Greg McKeown:
Welcome back, everybody. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and this is the Greg McKeown Podcast, where we focus on what’s essential so that we can live a life that really matters. And part of that, of course, is to stretch our minds, to break through the assumptions and the ways that we see the world. And one of the best ways that I know is to read classic literature, to discover things in a world beyond your own.
To me, books are more than paper and ink. They are a portal through which we can experience places and times, and people we otherwise wouldn’t. And in the process, our minds are stretched, our lives are developed, and our empathy increases. The research is very clear on this. And so it’s with pleasure then that I have Stephen Riggio, who is an accomplished leader, a visionary, and the former CEO of Barnes & Noble, which is to say he has spent more time thinking about books than the average person.
He played a pivotal role in transitioning the iconic New York bookstore into the nation’s largest bookseller. From 2002 to 2012, he guided the company through a dynamic period of growth and innovation, expanding the e-commerce and publishing platforms. The company still exists, which is not nothing in a world of constant change and transformation. With over 40 years of experience in the industry, Riggio’s influence has been instrumental in shaping the future of bookselling in America.
Beyond his corporate achievements, though, he’s deeply committed to philanthropy, serving on the boards of the National Book Foundation and the National Down Syndrome Society and as a founding member of AHR’s New York Foundation. Stephen’s leadership and dedication to fostering accessibility, education, and beyond has made a lasting impact. But right now, and for the last several years, one of the prime projects that he has devoted considerable personal time to achieving is the translation of two volumes, each significant, of a book called, in English at least, Sicilian Avengers.
This is a dramatic story, its scale, its immense story. A single character, the protagonist, an orphan, goes on a sort of hero’s journey with so many twists and turns, the kind of fabulous literature that can indeed take us on similar adventures.
Steve, welcome to the podcast.
Stephen Riggio:
That’s a wonderful introduction.
Greg McKeown:
Steve, before we get to Sicilian Avengers, can you help unpack why it is that you’ve been so drawn to books in the first place?
Stephen Riggio:
I was a reader, a heavy reader, at an early age. Barnes & Noble was founded—the company goes back well over 100 years—but the modern iteration of it began in 1975 when my brother, my older brother, purchased the company out of bankruptcy. But he had begun his own book business earlier, and he was 13 years older than me. And at a very early age, he put books in my hand. I have a vivid memory of the first, what I would call serious book that he gave me.
It was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think I was 10 years old at the time, so talk about expanding the mind of a 10-year-old.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, just so.
Stephen Riggio:
And my brother was, in his own way, the personification of an autodidact. He studied in college but left to build this business. He was a voracious reader himself and a constant seeker of things that would nourish his life. So he fed me those books from an early age. It was Huxley, then Vonnegut, Kafka. And as I grew older, I fell in love with reading, particularly in my early teenage years. I loved reading the adventure novels of Dumas, of Hugo. I loved reading Dickens. So, it was a journey that almost began the translation of this book. It had a thread that began when I was very early. And it’s also tied to my Sicilian ancestry.
Greg McKeown:
Yes, I understand. Well, why don’t we go a little further back, then, if we sort of think about the hundred-year journey, not just of the company but of your journey to this moment? What is that ancestry?
Stephen Riggio:
My paternal ancestors emigrated here from Sicily at the turn of the 20th century. My grandfather died before I was born, but my grandmother used to read to me from the Italian language newspaper that was published in New York City for Italian Americans, especially for those who had come over from Sicily and from southern Italy, where the great migration had occurred. I developed a love of the language at an early age, and I studied it through school, up through high school, but I dropped it and started my career.
In 2008, we lost our daughter, Melissa, after her year-long struggle with leukemia. It was a very tragic time, and I was looking for us to find a way forward, my wife Laura and I. I came up with the idea that we would open a new door together and study the Italian language. It was a way for me to revisit the language and a way to pick up where I had left off, and for her to begin studying it with me. And so, we began on that journey.
All happy families are alike, and all grieving families grieve in their own way. This was a way for us to find a new way forward. A few years into taking lessons and studying the language, our teacher gave us the original Italian edition of this book. And it wasn’t long before we fell in love with the story. It’s an epic adventure story, very rich in historical detail. It’s full of swashbuckling. It’s got a love story in it. As my wife Laura says, it appeals on a lot of different levels. So, it’s a multilayered plot.
