CONFERENCE REPORT Sicilian Honour and Theatricality in Agrigento: A Workshop on Questa sera si recita a soggetto (30 November-3 December 2015) In December 2015 I had the opportunity to attend the fifty-second Convegno Piran- delliano in Agrigento. As an Italian researcher based in Canada I have been working on a project on theatre and translation for a number of years, and I was very excited to learn that the 2015 conference would be dedicated to one of Pirandello's last and most complex plays, Questa sera si recita a soggetto [Tonight We Improvise] (1930), where translation-both as cultural translation and as translation proper- plays a major role. I was particularly interested in the theatre workshop that was scheduled to take place during the conference, and in learning about how the play is received among Italian students today. The Convegno Pirandelliano in Agrigento is a three-day annual conference that brings together scholars, theatre practitioners and students from Italian schools of all regions, with of course a predominance of Sicilian schools. The event has a long history: the first convegno took place in 1967, under the direction of Enzo Lauretta (1924-2014), the founder of the Centro Nazionale Studi Pirandelliani. From the outset the aims of the Centro have been to gather as inclusive a corpus of scholarship as possible on Luigi Pirandello and to breach the distance between schools and the academy. In this spirit, the activities organized by the Centro include working groups in Italian high schools that take place throughout the year. Before travelling to Agrigento, teachers have the opportunity to develop a research project or a creative activity on the theme selected for the conference, thus preparing students for the annual event. High school students constitute the main audience at the conference. In the morning they listen to talks by experienced researchers from various countries, and in the afternoon and evening they participate in a short film festival-a recent new feature of the convegno-and in a creative writing/theatre workshop. As the event also offers an opportunity to bring tourism and business to Agrigento, it includes excursions to the Greek temples and a guided tour of the house in which Pirandello was born, just outside Agrigento. The cult of the author as a local and international celebrity becomes evident during this trip, which concludes with a walk to the rock where Pirandello's ashes are preserved. Here visitors can witness what is left of the 'solitary pine tree' that Pirandello celebrates in a passage of his 1893 autobiographical fragment, now in Enzo Lauretta's Luigi Pirandello: storia di un personaggio 'fuori di chiave' (Milan, Mursia, 1980): 'Una notte di giugno caddi come una lucciola sotto un gran pino solitario in una campagna d'olivi sa- raceni affacciata agli orli d'un altipiano di argille azzurre sul mare africano ... '
164 Conference Report ['One June night I fell like a firefly under a great solitary pine in a countryside filled with Saracen olive trees which overlooks the edges of a plateau of blue clay on