L’isola dove volano le femmine

Alicudi, 1903. Catherine looks at the cold, hard as a crust of bread body of Maria, her twin sister, and thinks that now life will change forever. It was Maria who chose the right thoughts for her to think, and now who will do it in her place? An evil disease has taken her away and everyone in the family – from her great-grandmother, who can no longer see well but understands everything, to Palmira, her mother, who has a baby in her belly for the fourth time but has lost her mind in grief – thinks it is the fault of Ferdinand, who is serving a sentence at Lipari Castle, and wants to make a revolution. Now that Maria is no longer there, even though Caterina’s room has expanded, life has become much tighter: she works in Don Nino’s fields until sunset, delivers salted anchovies and helps her mother with the housework, waiting for her favourite day, when everyone gathers to knead bread. For some time now, however, the island’s rye ears have been sprouting small, coal-black horns, ‘tizzonare’ they call them. At first they didn’t trust themselves to eat that sour bread, but now that’s all there is to eat, so Catherine too gulps down those hard bites that smell of death. Perhaps, however, in those bitter morsels lies the key to escape from an increasingly lonely and bitter present, and reach the ‘majare’, the witches who live on the island and hover in the sky, free in the dark wing of the night. Catherine does not know it, but she is not the only one to see things that then fade into mist. For her, as for all seven hundred and thirteen “arcudari” (this is the name of the inhabitants of the island of Alicudi), the time will come to choose between reality and dream.