But in the middle of reading it, I thought, why not check the Italian edition that we’re reading against the available English translation? And I discovered it did not exist. I would say Barnes & Noble did many audacious things during the time I was there, and when we were running the company, and built it up to a nationwide retailer of about 700 stores. So I thought, why not do something audacious, Mr. Riggio? Why don’t you spend the next few years of your life, which it turned out to be, translating this book?
I didn’t go in, you know, full force at first. I said, let me see if I could do this. So I said, I committed myself to translating one page; I said if I could do one page and feel comfortable with it, then I’ll proceed. So, I did one page. I gave it to our teacher, and she sent it back with all kinds of corrections. So, you know, I knew that it was going to be quite a challenge to get through it because it is a thousand pages,
Greg McKeown:
Your own epic adventure—getting to the point that you could translate this epic adventure.
Stephen Riggio:
Yes, you’ve got it. And I did wind up doing it. It took the better part of three years. And during that journey, I had this simultaneous journey of researching my ancestry. It wasn’t uncommon for the first wave of Italian immigrants to teach—almost preach—to their children to be American. And my dad hardly spoke a word of Italian, even though his parents were Sicilian. You know, they wanted him to be American.
So, there was very little in the way of oral history or archives of our own family for me to grow up with or, in later life, consult with. But I was very determined to find out more. And I ultimately traced our family back 400 years. And interestingly, I discovered that my dad’s father, my grandfather, was an orphan, as is the main character in Sicilian Avengers. So, in many respects, I feel that I was destined to translate this book.
It was a way for me to learn the language, rediscover my roots, and open a new door, as they say, not just to my past, but to my future—my future with my wife, with my family, with my grandchildren—and to make them aware of our heritage. I have a grandson. We have a grandson—our son-in-law is Indian. So, our grandson is five years old, and he says proudly, “I’m half Indian, and I’m half Italian.”
And I love the fact that while researching this book, while I didn’t really know much about Sicilian history, I discovered that it’s one of the most multicultural places on the planet. We talk about America as a nation of immigrants and New York as a melting pot, but Sicily has it beat by a mile—many miles.
Greg McKeown:
Because of all of the invaders from all the different empires that have tried to come in there and left their mark upon the place.
Stephen Riggio:
We’ve been to Sicily four times since I took on this challenge. And you could not just feel it in the culture, in the people, but you could see it in the buildings and the churches and the monuments, that 2,000 years of history are kind of unfolding before your eyes.
One important thing I would like to say about what I hope for this translation is Italian Americans and Sicilian Americans have been the victims of very stereotypical portraits in the media…in books, or in film. A lot of that has to do with the popularity of films about the Mafia, the Sicilian Mafia, the American Mafia. And I want people to look past that. The book is deeply, deeply historical. It’s accurate. The author of the book was a historian. He wrote books about the history of Sicily. And it is a way for people to discover how rich Sicily is—its history, its culture. The Greeks, the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Arabs, the Normans, the Byzantines, the Spanish. Many of these cultures coexisted, and the Sicilians, of course, were dominated by all these cultures, but in an interesting way, they absorbed them and then repelled them. The Spanish were a cruelly repressive regime that ended in 1861 when the Spanish Bourbons were kicked out by Garibaldi. But many people don’t know this—Sicily was not part of Italy until 1861. The Sicilian language is a different language—not a dialect—than Italian. They say they’re Sicilians first and Italians second. They’re fiercely, fiercely proud of their heritage and of their multicultural heritage.
Greg McKeown:
I want to go back, even though I hope it’s okay because it’s obviously a painful moment, but back to that. Not exactly, of course, the moment that your daughter passed, but the way that you were broken open, your wife as well. You know, an experience like that doesn’t just impact this moment—it impacts the past, the present, the future. Because at a meaning level, it’s even beyond disorienting. I think because it’s destabilizing, I think is a better word because what does all of it mean? What’s the point in all of it? And it just shakes everything up. So you say, well, what does have meaning? What’s left? When our relationship to our daughter, our hopes for her, what is possible, all of that.
