“Beninanza” and the flavour of the Sicilian Middle Ages

It is a multicultural Sicily, the one skilfully reconstructed by Salvo Salerno in the pages of the historical novel “Beninanza”: an island traversed by political and cultural turmoil, which serves as a backdrop to the vicissitudes of knights and ladies, in a Middle Ages that is almost coming to an end

I was immediately intrigued by the title of the volume: ‘Beninanza’, an obsolete noun of Provençal origin indicating ‘benignity or goodness’: “that fairy benignity that only the chosen troubadours possess. ” The narrative framework of the novel is that of an itinerant minstrel, a storyteller, a storyteller named Aquilante di Odogrillo who wanders around towns and castles, entertaining the nobles in their manors and the commoners in the squares, with his impassioned narratives.

It is clear from reading the first pages that the text is historically very accurate; the author has drawn heavily on chronicles of 14th-century history and notarial quotations, giving voice to revisited or invented characters. One of the five novellas is a notarial account from the 14th century, another is from the 16th century, yet another is a historical chronicle from the turn of the 13th century. 

The love poetry that appears between the pages of the book is linked to the heirs of the Sicilian poetic school and transports us to the atmosphere of the 14th century, to a Sicily prostrated by the centuries-long war between Sicilian barons, Angevins and Aragonese fighting to take possession of the island.

The structure of the novel may remind one in a small way of that of the “Decameron”: a collection of novellas that attempts to integrate the aristocratic ideal of life based on courtly love, magnanimity, liberality, with intelligence, resourcefulness and cunning.

As in the “Decameron”, women are the pivot around which Aquilante’s narrative revolves: five heroines (three of whom actually existed), all different but all able to hold their own against men.

The poets of the Dolce Stilnovo had attributed an unprecedented centrality to the angelic woman, but the woman remained in any case an object and never became the subject of the poem; there is no doubt instead that Boccaccio is innovative, because the woman of the Decameron is no longer the woman-angel, she is the bourgeois woman, who combines beauty and nobility of the courtly soul with intelligence and wit.

Similarly, the five heroines protagonists of Aquilante’s tales unveil the truth of the female universe of the 14th century: beneath an apparent fragility and formal submission to the male, lord and master, they actually conceal a profound spirit of rebellion, a pungent irony (combined with strength of mind, shrewdness and sagacity) but above all an indomitable courage.

Here Aquilante unrolls before the reader’s eyes, with the skill of a conjurer who knows his pack of cards well, the story of Angiolina, daughter of Ruggiero di Lauria and her secret love with the Dauphin of France; that of Lisciandra de’Baccarati, ‘a comely and fine maiden of marriageable age’, betrothed to the young Prandino, but who during a tournament had inflamed Duke Robert with love; and that of Gerolda di Campagna, ‘a woman loyal to the Crown of Sicily who wanted to make herself useful to the young King who was fighting the Sicilians against the hated Angevins’.

Last come the stories of Marviglia di Rachalsem (“reports say that she practised alchemy”) and Macalda Scaletta, wife of Alaimo da Lentini, who, wearing armour, was received by King Peter of Aragon: “arousing the sovereign’s admiration, as she immediately understood from his gaze…”.

Surprising and unexpected will turn out, at the end of the book, to be Aquilante’s meeting with Queen Blanche of Navarre, who ruled the island after the premature death of her husband Martin the Younger.

The novels are set against a backdrop of landscapes (cosy woods, clearings and gentle hills, in a fertile Sicily where nature reigns uncontaminated) and more: mansions and palaces, castles, towers, manors…

‘Beninanza’ is a book that is historically very accurate, even from a linguistic point of view; it is a novel with a bibliography and notes, like a historical essay, but the reader is captivated above all by the pleasure of getting lost in the story, of losing oneself in the Sicilian Middle Ages to follow the adventures of Aquilante di Odogrillo’s ladies amidst loves, tournaments, deceptions… among trees and paths, right up to the last page.