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Sinfonia marks a critical turning-point in Pizzuto’s work. In a final break with narrative unity, he eliminates the human protagonist (of whom there were still traces in Lumpi di Paginette , as if to preserve the book’s novelistic character). By renouncing “facts” and “their authors” (which, says Pizzuto, must stay “in parentheses”), the author creates a narrative without bearings—a collection of unrelated facts that readers must connect by means of an intuition “shared” with the author. Absent the familiar bearings of a plot, Pizzuto’s text builds up as a series of “life fragments” ( rerum vitalium fragmenta , as Marzio Pieri calls them) in a space that excludes causal links between them, and in a suspended time frame where each fragment returns to its origin and its random present. Life’s epiphanies orbit inside this “particle field.” We see the magic funicular of Palermo, an impossible love, a “musical” friendship, a village perched in the Sicilian mountains, a school outing, a schoolteacher, and instantaneous happenings. There are the floating particles of the writer’s imagination, which occasionally connect with the war never fought, prehistoric night or unfathomable reveries (the invasion of snakes, the moving forest, the anthropomorphic sea creature). These themes — already present in Pizzuto’s youthful “Symphony” — return here to bear witness to the “creative continuity” that he sought to maintain in his work. Antonio Pane’s commentary seeks to identify, as far as possible, the individual tesserae of the variegated mosaic, applying the methods successfully used in his commentary on Testamento : reconstruction of the space-time coordinates obscured by Pizzuto’s deliberate removal of context; search for autobiographical references and allusions to the author’s family and friends; identification of specific sources; intertextual synopses; clarification of the many literary, philosophical, scientific, and scholarly references; and citations from the variants contained in the “original manuscript.”