“I felt the need, with blindness, to intuit what eternity is, which I now feel is very close to me.” With these words on June 11, 2018, Andrea Camilleri explained his reason for writing and performing an arduous 80-minute monologue. He delivered it before a captivated audience of five thousand at the packed Greek Theatre in Syracuse. That monologue, a compendium of history, literature, and theatre titled “Conversazione su Tiresia” (Conversation about Tiresias), had its video projected last night at the crowded Ettore Scola Open-Air Theatre in Rome to mark the centenary of the writer’s birth.
Spoken just months before his 93rd birthday, that phrase now assumes its full meaning as a farewell. By passing the immense test he set for himself—a complex and taxing theatrical performance while already blind—Camilleri was indirectly saying goodbye. Through his identification with the Greek myth of the blind prophet Tiresias, it was more of a ‘see you later’: “I would like us to meet here again one evening in a hundred years,” he had said. Yet, the pleasure of the performance and the audience’s profound appreciation at the time made that farewell dissolve into the ancient beauty of the Greek Theatre.
He had chosen that location himself: a Sicilian man steeped in Hellenic, Arab, and Norman culture—that sedimented mix of knowledge unique to Trinacria. Camilleri had wanted to “savor a pinch of eternity,” precisely there, among those “eternal stones” where the Greeks performed theatre.
Last night’s event was thus a farewell, a reunion, and a celebration of his 100th birthday, coming just hours after the procession of San Calò in his hometown of Porto Empedocle paused before his residence. The evening was a key part of the extensive centenary program promoted by the Fondo Andrea Camilleri and the Comitato Nazionale Camilleri 100.
Reliving that 2018 evening, described as his “spiritual and artistic testament, is a beautiful way to celebrate the centenary,” was the message from his family, read by Enrico Magrelli. With proverbial sobriety, the family ceded the stage to those who made *Tiresia* possible: producer Carlo Degli Esposti (Palomar), director Roberto Andò, and composer Roberto Fabbriciani, who recounted the birth and realization of the show. This was followed by a previously unseen, brief but dense backstage video.
Camilleri’s *Tiresia* is renowned as a summation of two millennia of culture. The writer entered the stage to the delicate notes of Genesis’s “The Cinema Show,” with Peter Gabriel’s unmistakable voice advising: “Take a little trip back with father Tiresias…” From there, Camilleri wove the story of the Theban prophet—first a man, then a woman, then a man again—followed by a recitation of every author who cited him, from Hesiod to Statius, Angelo Poliziano to Guillaume Apollinaire, Ezra Pound to Woody Allen, with witty interpolations and blends of reality, fantasy, and literature. “Call me Tiresias…” Camilleri began. His prophecies are now missed.
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