Paolo Monello

Paolo Monello was born in Vittoria (Ragusa, Sicily, Italy) in 1953. When he was young, he engaged in political activities in the Italian Communist Party (PCI). From 1984 to 1987 he was mayor of Vittoria, a big city of Southeastern Sicily, well known for wine and greenhouse vegetable production (and now one of the locations of the TV series based on Andrea Camilleri’s Chief Inspector Montalbano’s detective stories). Being Vittoria located in a few kilometres’ distance from Comiso, an American ground-launch cruise missile site, in 1984 Paolo Monello declared the territory “denuclearized zone” and attended the First Meeting of Denuclearized Zones which took place in Manchester in April 1984. There he met some Spanish mayors, to whom he made a particular request: finding the mortal remains of the founder of Vittoria, the Roman Vittoria Colonna, who was known to have died in Spain. The search was lucky and the noblewoman’s remains were found in a church in Medina de Rioseco (Valladolid). After four years’ negotiations with Spanish authorities, in 1990 Paolo Monello succeeded in his stubborn purpose and eventually brought some mortal remains of the founder to Vittoria. In the meantime he was elected a Member of Parliament for PCI (1987-1994) but his main passion remained history to which he diligently committed in his spare time. From Spain he brought to Vittoria a conspicuous amount of documents, which, along with other documents coming from the Archivio di Stato of Palermo, of Modica and of Vittoria helped him (and help him even now) write the histories he loves: about Vittoria Colonna’s biography, the dreadful earthquake of 1693 (based on inedited documents from Simancas, Spain), the lives of some counts of Modica. But he mostly writes on his hometown, Vittoria, whose economic, political and administrative events from the XVII century up to the present he is one of the major expert of. Good researcher, he only grieves for not being a novelist, because if he had ever been, by drawing on the documents of the trial, he would have written a beautiful novel on young Mario Pancari’s murder which took place in Vittoria in 1871… his e-mail address is: paolo.monello1@yahoo.it