Richmond History Professor Returns Lost Painting to Sicily
Author: Richmond American University London
Dom Alessio, Professor of History and VP International Programmes, was in Agrigento, Sicily, recently to return to its hometown an oil painting, T”orre campanaria Chiesa San Giorgio” (1913) by Luigi Pirandello.
Pirandello was one of Italy’s most prominent twentieth century writers and winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature. A friend of the likes of Einstein, Pirandello was hugely influential on an international scale, writing plays, novels and poems and impacting directly some of the great literary and philosophical minds of the century, including Sartre in France and Becket in Britain.
The painting was identified and donated by his father, Antonio Alessio, Professor Emeritus of Italian at McMaster University, Canada, whose new book Pirandello a Briglia Sciolta (2023) was also launched that day. Dom presented a talk at the Parco Archeologico in Agrigiento’s Valle dei Templi on his father’s research on Pirandello’s painting, and the search for this particular painting in Europe, Argentina and Brasil.
