Pitre Stories

Nico is a young graphic designer who lives in Bagheria, the more populated town in the province of Palermo. Nico is also a boy strongly tied to his land. Here he learns that to discover them and to tear them to the oblivion it has been a Palermitan man, born in 1841 and died in 1916: Giuseppe Pitrè. Nico is mainly affected by a photo of the man, a portrait next to the graffiti. Something snaps in him: the appearance of Pitrè is likely to be immediately to transformed into a character to draw on paper. Very soon the plan of Nico becomes to tell a graphic novel, the human story of Pitrè, medical doctor which for years has travelled to Sicily incessantly in order to collect, catalogue and put under observation the uses and customs, objects, songs, stories, festivities and all that came from the sicilian popular world. While drawing often on the road, returning to the places where little Pitrè had grown Nico meets different people all ideally but also directly involved in the world of Pitrè: Peppe, one of the last remaining fishermen of pescespada living on the Strait of Messina still attacked to a job that is likely to disappear; Doctor Affronti who assists the immigrants of today; Silvia, one of many girls who play santa rosalia in the processione of the festino; Nino Cuticchio, heir to the tradition of the Sicilian Puppets; father. They are some of the personages who Nico meets on his way.