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.