Ignazio Buttitta is the writer of the best-known poetry in the Sicilian dialect, and is known almost as well in Mexico, China, in the Caucasus as at the foot of Mount Etna. His is a Sicilian world molded by Sicilian language and rhythms; his best poetry, no matter how attached to regionalism in content and expression--or perhaps because of it--generates a particularly seductive music.

He was born to Provvidenza Raspante Buttitta and Pietro Buttitta in Bagheria, in the Sicilian province of Palermo, on 19 September 1899. He was sent to live with his wet nurse because there were already five children in his parents' house; in his poems his absent mother appears continually from his first collection to his last, at the beginning in a sentimental vein, later in a more detached yet more moving manner as the personal mother combines with Mother Sicily. Pier Paolo Pasolini thinks that Buttitta...