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In this paper I argue that Leonardo Sciascia inscribes himself into a Siculo-Arab literary history, an inscription articulated through the historiographic metafiction of the novelIl Consiglio d’Egitto, the reception of the Sicilian poet of Arabic tongue Ibn Ḥamdīs, and the rewriting of a Giufà folktale. Influenced by the nineteenth-century Orientalist Michele Amari, Sciascia fashions Sicily’s Muslim past into a precursor of a Mediterranean modernity. Sciascia’s paradoxical vision of Arab Sicily is suspended between a fundamental historicism and an Orientalist essentialism, positing a Sicilian character that is both unchanging and the product of the island’s history of foreign invasions. The fictional investigations of Sicily’s Arab history provide Sciascia with an answer to the question of how one can be Sicilian, an answer that entails the responsibility of the historian, and the need to uncover a past that can guide us into an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study aims to identify the responses of citrus orchards (C. sinensis (L.) Osbeck), grown under typical Mediterranean climatic conditions, to deficit irrigation (DI) regimes applied over more than a decade (2010-2020). In particular, the DI regimes were declined at the study site in terms of sustained deficit irrigation, regulated deficit irrigation, partial drying of the root-zone, with increasing severity of the water deficit, from 25% to 50% of the crop evapotranspiration, using surface and sub-surface micro-irrigation techniques. Long-term monitoring was set up for identifying the main processes acting at the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) level through direct in situ measurements of mass and energy fluxes (i.e., via micrometeorological technique) and the estimation of ETc and transpiration fluxes (i.e., via sap flow method), and the soil-plant-water processes (via geoelectrical techniques). In addition, the main physiological, qualitative, and quantitative parameters were evaluated since the beginning of the experiment. The results of the long-term experiment demonstrated the great adaptability of the crop species to sustain even the highest water reductions without substantial alterations of the main marketable productive and qualitative characteristics, evidencing the importance of controlling the SPAC dynamics for correctly applying the water restriction regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precipitation data availability plays a crucial role in many climatic, hydrological and agricultural-related applications. In this study, the use of alternative data sources (i.e. interpolation methods and ERA5-Land reanalysis data) was combined for improving the spatially distributed precipitation estimates at the Simeto river basin, located in Eastern Sicily (Italy). A total of 51 rain gauges were used to generate a monthly precipitation dataset for the reference period 2002–2019. Among the 6 tested interpolation methods, Natural Neighbour was the method that predicted precipitation the best at monthly level with a Distance between Indices of Simulation and Observation (DISO) of 0.51. Radial Basis Functions and Inverse Distance Weighting provided the highest precipitation accuracies, respectively, for winter and autumn (with DISO values of 0.44 and 0.50, respectively), and for spring and summer seasons (with DISO values of 0.50 and 0.63, respectively). Underestimations on the ERA5-Land precipitation estimates were observed when compared to the most accurate interpolation methods both at monthly (25%) and seasonal temporal scales (21% in winter and summer, 36% in autumn), with the exception for spring. The performance was significantly improved when the interpolation estimates were corrected with local observations (with RMSD values ranging from 35.29 mm to 26.46 mm at monthly scale, and from 23.33–55.34 mm to 23.15–37.88 mm at seasonal level). The spatial distribution of the estimation errors associated to precipitation obtained from ERA5-Land reanalysis revealed a significant positive correlation (p value <0.05) with the altitude variation in each ERA5-Land cell within the basin under study. These results confirm the good performance on the combined use of alternative precipitation data sources, while adjustments are required to reduce site-specific uncertainties due to local microclimatic conditions occurring at the basin scale. • Monthly precipitation was estimated most accurately by deterministic interpolators. • ERA5-Land underestimated precipitation obtained by deterministic interpolators. • BIAS correction procedure improved the accuracy of the precipitation estimates. • Topography heterogeneity worsened the accuracy of ERA5-Land precipitation estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]