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  • Location: Palermo

What Hell Is Not

What Hell Is Not

Why a Booktrail?

193: A story of deprivation and resilience in mafia-run Palermo

  • ISBN: 978-1786072757
  • Translator: Jeremy Parzen
  • Genre: Fiction

What you need to know before your trail

Federico is a privileged teenager from Palermo. He is preparing to spend a summer learning English in Oxford when his teacher, Father Pino, asks him to help out at a youth centre in an area of Palermo dominated by mafia and misery. To his parents’ dismay, Federico decides to follow Father Pino into the darkness of Palermo’s alleyways.

Far removed from his familiar surroundings, Federico begins to learn from the incredibly tough lives of the children who attend the youth centre, and also from Lucia, a beautiful girl full of courage and light. Then one day, Father Pino is murdered by the mafia, and the hope for Palermo and its beauty are entrusted to Federico’s young hands.

Travel Guide

Travel to Palermo BookTrail style

Here, the port is everything

There are thousands of cities that men and nature have set up along the sea But there is just one that can claim this name by its very existence, brilliance and fate. “Palermo, the never ending port.”

The streets are described as labyrinths, and for every light in the city, it is clear there is also a shadow.” Ina city lashed by light, the  whipping of the shadows can be just as violent.”

It’s a never -ending port but there are other things that are never ending such as the scourge of the mafia, that of the brothels,  conmen and more.

 

Brancaccio

Wind and light lash the streets of Brancaccio, a neighbourhood composed of houses that resemble the scales of a fish that writhes ever more slowly as it dies, gasping all the while for water and life. A dark area of Palermo’s endless port with the sea at its back, Brancaccio rises from the debris that ever sea discards along the coast.”

Mondello

The day after school gets out, everyone in Brancaccio goes to the beach in Mondello, our own personal Caribbean

Via Emanuele Notarbartolo

Frederico’s street:

“My street is named after Emanuele Notarbartolo, He was a major of Palermo and the present of the Bank of Sicilly in the late 1800s. His battle to wipe out corruption in the customs houses of the time cost him twenty-seven stab wounds on a train that was travelling to Termini Imerese.”

Streetview Maps

A) Italy - Palermo - Brancaccio
D) Italy - Palermo - The Theatre of the Sun

Booktrail Boarding Pass:  What Hell Is Not

Destination : Palermo  Author/Guide: Alessandro D’Avenia  Departure Time: 1993

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