"…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. Our memory of the writer - and indeed the Park itself - extend to the quayside at Girgenti, now renamed Porto Empedocle, where Pirandello's father, a wealthy sulphur merchant, had his warehouses. Here the writer spent his childhood, and when an older man he never missed an opportunity of returning to the little seaside village, in order to watch life go by, sitting at a table in a coffee-house in the main street of the village, and in this way fill his mind with memories.

The surrounding area, with the sulphur mines and above all the valley of the ancient city of Akragas with its rich historical associations, also influenced the creative vein of the author of such celebrated works as The Late Mattia Pascal, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. The places in the Park testify to the close bond between Pirandello and his surroundings, for his characters represent the typologies and behaviour patterns of people belonging to the Sicilian folk and peasant world - the human universe making up the social context from which he himself had come and in which he immersed himself after his move to Rome.

The Sceneries of the Park

(click on the photos to enlarge)