Word: agrigento
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...stone rumbling down the middle of the bed." Thus two Americans awake to the "normal havoc" of a Sicilian morning. Howard is a huge, blond, earnest young graduate student; Sarah, his wife, is a humorous, easygoing girl with honey-colored hair and long shapely legs. They have come to Agrigento to inspect the Grecian ruins and enjoy the local color; but they stay, as Author Tom Cole relates in the superb novella that dominates his first book of stories, because Sicily seizes them in its primordial field of force...
...primordial is personified in Polifemo, the gigantic demon who heaves up hairily out of millennial memory once every year and incites all Agrigento to resume the prehistoric and obscene religion of carnival. As carnival impends, an imminence like electricity waits in the air, an itching in the mind invites convulsion. Convulsion begins: a Bacchic ecstasy of vino nero, roaring scooters, rock 'n' roll. Howard, a tidy Nordic, draws back in distaste. Sarah, a subliminal Mediterranean, is drawn toward delirium. One morning, imagining her intentions innocent, she lets a young bull of a Sicilian kiss...