The chapter is divided into three parts – places, attachments, and fables – that highlight Pirandello’s multiple connections with the southern Italian island of Sicily. Emphasis is given to the myth of the author’s Greek birth in Caos in Porto Empedocle and to the importance of Palermo in his coming of age. The essay then explores how Pirandello’s mythologized treatment of motherhood – present in works such as Her Husband, The New Colony, and The Mountain Giants – reaches back to his deep affection for his own mother. However, the importance of Sicily for the writer can be seen in multiple elements of his work, especially in the early novels and dialect comedies notable for their transformation from the naturalism with which he began his writing career. Recovering the idea of Sicily’s Greek heritage, the final section reveals the innovative nature of Pirandello’s mythic view of the island, even while acknowledging that Pirandello thought in historical terms, too, having dedicated The Old and the Young to the story of the revolt of the Fasci Siciliani in 1893–1894.

The chapter makes a case for Pirandello as the head of an Italian school of fantastic literature that came into being at the end of the nineteenth century. It recounts Pirandello’s use of the fantastic – characteristically without the supernatural – as a tool for distancing himself from the naturalism of the period and as a literary strategy that shared much with the humorism that was likewise dear to Pirandello. Both the fantastic and the humoristic relied on the perception of life’s contrasts to slowly overturn an understanding of the laws of the universe. Focusing on the Stories for a Year, the chapter traces the sometimes uneasy coexistence of the fantastic and humoristic, chronicles Pirandello’s original recreation of fantastic situations and environments in a wholly Sicilian imaginary, and reflects on how the fantastic itself becomes a metaphor for literary creation.