Splendour

Splendour is the government-contracted waste-collection company responsible for collecting trash in Vigàta. Its ordinary municipal work places temporary, politically connected laborers in neglected parts of the town, and its assignment of Pino Catalane and Saro Montaperto to the Pasture puts them at the center of the discovery of Silvio Luparello’s body.

Work and Employment

At the start of the novel, Splendour’s foreman announces that two workers, Peppe Schèmmari and Caluzzo Brucculeri, will be absent because they have been arrested after attempting an armed supermarket robbery. Their vacant jobs are reassigned to Pino and Saro, young land surveyors who are unable to find work in their trained profession and have instead been hired as temporary ecological agents.

Their employment is presented as the result of political string-pulling: Chamber Deputy Cusumano helped secure their positions because they had worked energetically on his election campaign. The account links access to precarious work with electoral service, but does not establish that Cusumano arranged Splendour’s government contract itself. The distinction matters: political influence shapes who gets hired, while the foreman still assigns the workers’ daily tasks.

The Pasture as a Worksite

Pino and Saro are assigned to the Pasture, a broad tract of Mediterranean scrubland on the outskirts of Vigàta that extends almost to the shore. Reaching their sector takes them about half an hour on foot, each pushing a waste cart. The assignment is therefore physically removed from the town’s usual routines, even though it remains part of Splendour’s municipal work.

The rubbish they are sent to collect records a change in the area. Until recently, cleanup there was relatively easy: among scraps of paper, plastic bags, beer and Coca-Cola cans, and exposed or lightly covered human waste, a used condom appeared only occasionally. Over the preceding year, condoms had accumulated in great numbers. The shift accompanies the Pasture’s growth as an illicit sex-and-drug market, which Gegè Gullotta developed to serve soldiers sent to Sicily to help control the territory. Splendour’s workers do not run that market; their job is to clear its physical traces.

The landscape around the route makes the assignment part of a wider history of failed development. Behind the Pasture stand the ruins of a large chemical works, built during a brief period of promised progress and left amid unemployment and compensation claims when that promise collapsed. The company’s crews work through a terrain where abandoned industry and an expanding informal economy meet in the same discarded material.

Discovery and the Investigation

The Pasture assignment brings Pino and Saro into contact with Luparello’s body. Their work makes them witnesses to a discovery that will become a police matter, though their first account does not disclose everything they know. After signing a sworn statement describing their movements before and after finding the body, they leave out two significant facts: they had recognized the dead man almost immediately, and they had hurried to inform lawyer Rizzo. Saro still has a necklace in his pocket as they head home.

The company itself is not shown directing or participating in their concealment. Rather, the contrast is between the formal record produced by the discovery and the knowledge the two workers keep from the authorities. Their ordinary employment has placed them at the scene, but their actions after the discovery carry them beyond the limited role of municipal cleaners.

Narrative Significance

Splendour gives the novel a practical route into Vigàta’s social landscape. Its workers move through places shaped by political patronage, abandoned industrial development, and illicit business, collecting what those systems leave behind. Pino and Saro’s carts and assigned sector connect the everyday labor of public cleanup to the investigation without making the company itself a criminal organization.

Their work also gives the Pasture a double identity: it is both a municipal cleanup zone and a site whose changing refuse signals a changing use of the land. When the two employees discover Luparello’s body, that routine route becomes the point where local labor, concealed information, and public authority converge.