And I just think I sort of want to zoom in and expand not just that moment, but this other element that came into existence through that—somehow you were opened to this intergenerational story and meaning through the breaking of your own sense of what family is and what you expected it to be and what you thought the future would be. It just feels really related and connected on many levels. So just, you know, your thoughts about that.
Stephen Riggio:
We often said in our company that Barnes & Noble was a purpose-driven company. The fact that we sold books was central to, obviously, everything that we did. We used to also say that bookselling was important work. Working in a bookstore was an education in itself.
Greg McKeown:
I love that.
Stephen Riggio:
And that the bookstores were not made for people, in a sense, who had already arrived but for those who had aspirations to explore and to nourish their minds.
Greg McKeown:
I have used Barnes & Noble, especially if you go back 15-plus years before I had published any of my books. I used it in the educational way you’re describing. I’m looking at the books; I’m picking things off the shelf to move into a 3D learning classroom where you’re just sitting inside of the encyclopedia almost. I can’t walk past it even now without suddenly disappearing. Even in airports. And so my wife, if I’m with her, she’s like, “Where’s Greg?” “Where’s the bookstore?” That’s where he’ll be, you know—seeing it and being pulled to it, like a gravitational force. So there’s something easy to relate to in what you’re saying.
Stephen Riggio:
Yeah. I used to call the stores the amusement parks for the mind. But to continue on this idea of a purpose-driven company, and like most people, I put my heart and soul into my career. But then to find a purpose-driven post-career life or post-retirement life…
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Stephen Riggio:
…is another thing entirely. So, losing someone—losing any relative—but losing a child is the most devastating thing that can happen.
Greg McKeown:
Yes.
Stephen Riggio:
And as I say at the end of the book, my deepest wish is that this book didn’t exist. However, our daughter’s presence in it is undeniable. This event and the subsequent decision of Laura and I to take this journey together has given our life purpose and meaning.
Greg McKeown:
I understand.
Stephen Riggio:
Our life is filled with other meaning, too. With family, and with travel, and enjoying this journey that we’ve taken. In the language, the good news about having translated the book is that it’s done. The bad news is there’s a sequel that’s not a thousand pages—it’s 700 pages. So we’re making our way through that. And hopefully, readers that pick this up and want to find out what happens next will be around, patiently, and wait for me to complete the task.
Greg McKeown:
So I’m curious when you say that your daughter was a part of this. There’s two ways to think about that. One is the way that we’ve addressed explicitly, which is that if it weren’t for her passing, you would never have pursued this journey together with your wife. So that’s sort of version one. And then, version two is that I have felt her presence through this process—that she was involved in it. And I just am curious about…
Is that also how you mean it, or is it really just the first?
Stephen Riggio:
No, no, of course, it’s both. Her presence is right in the pages of the book. The story resonated so much with people that we came to know in Sicily. Our daughter had Down syndrome. And so, well, since her birth, Laura and I have been advocates for people with individuals with disabilities. And that is another part of our life that was very rewarding for us while she was living—working on programs to hopefully lead to individuals with Down syndrome being able to lead a full and complete life.
And we continued that work after we lost her. So, her life and her passing did provide us with another dimension to our life. One dear friend of ours, many, many years ago, had written something about the experience of having a child with a disability. It’s an essay—I forget the exact title—but it’s like you think you’re taking a trip somewhere, and you’re thinking you’re going to one country, and you go to another. And yet, you discover there’s some beauty and wonder in that other country.
Greg McKeown:
What a beautiful metaphor for what you’re describing.
Stephen Riggio:
Without a doubt, raising a child with a disability is a challenge. And depending on that individual’s disability, each family and parent has to deal with it as they see fit. For us, Melissa was an extremely vibrant and intelligent girl who grew up to be a self-advocate and a poet. And she was the writer in the family, actually. Laura and I had no doubt that she would have lived an independent life—something that we were paving the way for her.
Greg McKeown:
I have the loveliest nephew who also has Down syndrome, and it has been remarkable to see what is possible when you have, in this case, parents—or for you, and then in my case, as an uncle—who are sort of just willing to challenge assumptions and imagine, sort of have limitless thinking. You say, well, okay, let’s…who says what can and cannot be done? And so, you know, I connect on that level, too.
