The oil jar The Italian short story La

The oil jar The Italian short story “La giara” represents one of Luigi Pirandello’s masterpieces; Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. The story is about two Sicilian characters: the stingy and hostile landlord Don Lollò Zirafa and the old and proud craftsman Zì Dima Licasi. The plot is comic and full of humor, too

Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti, now called Agrigento, on 28 th June 1867. He studied in Palermo and then in Rome. After that he moved to Bonn University, where he studied philology. Here he got his degree, being examined on a thesis about Agrigento dialect. Later he married Antonietta Portulano, a beautiful woman from Agrigento, and they had three children, Stefano, Rosalia and Fausto. He wrote very much and he founded the “Art Theatre Company”. In 1929 he was named Academician of Italy and in 1934 he was awarded the Nobel prize. In 1936 Pirandello died in Rome. According to his last will, his ashes were put into a Greek crater and taken to “Kaos”, in his birthplace, near the pine he loved.

Don Lollò Zirafa, a rich land owner from Messina, a choleric and quarrelsome person, has bought a very big jar, in expectation of an abundant production of oil from his country.

But one day a farmer finds the jar broken into two halves and nobody knows how that has happened. Don Lollò gets soon into a rage and wants to run to a lawyer’s to accuse everybody, but he finally calms down and becomes convinced of having the jar repaired by Zì Dima: this is an old man, very able in his job of “jars-repairer”, who has invented a special “mastic” (a sort of strong glue), but Don Lollò doesn’t believe that it really works and wants his jar repaired both with Zì Dima’s mastic and also with the more traditional metal stitches. Zì Dima grumbles but he finally consents and starts repairing the jar; he comes into it and “sews” it but when he finishes his work he realizes that he can no more go out: the mouth of the jar is too small for his belly! The jar has to be broken again, this time for ever!

Don Lollò gets even angrier than before and this time he really runs to a lawyer’s but the man tells him that he has no chance: he cannot keep the old man into the jar because that would be considered as an unlawful imprisonment; he can only estimate the value of the jar (Zì Dima himself could do it), give the old man his freedom and ask him the money to compensate the loss of the jar.

But Zì Dima does not agree: he does not want to pay at all and he says that he would rather remain into the jar until to rot. Moreover, he pays the farmers plenty of wine to have them drunk, so that they can keep him company all the night while he is philosophically smoking his encrusted pipe.

At this point Don Lollò, woken up by the great noise and strongly provoked, kicks the jar down towards a big olive- tree: the jar breaks and Zì Dima, the winner, comes out from it with a large smile.