Cantos barrocos : y otros poemas

“The horn sound that reaches us from Capo d’Orlando is not the oliphant of a survivor, but a voice whose echo each of us can hear within ourselves.” Eugenio Montale’s words foreshadowed the success of Lucio Piccolo’s Baroque Songs, which, presented here alongside a wide selection of his poems, have already achieved considerable acclaim within the realm of Italian poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The continuity of the complete and total song, in which reality and myth, nature and feeling merge beyond time and space, links them to the rest of his compositions. It is a return to the rustic Sicily of literature, the same Sicily of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, with whom Piccolo is connected not only by blood ties, but also by intimate correspondences that originate in the ambiguous Sicilian Eden.