The particular nickname of “Saracen olive tree” was used by Pirandello, when he was now old and nearing the end, and was struggling with his last and unfinished theatrical work "The mountain giants”. He knew that he was about to die and says, smiling, to his son Stefano, this phrase "there is a large Saracen olive tree in the middle of the scene: with which I solved everything".
With this phrase Pirandello meant to say that he had found the scenographic solution for "The mountain giants”, he was about to die, and in his eyes there was a big old Saracen olive tree. «With which I solved everything».
Pirandello invents, but in reality he is thinking of his end.
In Pirandell's work the expression "Saracenic" occurs frequently, in fact we find it in the novel "I vecchi ei giovani” with «some centenary Saracen olive trees with distorted trunks» or «there had been a Saracen olive tree for more than a hundred years, whose robust trunk, full of knots and knots, due to the opposition of the wind or the soil, it had grown sideways” or in the work "The jar" "Was a crooked old man, with crooked and knotted joints, like an ancient Saracen olive tree" and "on the right, a centuries-old Saracen olive tree; and, around the rough and distorted trunk, a stone seat, walled up all around."
The Saracen olive tree is that plant that instead of reaching towards the sky seems to want crawl on the ground, curved, twisted. It is a symbol of a place, the symbol of his memory, of Memory, Leonardo Sciascia also wrote it.
Here utopia appears: the Saracen olive tree, as the emblem of Sicily, from Pirandello's homeland and Leonardo Sciascia dedicated an essay to this olive tree, in which he suggests this fascinating interpretation:
«In the vision of the dying Pirandello the Saracen olive tree was, memory and imagination, a summary: a landing, a return of the myth of poetry to that “place of metamorphosis” in which it could become reality again.»
Sciascia described the Saracen olive tree “from the twisted, twisted trunk of dark cracks; as if tortured, and you can almost hear the moan. Hoary, ancient: and it is believed that it was the Saracens who planted it, who thickened the valley between today's Agrigento and the sea".
Salvatore Quasimodo reports in the poem "Road to Agrigentum” ("the Marranzano sadly vibrates / in the throat of the driver who climbs / the moon-clear hill, slow / among the murmur of Saracen olive trees»
Besides the poet Quasimodo, other Sicilian writers also talk about this Saracen olive tree.
Andrea Camilleri in the work "The hunting season" reports: «The house stood on a hill thick with Saracen olive trees and from some of its windows you could see the distant line of the sea» and in "The Terracotta Dog", from the detective series:
"The one-storey cottage, one bedroom below and one above, was right on the edge of the hill, half hidden by four huge olive trees Saracens that surrounded it almost entirely" and "When I come back there are Saracen olive trees".
The archaeologist Biagio Pace reminds us that the population calls some olive trees "Saracens" with a generic historical judgment extended to all ancient things, to declare them outside of our time and our civilization.
