Abstract
Miriam and Severa, Nicolina and Antonietta, the young ladies Fiorillo, Caterina and Marietta, Sofia, Carmelina and Lucietta, Vanna and Ninetta, but also Viola and Remigia are some of the creatures of the twentieth-century Sicilian author, Maria Messina. They are sisters to each other but also to many other female characters presented to us by the writer, united by an unchangeable seclusion, by loves never found, by an inability to love themselves but also by sacrifices and regrets for their diametrically opposed sisters, subjected as they are to a patriarchal power. Discovered by Giovanni Verga, rediscovered by Leonardo Sciascia, and, in recent decades, especially by international scholars of gender studies, Maria Messina has given us not only wonderful pages of a Sicily of the past but also of sensitive topics regarding the universe of sisterhood. The sisters of Messina are “figures with a strong symbolic impact, which together draw a topography within which the narrative voice is placed and with it the gaze of the reader” (Sapegno, 2012), who grow (physically and psychologically) in an environment tormented by emigration, patriarchy, poverty, uncertainty and asphyxia, steeped in solitude but also in the inability to autonomy and redemption. live together and try to “solve” or erase, as they can. Maria Messina’s sisters are “abruptly alone like little girls holding hands in a dark room” (“Il telaio di Caterina” in Ragazze siciliane, p. 61) and offer, with their vulnerability, a pedagogical and inspirational tool to readers, to all sisters still, unfortunately, shocked by social injustices and lost loves.