Stephen Riggio:
You talk about being audacious. You know, most individuals with disabilities, once they graduate high school, they fall into such a chasm, and the opportunities for them to continue on in their life are very, very limited. Often many of them stay in high school through age 21. We decided that it’s time for individuals with disabilities to attend college programs, and we started those in New York City.
So, post-secondary education is something that we hope we were very instrumental in putting on the map, and many others have followed. And those programs are growing throughout America.
Greg McKeown:
Well, it’s not very long ago. I mean, my parents were respite carers for special needs children, so something like the last 10 years of me growing up, there was always one or more special needs children in our home. And, I mean, it’s just not very long ago that it—obviously, it depends on the level of disability and challenge—but that people really were put away, you know, put in an institution. And I remember taking a tour of one of those institutions as a young man—maybe 12 or 13 years old. It was extremely disturbing to me. And even in the moment, I knew it wasn’t an all-negative experience, but to see the effects of a paradigm…
And that’s not to say that the people who were caring for those individuals in that moment were somehow not being kind or anything like that because they were, but the people in there had been so separated from society. It was a powerful experience about how locked our minds and paradigms can be and, what effect that can have in terms of policy and execution, and how people are actually treated. And, you know, it’s another example of an experience that opened up the “new country,” you know, to go back to that beautiful metaphor.
I want to just one more time come back to this connecting point between the intergenerational… One term I love is the intergenerational self. And that’s not a new term for longtime listeners of this podcast, but it’s not a well-known term outside of it. And what the research shows about the intergenerational self, among other things, is that once you develop a sense of this intergenerational self, you have higher levels of resilience, partially because you hear stories of resilience from your ancestors, and you say, “Oh my goodness, they dealt with this.”
And, you know, “I come from that DNA; I can do challenging things, I can survive, I can pass on, you know, better things to my children and great-grandchildren and so on.”
So, there’s a lot to be said in favor of the intergenerational self. But it seems to me that this experience started like a seed but has grown into sort of a tree for you, a whole opening—this 400 years of family history that you’re saying you’ve been able to trace. Your sense of panoramic vision now increases in equal measure, I think, because it seems to me that the further we see back, the further we consider the long future. It’s part of the intergenerational self. I’m a small part in a huge story, you know, that you are a Sicilian avenger yourself, you know, you’re part of this grand story.
And maybe just a final observation for you is it just is so clear to me that you have felt this, like a hand reaching from the other side, metaphorically turning your heart to your ancestors. And it’s through the crack that the light seeps through.
And when we deal with suffering, it does produce cracks; there’s no question about that. But somehow, through the cracks, this light—this intergenerational light—has seemed to seep in.
Stephen Riggio:
I didn’t know my grandfather because he passed away before I was born. We knew little of our family history. So, while I began this deep dive into searching for my ancestry, I discovered a document from a small town in Sicily. It’s a town called Sciacca on the south coast. And that two-page document tells the story of my grandfather’s birth, about how he was dropped off at 3 a.m. in the morning with rags, wrapped in rags at a foundling home.
And he was given—there were two farmers that were the witnesses. And there was a, I guess you would call a nurse. They took the baby that was laid at the door of this place, and in front of these two witnesses, the baby was handed over to another woman who raised my grandfather. And on the birth certificate, it says “mother unknown.” And when I read it, it shook me to the core. Because then, at 14 years old… I don’t know what happened between then and the time my grandfather came to America, but like many immigrants, you know, he got on that ship by himself.
And he opened up, several years later, a grocery in lower Manhattan. So, in a way, he was an entrepreneur. His grandfather was a pharmacist. So, there are entrepreneurs in the family down the line. So yeah, it shook me to the core. And to discover that when I was in my 60s was quite a discovery.
Greg McKeown:
What did it do to you to discover that?
Stephen Riggio:
I wanted to know more. And yes, I did discover that his grandfather was a pharmacist and his father was a shepherd, and down the line, all the way back to a bricklayer in the 16th century. So, it compelled me to know more. And I happened to have the benefit of being introduced to an expert, and he led me back to right after 1500. And I think in the genealogy community, they call it a brick wall—we hit a brick wall, can’t go any further.
