“Dunami tempo, dissi u’ surci a’ nuci, ca ti percio”

“Dunami tempo, dissi u’ surci a’ nuci, ca ti percio” is a proverb about persistence: the mouse asks the nut for time, confident that it will eventually gnaw through it. Vincenzo Florio invokes it as a practical credo for work that others dismiss as impossible, joining patience to an ambition that depends on changing Sicily’s commercial future rather than accepting its limits.

Meaning and Form

The saying gives persistence a small, physical image: a mouse confronting a nut too hard to break at once. Its answer is neither force nor surrender, but time. The proverb’s eventual outcome is contained in its patient request; the mouse will keep working until the obstacle yields.

When Carlo Giachery asks what it means, Vincenzo translates it directly: “Give me time,” the mouse says to the nut. “Give me time and I’ll crunch through you.” The exchange makes the proverb more than a colorful expression. It names the method Vincenzo claims for himself: continue, work patiently, and let results answer disbelief.

Vincenzo’s Commercial Ambition

Vincenzo uses the proverb while describing projects that have drawn ridicule. He has built a tuna-processing facility behind a tonnara and says the Florios have already been canning tuna in oil and selling it for years, with demand continuing to grow. He intends to expand that trade on a large scale, presenting sustained sales and rising demand as evidence against the label of visionary.

He applies the same confidence to the Oretea foundry, which he bought from the Sgroi brothers. Others had argued that a workshop in Palermo could not succeed and that only small shops could survive there. Vincenzo rejects that assumption: if no one thinks on a larger scale, he says, the island will remain in place while the rest of the world advances.

The foundry is not an abstract emblem of progress but part of a specific industrial plan. Vincenzo wants its work to support his ships as they acquire metal hulls and steam engines; a foundry serving his own fleet could reduce the cost of spare parts and other needs. His instruction to Carlo to visit the construction site at Porta San Giorgio, where work on the new head office has slowed, turns the proverb’s patience into an immediate demand for continued effort.

Work, Opposition, and Recurrence

The proverb appears amid a longer record of commercial persistence. The Florios’ spice trade depends on goods traveling through many hands and across long distances, with transport costs accumulating along the way. By the early nineteenth century, British and French colonial commerce has diversified the market and brought more spices into open ports, while Palermo’s aromatari have organized a guild. The proverb’s small contest between mouse and nut thus resonates with the patient work of entering a market shaped by powerful trading routes and established competitors.

At Palazzo Steri, the Florios rent a guarded warehouse near the customs offices for spices in transit or awaiting sale. By paying import duties only when goods enter Palermo, they follow a common wholesaler’s practice, while sourcing products from India through British suppliers and from French colonies through Italian sailors and Livorno. Their stockroom on Via dei Materassai has become too small. The business has advanced rapidly, though it still cannot claim the wealth of the Canzoneris; growth comes through patient handling of goods, storage, tax, and trade rather than a single breakthrough.

Elsewhere, the book sets commercial expansion against the labor and damage that support it. Sicily’s sulfur reaches European markets, especially Britain, after men and children carry basketfuls of yellow stone from winding underground corridors; the fumes have made the land barren and unsuitable even for pasture. The contrast complicates any simple celebration of enterprise: persistence and growth are not detached from the conditions under which commodities are extracted and moved.

The proverb’s meaning also gains force from Vincenzo’s recollection of the bark grinder and the insults the Florios endured when they began selling quinine powder. In his account, opposition does not invalidate innovation; it is what continued work must outlast. His hope that the foundry and steam-powered ships will prove useful follows the same pattern: the projects are not yet vindicated, but time, investment, and practical results may wear down resistance.

Narrative Significance

Carlo laughs at Vincenzo’s fondness for proverbs and remarks that he is more Palermo than some people born there generations earlier. The exchange makes a local saying the language of an expansive commercial imagination. Vincenzo does not discard Palermo’s inherited speech in order to think about new machinery, large-scale canning, or steamships; he uses that speech to express a plan for taking the island beyond its accepted limits.

The mouse and nut also condense the tension in Vincenzo’s ambition. He speaks without arrogance, as if the facts of production and demand will ultimately suffice, yet he knows that others have called him crazy and remembers the insults directed at his family. The proverb gives that conflict a measured answer: not an immediate victory, but the insistence that work continue long enough for the supposedly impossible to become demonstrable.