originated.
What emerges is a literary fresco which is one with the forms, the paths, the places that have ignited the imagination of the artists. It is a truly new way to discover and visit Pantelleria. Even for those who have already frequented it and have known it for many years. The book also has something to offer newcomers: a picture gallery with 163 shots. He escaped very little Luigi Olivetti's eye.
Among the frequent visitors of Pantelleria there is Julius Sapelli, who wrote the introduction to the book with his unmistakable voice, as unmistakable is the voice of Mick Jagger. We are pleased to offer below the text of Giulio's introduction to the book.
Yo dream which am here ...
of Julius Sapelli
There are places in the soul that resist time and become dreams and reality at the same moment they appear in our symbolic world. They allow you to live in the being of the present time and always carry the past with you, which returns every time you reach them. Pantelleria is one of these places where we are called to rediscover ourselves and ask ourselves the essential questions of being.
Calderon de la Barca comes to mind with his metaphysical questioning on the responsibility that we must always assume before the world. And this is because the book by Luigi Olivetti, a poet and writer of extremely rare sensitivity and culture, could not fail to be a literary guide to Pantelleria…
It's an introspection, the one that catches us the moment we arrive on the island, in the Black Pearl, that springs from life being a continuous questioning between dream and reality, where the dream is the depth that each of us carries with us too often unknowingly.
In Pantelleria you can't.
There, in Pantelleria, we can always say, with Calderon de la Barca:
I dream that I'm here
arouse the burdened prisons,
y soñé que en otro estado
more lisonjero me vida.
What is life? A frenzy.
What is life? An illusion,
a shadow, a ficción,
and the mayor is small:
that all life is dream,
and the nights, nights are.
And this is because Pantelleria is the imaginative version of what Calderon de la Barca's work expresses. The work of the great Spanish man of letters is none other than the triumph of the Baroque which, beneath the apparent fairy-tale simplicity, underlies questions of cosmic significance: what is reality? Is the dream fiction and waking reality? Or is it the reverse? Is the life we live nothing but a play in which we play a part?
Everything in Pantelleria is multiple, just like the Baroque. Its bare harshness is by no means a metaphor for simplicity. Its nature is the triumph of environmental, biological and vital complexity and diversity is the number of the multiplicity of its deep voices that start from the winds and end where an end can never be found: in its always archaic and secret seas.
It is history that speaks its always unknown language on Pantelleria. Today the excavations tell us the stories of past lives so that we can read in the forms brought to light by the skilful archaeological works the past of human action and of the civilizations that have followed one another in the residential and devotional crystallizations of the human settlements that have happened.
Everything always has an archaic, mysterious background as we cross the threshold of the island's secret places, between its naturalistic diversity and its clouds that we reach when we climb the peaks and plateaus of the island. Human work leaves its marks in the earth, in the roots of associated living through the oldest science and art in the world: agriculture. And as always also in Pantelleria the agricultural past is the economic future of men.
If they know how to reconnect the threads of the past and make them live in the present. And here the ranks elude us: they have escaped us… First of all, in the ranks of the seas and between the seas. Pantelleria was the place par excellence that marked the passages between Europe and Africa and the Middle East with the ships that reached it and never left it.
Today this is no longer the case and we also dream of this by searching for a reality that still eludes us and that we will certainly have to rebuild to give back to Pantelleria an ancient splendor that already reappears like lightning in a storm, with their blinding and at the same time illuminating light.
Because this is Pantelleria: unity of multiples and diversity of paths that meet where the sun sets and men rest after their efforts and passions, in an endless continuity. If you want to understand what the symbol is, the relationship with the cosmos and with yourself, you have to go, come, return to Pantelleria.
And if you never come back, you remember it forever. This book by Luigi Olivetti is an admirable gift of intelligence and passion: we will never stop thanking him.
A place to stay
by Luigi Olivetti
In our imagination Pantelleria is the distant and mysterious island where the natural elements go wild, where everything is absolute and extreme: the light, the sea, the silence.
A place from which you would like to escape or never leave again, the Homeric Ogygia that envelops you with its ancient charm, a land where the rhythm of modern man expands, merging into a primitive breath.
An island of mysterious prehistory with its funerary monuments called sesi, it was an opulent Phoenician city-state with a high acropolis of dazzling marble and its powerful fleet in the port in the shape of a "tau" [letter of the Greek alphabet corresponding to the t of the Latin alphabet, Ed.].
Ancient trading place where the Greek sailor mingled with other peoples, a crossroads of Mediterranean cultures, two-faced Janus between two worlds, the Arab-Phoenician and the Greek-Latin; later Pantelleria was conquered by the Romans and the Vandals, then it was Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese; for a short time Piedmontese and Austrian, finally Spanish and Italian.
Island disputed and destroyed and, like the mythical Phoenix, reborn each time from its ashes; place of many idioms and cultures, with its villages with Arabic names, with its scattered dammusi, stone forts to hide and protect themselves from raids and looting, from wind and blood.
The nameless island of the mysterious Sesioti, the Phoenician «Yrnm», the Greek «Cossyra», the Roman «Cossura», the Arab «Quasarah», the medieval «Pantelaream»; archetype of the island imagined in childhood; solitary navel of the sea where the horrid and the sublime coexist, a place of slow watches and rapid sunsets; island called «little Italy», because here we find the steep wooded mountain and the sea, the green plain and the lake, the arid rock and the gentle slopes, the valleys and the kuddíe [hills, Editor's note], the stacks and the dark caves marine.
A place once unattainable, where the sea is terrible and sweet, a place of shipwrecks amid lava knives, a magnetic heart of a volcano, an island of black and green amidst dizzying blue light. Charming muse, described and sung by many writers who have come from afar, an island-border where the Greekness of Europe runs out, brushing the Levantine Mediterranean with glimpsed African deserts.
An island of misery and struggle, of generosity and fatalism, where, if beauty is to be found in the meeting of opposites, pure beauty par excellence is found here, where the primordial collides with the decadence of Europe, where two ancient souls they make us glimpse a possible rebirth, through the rediscovery of the soul of the world.
Pantelleria has been sought out, discovered, loved, studied and visited by explorers, scientists, writers and artists who have been attracted by its landscapes and its inhabitants, who have described it in their travel diaries, novels, songs or poems.
For this reason, the idea was born to create the first Literary Guide of Pantelleria which describes the island through the many artistic texts scattered over time, forming a large anthology divided by subject.
This book will not only accompany us during our wanderings, but will also present a literary fresco which is combined with images and topographical indications of the places described which will help us during these journeys. Obviously all those texts have been excluded which, despite being of great historical and scientific interest, do not have marked characteristics of an artistic type both in terms of language and content.
Three short appendices have been included at the end of the book: the first is dedicated to the Madonna della Margana, protector of the island of Pantelleria, the second is a collection of some poems and songs about Pantelleria, the last is dedicated to Pantelleria proverbs.
Finally, we remind you that this guide aims to highlight the literary value of the texts and not necessarily to provide historical, geographical or social information; for these topics we refer to tourist guides on the market or to other publications.
I can't resist you anymore
I can't resist you anymore
forget explosion
of air that you bind,
constant gust that immolates you
that you hold the blue
among the reeds, the shadow
of the palm that does not burn.
I can't resist you anymore
pale expected crash
where a splinter
lights up with salt, nail
beaten in silence
of a sea distance
of a green breach of light.
I can't resist you anymore
African sunset
in the surprising dream,
place where everything
it is permanent and high
and you fall in love
spelling stars.