And I asked him, I said, well, what was before then? What was before then? And, you know, he said in Italian, chissà—like, who knows? You know, we don’t know. I said, well, where did they come from? Were they Normans? Were they Spanish? You know? So, I guess it is disappointing that I couldn’t go further back.
Greg McKeown:
Yet.
Stephen Riggio:
But it also lends some mystery to it. Yes, that’s true. Well, you know, they had to research church records,
Greg McKeown:
I’m sure. I mean, do you know the story of Philippa Langley? I had Philippa here on the pod a little while ago. The literal story is unbelievable to me, even now. She…every time she would go to that parking lot, she had some experience—physical and spiritual, and emotional. “He’s here.”
Stephen Riggio:
Oh, Richard III. Yes, of course.
Greg McKeown:
“He’s here.” And there’s no one believing her. And she’s connecting the dots, and it’s getting her within a certain range. But without that sensation, without that assurance, she would never—it had continued for a second. She said that to me. She pursued that because of that sensation. And I’m just drawing it to you because I think it’s really remarkable and that there’s more here, too. You know that? Yes. Okay, a genealogist said that’s the limit. I was maybe—I don’t know. I certainly wasn’t older than 12, but I might have been as young as 10. And I went for about six months, every week, in search of a very particular ancestor’s record. I was using microfilm—slow, tedious, impossible to read. I never made a single step forward. Nothing—six months of that. And fast forward, okay, so for me, 30-plus years. And what AI is now doing to connect the dots is breathtaking.
The speed with which people are being connected compared to that is unbelievable. And so what seems closed can be opened. I mean, just in the same way as the protagonist of Sicilian Avengers has doors opened in all sorts of ways to join, in his case, sort of a crime family. But still, the point is that there is epic adventure behind this epic adventure.
Stephen Riggio:
Oh, yeah. That’s a great way of phrasing it because I wasn’t aware, let’s say, of the epic adventure of my grandfather, you know, coming to America.
Greg McKeown:
Well, he was also an orphan.
Stephen Riggio:
I mean, when I actually realized the connection a bit later on, I said, wow, this…you know, there are subliminal connections, and there are overt connections. And that one just popped out, and I said, wow, this is something I could work with, and this is something that has some meaning to me.
Greg McKeown:
Yes. There’s a book written; I don’t know, let’s say, 50 years ago. It’s called Charlie’s Monument. I think it’s by Blaine Yorgason. I read that when I was very young—a story of a man with disabilities who moves into the town that he lives in, and people have all sorts of stories about him because he has physical disabilities, and so he’s really rejected from society. But he has been given a job, which includes every day climbing this mountain to look over the town.
And every day, after a while of doing this, he picks up a rock with him and he brings it up the mountain. Every single day he does it. And some days, it’s really, really difficult to do it. Sometimes, he brings quite big rocks up and so on; he does this. And then one day, as he’s overlooking the town, there’s a woman who he really falls in love with. And through a really extraordinary set of circumstances, they meet, and she ends up marrying him. And they also judge her for that because, well, how would—why would…?
Well, at the end of the book, there’s an author’s note that gives the story behind the story, the epic behind the epic. And in it, he says, well, first of all, I dreamt this whole story. Woke up with a whole story in my mind, and I couldn’t rest until I had written it out. And so he writes out this whole story.
So then he has a single copy of this manuscript. And he has this feeling one day—either he goes, or he has his brother go, I can’t remember—but to go and get that manuscript, like, very urgently, this single copy. And they get it, and then there’s a massive flood that comes through and just destroys that area. It would have been destroyed.
And he’s like, my goodness, why does this manuscript matter? So then, later, he ends up doing his own family history research and discovering a literal monument of rocks, massive rocks at the top of this hill that were built by his own grandfather. And it just… I can’t not share that story, given what you’ve just described. Well, it’s a coincidence, and so on. But there’s so many stories of this nature. These are very particular kinds, but I certainly am convinced that there is an ongoing intergenerational connection that is deeper than memory, that we feel a connection to those people.
I am transcribing right now my grandfather’s journal, which is surprisingly hard to do. It’s not an especially long journal, but his writing is just slightly different than, you know, easy on the eye. And I just also feel a sense of mission that doesn’t really, in one sense, make sense because there’s so many other things to do. And nobody really says, “Oh, this is what you should spend your time doing.”
