"Of the four "short novels", I cannot conceal that my preference, at least thematically, goes to La saga dei Tomasi, given my profound admiration for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel... and I cannot conceal that the incipit dedicated to Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg is masterly: Pirandello and Sciascia could not have done better. The story is solidly grounded in its Homeric journey and pilgrimage dimensions, both of which are in their own way connected to the Grand Tour amidst philosophical and vaguely Mozartian digressions. Don Vincenzo Arnone's book, a unique and fourfold work, ignores the oratorical norms on the unity of time and place and deals familiarly with a long, multicoloured, heterogeneous theory of protagonists and co-protagonists between the biblical age of the Moabite gleaner of the preacher of Nineveh and the present day without ever letting us forget that "Florentine Sicilianity" that leads from the thirteenth-century rhymesters to Giovanni Gentile and Giorgio La Pira (from Franco Cardini's preface).