It is the diary of three trips made by the author in the lands of Sicily between 1952 and 1955. With this book, a new literary vein opens up in Levi’s production (even if he had already demonstrated it in his articles published in La Stampa and L’Illustrazione italiana), that of reportage.
Le parole sono pietre, published in 1955, is a harsh account of the backwardness of Sicilian farmers “the spectacle of the most extreme peasant misery”, of a land where it becomes difficult to apply those laws that the Italian state has approved for the redistribution of land, to improve working conditions, to enforce rights that should apply to everyone, but in those lands must submit to the privileges of the powerful. The book is dense with facts that the writer transfigures by placing them in the symbol of human consciousness, where “…tears are no longer tears but words, and words are stones”: stones are the words of Francesca Serio, the mother of Salvatore Carnevale, the rebel peasant murdered by the mafia for having found, in Sciara in 1951, the section of the Partito Socialista and the Camera del lavoro; stones are those, thrown by a Sicilian mother, in the courtroom of the Tribunale di Palermo, who tells and challenges Cosa Nostra, the law of the fief and the complicity of the institutional power.
