Bagheria
By: Dacia Maraini ; translated from the Italian by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood.
Publisher: P. Owen; Distributed in the USA by Dufour Editions
Published: 1994
Place of publication: London; Chester Springs, PA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 119
Work titles: Bagheria.
Description: In Bagheria, Dacia Maraini revisits the landscape of early memory. She describes Sicily in sensuous detail, the town of Bagheria, and the ancestral villa to which she returned as a child after two horrific years of imprisonment with her family in a Japanese concentration camp. The Villa Valguarnera and Maraini recalls the spiritual struggles and her rebellion against the elitism of her class. She also discusses her experience of child abuse.

Bagheria is also a tale of corruption: centuries of the town's past unfold alongside Maraini's family history as she details the involvement of the Mafia in the architectural decimation of Bagheria in the 1970s.