Invictus. Cristiano Parafioriti
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Invictus
Cristiano Parafioriti © 2021
Cover photo
Anna Francica
Layout and editing
Stefania Salerno
CRISTIANO PARAFIORITI
INVICTUS
NOVEL
With an introductory essay by Antonio Baglio
Translated by Giovanna Bongiovanni
TABLE OF CONTENT
INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
I
I
I
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
(Invictus, William Ernest Henley)
To Don Ture Di Nardo “Pileri”
to my grandfather Calogero Barone “Ccanino”
to all veterans
and to those who have never returned
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Nino Amadore, my friend and esteemed journalist of “Il Sole 24 Ore”, wrote in one of his articles: “Cristiano Parafioriti is the founder of a new literary genre, Sicilian minimalism, where the stories of a country and its people become the stories of the whole world”.
I jealously guard this definition in my memory and heart, and the more stories I write, the more I find myself in those words.
My work is born in my small and beloved village, Galati Mamertino, a mountain village perched on the Nebrodi mountains in Sicily. Galati is a melting pot of many other tiny places and many other realities that shine with their own light, each with stories to tell, with their people, with their own myths.
This novel was born from one of these magical corners, San Giorgio, a remote and by now an uninhabited village, of which today only a few abandoned