Literary parks Horcynus Orca represents the point of meeting of manifold cultural experiences a workshop of knowledge in which the signs of the past are combined with the challenges of the future. Beginning from the suggestions and from the indications of the literary text they are built and they weave, as in a real hypertext, crossed among worlds, cultures and different languages. The physical space de The Literary Parks Horcynus Orca is among the Scilla and Cariddi, the topos of the novel of Stefano D'arrigo, while its scenery embraces the whole area of the Messina Stretto, the plain one of Gioia Tauro, Eolie Islands, the Mt. Etna.

The Riviera of the Cyclops, along which stretches the Literary Park named after Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), is well known thanks to the mythological tales handed down to us by the great poets of antiquity, Homer and Virgil. Legend has it that the three faraglioni, or rock stacks, on the coast of Acitrezza are the great rocks hurled down by Polyphemus after Ulysses as he fled in his ship. "The Cyclops' Archipelago" has become the picturesque scenario of a rite known in Sicilian dialect as "U pisci a mari" ("The fish in the sea"), a popular tradition linked to the celebrations in honour of St John the Baptist.

Since March 2003 Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) has been for Syracuse something more than the great writer who was born here. With the creation of the Literary Park named after this profound connoisseur of contemporary American literature, the writer has become an "ambassador", in the broadest sense of the word, for the cultural world of this province. And not only with reference to Vittorini's actual writings but also to everything that they tell us of Syracuse and this part of Sicily - the places of natural beauty and historical interest, the traditions, the people.

The Salvatore Quasimodo Literary Park (1901-1968) - "The Incomparable Land" - came from an idea of Alessandro Quasimodo, the writer's only living heir, who in this way proposed to unite all those who have contributed to the dissemination of the celebrated Nobel prize-winner's works in Sicily. The specific purpose is to preserve this poetry in the places that inspired it: Modica, where Quasimodo was born, and Roccalumera, where his family came from, and which are connected by a thread of lyrical memory to Messina, Tindari, the Aeolian Islands, Syracuse, and the River Anapo, with Pantalica and Agrigento.

Since to the rise of the institutions of the Italian Literary Parks - from an idea of Stanislao Nievo (pro-nephew of Ippolito) and according to the suggestion of the relative Foundation Ippolito Nievo - it was set as a primary purpose to baptize a park with the name of the writer Nino Savarese, because his activity of writer, playwright, poet and essayist is recognized in the whole Country and to the foreign countries. An intention that goes beyond his qualified figure, also because so many places - not to say the most greater part - reenter (to be described in his works) in the run that the Literary Park includes.

The world of sulphur mines and fumaroles, the world of peasants with its farmsteads and villages in the heart of an arid and sunscorched land, the Sicily of the Mafia, of problems of justice and civil commitment - these faces of the island's culture relive in the Park named after Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), the unforgotten author of The Day of the Owl and To Each His Own. Regalpetra, the Park's symbol and its ideal crossroads, is the "imaginary" town that provides the scenario for the happenings in The Parishes of Regalpetra (1956), a work that contains all the themes so dear to Sciascia.

"...let the funerary urn be taken to Sicily and be walled into some rough stone in the country around Girgenti, where I was born." These were the testamentary instructions of Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), who rests today close to the house he was born in and to what he called the "African sea". The house, in a country area known as Caos ("Chaos") in the territory of Agrigento and now transformed into a museum, constitutes the pulsating heart of the Park named after the illustrious author, the 1934 Nobel prize-winner for literature.

The Literary Park named after Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) covers a part of western Sicily stretching from Palermo, where the writer was born and wrote The Leopard, to Santa Margherita di Belice, with Palazzo Filangeri Cutò where he spent his childhood, and Palma di Montechiaro, the family fief - three places that are at one and the same time scenarios from the pages of his most celebrated novel and important tesserae in the formation of his literary sensitivity. Published posthumously in 1958.