But I think this mission that you’ve been on is a meaningful one. And anyway, it reminded me of this Charlie’s Monument story—that he felt he was being a voice for his grandfather in telling this story. You feel now, not a book project that’s incidental but it’s a gateway for you to go to places you’ve never been and to meet people that you’ve never met, but that are in your family. And I just think there’s such a meta-story here, a story within a story.
Stephen Riggio:
I’ve said to people that, in a way, translating this book was… I was destined to do it. It was my destiny. But it doesn’t sound corny to me now. It sounds real, right? It sounds like… how should I say it? It was in the cards, or it was waiting for me. And it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to know that I’ve arrived here and that I haven’t completed anything. Maybe I’ve started something for our children and for our grandchildren to continue on, to keep this faint discovery back 400 years into the future.
Well, Laura and I have three girls. My brother had three girls. I never thought about the name continuing on as being any kind of active in my life.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Stephen Riggio:
But what it means to me is at least the story moving forward. Because the name is just a name.
Greg McKeown:
Of course.
Stephen Riggio:
It’s interesting that the name had survived that many years. And I do have a nephew. My other brother had a boy. And the relatives, I think—I don’t know if I mentioned it, we did discover distant relatives,
Greg McKeown:
Living relatives now.
Stephen Riggio:
And what I feel so grateful for and blessed is that the people that we discovered—they could have been anybody.
They’re like family. They’re regular people. They’re beautiful people. They don’t speak a word of English, which is a challenge. But I feel very blessed to have met them, and they have embraced us and vice versa. And hopefully, we’ll take our family there, our children and our grandchildren there in the next couple of years and have a big, big family reunion.
Greg McKeown:
Well, it was curious to me that you used the term, you know, they’re like family, which I understand why you’re saying it because, you know, it’s distant, and you’re also saying there was a connection that was there nonetheless. But of course, they’re not like family. They are family. They’re distant family. But there’s some extraordinary statistic about this, about, you know, if each person knows a thousand people, then the entire world is only a few degrees of separation from the whole planet.
And of course, that’s true, even truer going backward, because, you know, we’re all obviously connected. But in a world that feels too often polarized, too often toxic, too often enemy-centric, where, you know, we’re seeing people of the other political persuasion as somehow less than human, it’s such a catastrophe when this happens between people. This is its own timely reminder to us all. I mean, we are really connected, you know, we are all… You’re like, like family. We’re not like family. We are family. We are part of one great family. And, of course, that doesn’t mean that you don’t debate differences and challenges and work through things. I’m not pretending; therefore, we kumbaya and don’t have to deal with issues and decisions and even elections and so on. It’s just there’s a much bigger epic than that. Family story is the epic; the political things that capture so much time and attention, you know, in news publications, in a sense, they get the news wrong.
I mean, my undergraduate was in journalism, and I remember one of my first classes in journalism was a professor asking the question, and we’d read the chapter: what is news? And that’s a serious question because it’s going to be relevant to lots of people. And the answer to that question takes us way off the mark easily if we’re just focusing on the latest gossip, in a sense.
Meanwhile, there’s this gigantic story, this news, and at least in my own life, I want to trade off a little more time away from that noise and back into the intergenerational narrative. Because I think, anyway, we have moved over the last 10 years from the age of distraction to the age of disorientation. And in it, what I think we’re losing is narrative. Who am I? Where do I fit into the story? What is my purpose? These big questions that you were confronted with, and that has opened up a much deeper and broader connection than you would otherwise have gone on.
Stephen Riggio:
You know, people often ask me, what type of books do you read? What are your favorite books? I would say, first and foremost, give me a book by a historian who can write with a narrative sweep. Someone who isn’t just presenting you with facts and figures and events through history but has the skill… I’m thinking of a Barbara Tuchman, of a David…
Greg McKeown:
David McCullough, yeah.
Stephen Riggio:
Garrett Mattingly wrote a great book on the Spanish Armada. But also, I think a good way to find out about history is through fiction. I’m a big reader of crime novels, and people ask me, why do you do that? You know, what is it you like about crime novels? And they say, well, you know, it’s a way for me to travel. I was reading Scandinavian noir way before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’ve been reading it since the 80s.
