Mario Fillioley knows well that he finds himself in front of a place that is all too told, cloaked in its own tradition which - from the cycle of the vanquished to television dramas - has accumulated and incorporated an endless series of versions, always on the border between topos and stereotype.

Avoiding both rhetorical and anti-rhetorical poses, Syracuse born Fillioley speaks to the readers as if they were friends, without tricks and without hypocrisy but with a charming irony. He thus succeeds in an apparently impossible undertaking: to say something new about an island that is too large, too complex.