Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [529]

‘Maybe the whole of Italy is becoming a sort of Sicily. When I read about the scandals of that regional government of theirs, an idea occurred to me. Scientists say that the palm tree line, that is the climate suitable to growth of the palm, is moving north, five hundred metres, I think it was, every year … The palm tree line … I call it the coffee line, the strong black coffee line … It’s rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up throughout Italy and already passed Rome … ’ — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 529

Note

Brescianelli’s political metaphor of the ‘palm tree line’ — the frontier of scandal and corruption migrating north like a climate line — turns the geographical South into a temporal forecast of the whole nation. A compressed, witty formulation of the novel’s politics.