I read about the Southwest with Tony Hillerman, about Sicily with Andrea Camilleri. But if you’re in the hands of a good writer, as Luigi Natoli is, he could make history come alive. And so, I think the best historical fiction, and the reason why it’s so powerful, is that people would prefer to be given a compelling narrative that is rooted in history. And Luigi Natoli himself was a historian and wrote books about Sicily and taught history.
His books happened to be banned by Mussolini because he was an ardent anti-fascist. Even though this book is about a forerunner of the Sicilian Mafia, he was certainly anti-Mafia. He was a man of incredible moral fortitude with a strong moral compass and deeply, deeply anti-fascist. So that’s… I think the good thing about this book is people’s stereotypical views of Sicily… Many are from films and from films about the Mafia.
And this book opens a different door here. Open this door here and see, well, not what Sicily is like today, because this is early 18th century, but see how interesting a place it was. You know, and that’s opened the door for me. You know, I was… When I was five years old, I had blonde hair, which is not typical for Italians. And, you know, in researching the book and Sicilian history, I’ve discovered that the Normans conquered Sicily.
It was a thousand years ago, so I don’t claim that I have Norman ancestry, but it did make me aware of the fact that we all come from a variety of places. And to be appreciative of that.
Greg McKeown:
Have you developed your own sort of hundred great books, you know, a reading list that you would want your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to read if, you know, work your way through this? This, I think, is the best literature that’s ever been written and can expand your mind in a good way.
Stephen Riggio:
You just gave me a project, you know. Johnny Cash had given his daughter Roseanne what he called the list of, I believe it’s 100 songs that she ought to know, and she went out and recorded… it’s a wonderful album. I think she recorded 10 or 12 of them. So you’ve given me something that I should give to my children. One of the top books I would put on that list is The Leopard, which is Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s book about Sicily.
It’s probably among the greatest novels I think has ever been written. And it’s only 200 and I think 60 pages. It is epic in scope. It takes place around the time of the Risorgimento when Garibaldi had expelled the Spanish Bourbons. And the main character is an aristocrat who is witnessing the change from an aristocratic society to what will ultimately become, say, a republican—quotation marks, you know. And it’s beautifully written.
And there was a great movie made by Luchino Visconti, which is very famous. So, I would put that right at the top. And I thank you for the suggestion because I should do that. I have many of the books in my library, so I should actually arrange them and say to my children, here it is.
Greg McKeown:
Here it is. It’s really beautiful. It’s a beautiful idea to actually just kind of have those hundred arranged to pass it on to them. I mean, it wouldn’t be too difficult to actually give them the hundred books, you know, here it is. These are… these are the books that I would, you know, want… I mean, one of my favorite sayings is that in the, you know, 10, 20 years from now, you’ll be the same person you are today, other than the people you meet and the books you read.
And, you know, that’s… it’s so profound to me. I was introduced to books early. I had books read to me. I did read books early, but nothing compared to the last few years, where I have sort of felt at some level appalled at everything that I don’t know. And it’s not because I’ve felt lazy in educational learning, but somehow, a new gear felt needed to be unlocked. And so I’ve just been working steadily but rapidly through classic after classic. And you can’t not be a different person at the end. You can’t not be changed. I mean, books are not entirely dead things.
And if you can find the greatest literature, of course, there’s an argument as to what it is, but there still is such a thing as the classics that have endured. And if the idea of that upgrade… I was just speaking at a university just last week, I think I mentioned it earlier, and was advocating for this, like, you go to university to read great books. It used to be that you read law, you know, that was the terminology. You read because you were there to read great books. Harvard, even today, still has it, although many don’t know that at Harvard.
There’s a great reading list there. And the idea, the goal is, while you’re here, whatever else you do, you should read these hundred books. And I didn’t when I was at university, and I wish I had, but it doesn’t really matter now because I’m doing it now. And we need… we need a reading revolution. We need to read deep history and trust that mysterious process by which these classics have been selected because we don’t know how they were selected, but they have been and given down literally as gifts to generations and generations. And we can either just go through life without that wisdom and brilliant thinking in our minds, or, for the sake of a few dollars, be able to… the cost of a meal… access the greatest thinking from the greatest minds in the history of the world. It must be among the highest-leverage activities on earth.
