Luigi Pirandello mentions the journey that goes from the Atenea Gate to Piazza Municipio over and over in his writings.
From:
THE OLD AND THE YOUNG
In Girgenti, all the people crowded on the vast floor outside PORTA DI Ponte, at the entrance to the city, waiting for the cars to arrive from the station, down in Val Sollano.
…
The many idlers of the city were going up and down, always one step, drooping with noah, with the automatism of the demented, up and down the main road, the only plain of the town, with a beautiful Greek name, Via Atenèa , but cramped like the others and tortuous. Via Atenèa, Rupe Atenèa, Empedocles … – names: light of names that made the misery and ugliness of things and places more sad. The Akragas of the Greeks, the Agrigentum of the Romans, were finished in the Kerkent of the Muslims, and the mark of the Arabs had remained indelible in the minds and customs of the people.
THE BERET OF PADUA
if it is true the story told to me by an old relative, who had met the berrettajo who sold them, the laughing stock of all Girgenti then, because of the many years passed in that trade seems not to have been able to make more money than the nickname of Cirlinciò , which in Sicily, for those who want to know, is the name of a silly bird. It was really called Don Marcuccio La Vela, and had shop on the main road, before the descent of San Francesco.
THE VITALIZIO
It was not for nothing that the people of the town recalled it with pleasure to the ragged and dusty memory of the slippery wards of the San Michele district with the bale of merchandise on their shoulders and the half-moon in one hand, all sweaty while the other was spokesman in shouting:
– Roba di Fràaancia!
He had been enriched in no time with usury, and now he was standing, seated under the light of the Madonna, behind the long bench of his cloth shop, which was the largest of all the Via Atenèa.
…
Accustomed to living in the country, entering the squeeze of the houses, he felt himself suffocating every time, even though he crossed the city by the main road, which he did not call by his name – Via Atenèa – but by way of everyone (and who knows why ) Piazza Piccola: in the square it had nothing at all; it was a street a little wider and longer than the others, winding, paved, with stately homes and shops lined up. What freaking on those smooth sable slabs the slippered boots of Marabito who went stooped and cautious, with the gait of the peasants, his hands to his back and looking at the ground, while the tassel of the black cap sock dangled on the nape at every step .
Everything was remixed, seeing from far away, to the right, the Scinè’s paneling shop with its four large luxurious windows and the door in the middle. It was right in the middle of the street a little before the Largo dei Tribunali, where people were more crowded. Often don Michelangelo was sitting in front of the door, with his belly that looked like a sack of bran between the open thighs, and so worn out that his shirt even ripped out from under his waistcoat. He smoked and spat. Seeing Marabito, who was coming slowly, his eyes were on him and he seemed to want to suck him alive with his eyes, like a viper, a frog
…
At the same time, Don Luzzo the goldsmith, who was the worst language of all the Via Atenèa, and the pharmacist opposite kept the same discourse up, although with less efficacy than gestures and phrases and in a tone of mockery, to Don Michelangelo Scinè.
ONE, NONE AND HUNDRED THOUSAND
Eh yes, without a doubt, a smallness; I saw, however, following him from afar, who stopped for the first time at a shop window, and then a second time, more there, in front of another; and there again and again for a long time, a third time, in the mirror of a door to look at his chin; and I am sure that, as soon as I get home, he will run to the closet to make the new knowledge of himself with that defect more comfortable with that other mirror.
Piazzetta Caratozzolo
THE OLD AND THE YOUNG
In Piazza Sant’Anna, where the courts were, in the center of the city, the customers of the entire province were crowded, squat and rough people, cooked by the sun, gesticulating in a thousand brightly expressive guises: owners of countryside and sulfur in quarrel with the tenants or with the warehouses of Porto Empedocle, and sensals and businessmen and lawyers and taxis; the zealous villagers of Grotte or Favara, of Racalmuto or Raffadali or of Montaperto, solfaraj and peasants were crowded, most of them, with their terrestrial and archi- cious faces, with their lupine eyes, dressed in the deep robes of turquoise cloth, with strange-shaped bonnets: a cone, of velvet; in stocking, of cotton;
or padovane; with beaded rings or gold clasps to the ears; come to testify or to assist imprisoned relatives. They all spoke with dark guttural sounds or with open protracted interjections. The pavement of the road spurted sparks to the dull clatter of their bolted boots, of raw, steep, massive, slippery leather
SEEN THAT DOES NOT PIOVE …. (Tonache di Montelusa)
Monsignor Partanna should have stopped it at any cost. Especially as it was well known to all that those brothers of the Congregation, in the frenzy of making money anyway, arrived until they unworthily speculated on Our Lady, also pledging the gold, gems and even the starry mantle to the Catholic bank of San Gaetano , which Our Lady had received as a gift from faithful devotees.
Strait of Saint Lucia
THE VITALIZIO
He had to go there to go up to the Strait of Santa Lucia, which was also infamous and almost always deserted, to succeed in Porta Mazzara, where he took the Via del Ràbato.
Piazza Municipio
THE SURPRISES OF SCIENCE
We went together to the Town Hall for the City Council session. She was, like the teacher and woman of all the houses in the country, the most squalid and the darkest: a grave slum in … but moldy grubs, yes, and so many!
…
The master room, the Hall of the Council, illuminated by other lights … naturally, had become worms
DEFENSE OF MÈOLA (TONACHE OF MONTELUSA)
I remember well that choruses of approval and that applause and how much admiration, when, defying the lightning of the Bishop’s and the indignation and revenge of the uncle, Marco Mèola, making himself the chair of a table of the Coffee Pedoca, he set for a now a day to comment to the Montelusani the Latin and vulgar works of Alfonso Maria de ‘Liguori, in particular the Sacred and Moral Discourses for all Sundays of the year and The Book of the Glories of Mary.
