IL CARRUBO È L’UOMO

Thanks to a fruitful and well-balanced interdisciplinary dialogue among a historian, an ethno-anthropologist, an agronomist, and an art expert, the volume Il carrubo è l’uomo. Memorie, storia e storie attorno a un albero emblematico has recently been published, issued by Abulafia, a small independent publishing venture.

The volume, which includes a preface by Giuseppe Barbera and photographs by Alessia Scarso, was conceived as a tribute to the memory, history, and stories that accompany the lived presence of the carob tree, a plant that intertwines at multiple levels with human life and, in particular, with that of the peoples of the Mediterranean. For several generations, the lives of men and women have been shaped by the presence of the carob tree and its products, which even today retain a fundamental productive and utilitarian value, as well as a central role in the lives of those small rural economies of southern Italy—especially in south-eastern Sicily—that still make the harvesting of carobs a moment of intense collective participation and a kind of community ritual centered on a plant with strong identity value.

By virtue of the collaboration with the Fondazione Carlo Levi and the Archivio Guccione, the aesthetic and art-historical dimension connected to the species is also highlighted, with particular emphasis on the pictorial cycles dedicated to the carob tree by the two artists.

In the section devoted to the historical analysis of the role the carob tree played in the local Sicilian economy between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the volume includes documentation drawn from the ‘Archivio Famiglia Tedeschi,’ preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Ragusa and its Modica section.

“Centered on a tree and its landscape, the book brings together scientific and humanistic disciplines which, although separated into chapters, are crossed by a constant encounter and dialogue. It reflects the awareness that, as the saying goes, ‘one must know everything about something and, at the same time, something about everything.’ Otherwise, the risk is to remain ‘ignorant specialists.’

The book necessarily begins with nature (‘origin, characteristics and uses’ is the subtitle of the Introduction by Stefano La Malfa), but it immediately engages with culture. One might say, in an etymological play on words, that it chooses not to deal with cultivation, except insofar as necessary. Possible and thorough avenues for further study are indicated in the text and bibliography, but they are not pursued, in the awareness that the ‘strength’ of the carob tree and its landscape, the strength that can make them not ‘uprootable,’ lies elsewhere and not solely in agronomic, economic, entrepreneurial, or market outcomes, foundational though they may be. It lies, together, in history, literature, artifacts, medicine, gastronomic uses, and encounters between cultures.

This is demonstrated in their information-rich chapters by Alessandro D’Amato, an ethno-anthropologist; Antonio Sarnari, an art expert; and Carlo Blangiforti, a wide-ranging man of letters. To Stefano La Malfa falls the task of introducing and coordinating the book, and of showing how art, and in particular the painting of Carlo Levi, represents the most effective language for understanding.”

[from the Preface by Giuseppe Barbera]