I have another question for you. You’ve mentioned movies and books. Is it within your aspiration to have Sicilian Avengers made into a movie?
Stephen Riggio:
It’s a good question. It was made into a movie in 1948, which was not very good. But a few years ago, a company called the Leone Film Group, that’s Sergio Leone’s children, I think, run it now. They announced that they were putting the novel in development for a TV series. It was a few years ago, and Giuseppe Tornatore, the great Italian director, was signed on to produce it and direct some episodes. But it hasn’t come to fruition.
Perhaps the publication of my book will put a fire under them. It would be a big, expensive production because it’s historical in nature, has a lot of characters, and takes place over many years, and It requires a lot of location scenes. So it would be an expensive production. I think it would be a great story.
Greg McKeown:
Well, the idea of doing it as a television series feels an excellent approach because you have a better chance of actually telling the legitimate story rather than, you know, I mean, I like the movie Count of Monte Cristo, but of course, it’s nothing. It can’t capture even an Nth part of the actual epic nature of that novel. I mean, that’s one of the longest books certainly that I’ve ever read and one of the longest books that exists. And yet there’s not a page that I was bored or that I wish they’d cut out. Just superbly written and so adventurous in exactly the same way as you’re describing Sicilian Avengers.
I think that the entire story that we’ve discussed today is translation. There’s the translation of what this means to give voice to your ancestors, to give voice to your daughter. And I think it is not impossible or improbable even that they are actually trying to have a voice through you, that they want to have certain things done. And you are suddenly open, this more open vessel, to be able to be influenced. And you’re doing all of this good. And then there’s the translation from here to the screen so even more people can discover it. And I think it’s a… it’s just a marvelous thing that you’re doing.
I advocate that people develop a hundred-year vision in their own minds, meaning a hundred years in the past and then a hundred years in the future. And I’ve done it before, and I’ve thought through it many times, and I always find that it is actually quite destabilizing to do it. You know, it sounds good, but it’s quite… it’s inspiring, but it almost gives a sort of identity vertigo because we’re so used to living life in a birth-to-death frame; of course, we really live life in day increments and thinking in terms of much smaller time frames.
Once you do, once you break that false meaning frame, life feels very strange for a moment because you say, oh my goodness, a hundred years ago, I don’t even know the names of all of my great-grandparents. I know nothing about this great story, an epic that came before, and 100 years in the future, my greatest grandchildren are unlikely to remember me. My name, even my name. If you don’t know the name, you don’t know anything else.
And so that’s a little disorienting. But then, on the other side, you suddenly wake up to this idea of, these people I don’t know the names of shaped me, changed me, impacted me, made my life possible, perfectly impossible without them. And the same for the people after me. And so even in the sense of, at one time, you had this duality of nothingness and everything—you know, that I am small and, at the same time, mighty.
And so I just think there’s a panoramic vision, a hundred-year vision of past and future, our own grand epic adventure. Both in this book, we have this epic adventure and story, but also, you’re helping us in this conversation and in your example and in what you’re doing for all the listeners to unlock their own epic adventure. How are they related to the past? How can they impact the future well beyond their life? And for that, thank you, thank you for doing it, and thank you for being here with me.
Stephen Riggio:
It was great. You can go to sicilianavengers.com. I’ve put up a website that has some additional content where people can explore some of the background about the book.
Greg McKeown:
Book one, paperback. Book two, paperback. E-book. You’ve got all the audiobooks, of course, which is a marvelous way to do it. Who read it?
Stephen Riggio:
Edoardo Ballerini who is one of the best, most sought-after readers.
Greg McKeown:
That’s another really helpful resource. We’ll put that in the show notes as well. Thank you very much.
Stephen Riggio:
It’s wonderful to talk to you, and I appreciate it.
Greg McKeown:
For everybody listening, what an epic conversation we’ve just had, at least from my point of view. What stands out for you? You know, what’s the news for you as you’re listening to this? What can you do in your life? What could you do with your life if you operated from a hundred-year vision? What could you learn from the experience Steve has just shared—from his loss, from his suffering?
What could you discover in creating a life that really matters, that’s connected to the past and to the future? And so, you can take a meaningful action today towards doing that. With that, thank you, really thank you for listening.
