| Chapter 7: | The Schools |
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DiGiovanni, who wrote Lu Saracinu and other books.20 In my schools I was taught to write in English and in Italian. I was discouraged to speak or write in what was called “dialect Italian.” Sicilian, a language only second in importance to Italian in Italy, was considered a dialect in the United States and Italy, a language to be abandoned rather than nurtured. The Sicilian language was the language of poets in Emperor Frederick II’s court in Palermo before his death in 1250. And Dante and Petrarch recognized Sicilian as the first Italian literary language before the Tuscan contribution. The Italians lost a bilingual opportunity and a literary jewel when they gave up the Sicilian tongue.
What was the Sicilian culture lost to Americans and Italians when their political and educational leaders abandoned the language that expressed it? Leonardo Sciascia’s writings on this subject give us valuable insights. It is a temperate culture. It is a culture that values the natural environment. It is a culture in which the past, present and future have little meaning for they meld into one. It is a culture that knows man’s limitations. It is a culture that distrusts authority figures. Many Sicilians had hoped following the unification of Italy that a common language, Italian, learned by all Italians, would make all Italians politically equal. Sicilians have always believed that a better world must exist outside Sicily, an idea that encouraged emigration to other lands. Sicily is a melting pot of many ethnic groups that eventually became Sicilian. It has been Greek, Roman, Norman, Arab, Spanish, and more. Since the Risorgimento, it has become Italian. Over the centuries the Sicilians have shown their pessimism, however, in the Sicilian language