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HISTORY

Sicily has a richer and more eventful past than any other Mediterranean island. Its strategic importance made it the constant prey of conquerors, many of whom, while contributing a rich artistic heritage, also turned Sicily into one of the most desolate war zones in Europe, their greed utterly transforming its ecology and heaping misery onto the vast majority of its inhabitants.

Prehistoric Sicily

Numerous remains survive of the earliest human settlements in Sicily. The most interesting of these are the cave paintings in the Grotta del Genovese, on Lévanzo in the Egadi Islands, which give a graphic insight into late Ice Age Paleolithic culture between 20,000 and 10,000 BC.

  During the later Neolithic period, between 4000 and 3000 BC, a wave of settlers arrived from the eastern Mediterranean, landing on Sicily’s east coast and in the Aeolian Islands. Examples of their relatively advanced culture – incised and patterned pottery and simple tools – are displayed in the museum on the Aeolian island of Lipari. Agricultural advances, the use of ceramics and the domestication of animals, as well as the new techniques of metalworking imported by later waves of Aegean immigrants in the Copper Age (3000–2000 BC), permitted the establishment of fixed farms and villages. In turn, this caused an expansion of trade, and promoted greater contact with far-flung Mediterranean cultures. The presence of Mycenaean ware from the Greek mainland became more noticeable during the Bronze Age (2000–1000 BC), an era to which the sites of Capo Graziano and Punta Milazzese on the Aeolian Islands belong. In about 1250 BC, further population movements took place, this time originating from the Italian mainland: the Ausonians settled in the Aeolians and the Sikels in eastern Sicily, pushing the indigenous tribes inland. It was the Sikels, from whom Sicily takes its name, who are thought to have first dug the vast necropolis of Pantalica, near Siracusa. At about the same time, the Sicans, a people believed to have originated in North Africa, occupied the western half of the island, as did the Elymians, who claimed descent from Trojan refugees: their chief city, Segesta, was alleged to have been founded by Aeneas’ companion, Acestes.

The Carthaginians and the Greeks

After about 900 BC, Mycenaean and Aegean trading contacts began to be replaced by Carthaginian ones from North Africa, particularly in the west of the island. The Carthaginians – originally Phoenicians from the eastern Mediterranean – first settled at Panormus (modern Palermo), Solus (Solunto) and Motya (Mozia) during the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Their arrival coincided with the establishment of Aegean Greek colonies in the east of Sicily, driven by a shortage of cultivable land back home and beginning with the colonization of Naxos in 734 BC. The Chalcidinians and Naxians who founded this colony were quickly followed by Megarians at Megara Hyblaea, Corinthians at Ortigia (Siracusa), and Rhodians, Cnidians and Cretans in Gela. While continuing to have close links with their original homes, these cities became independent city-states and founded sub-colonies of their own, most important of which were Selinus (Selinunte) and Akragas (Agrigento). Along with the Greek colonies on the Italian mainland, these scattered communities came to be known as Magna Graecia, “Greater Greece”.

  The settlers found themselves with huge resources at their disposal, not least the island’s fertility, which they quickly exploited through the widespread cultivation of corn – so much so that Demeter, the Greek goddess of grain and fecundity, became the chief deity on the island (the lake at Pergusa, near Enna, was claimed to be the site of the abduction of her daughter, Persephone). The olive and the vine were introduced from Greece, commercial activity across the Ionian Sea was intense and profitable, and the magnificence of the temples at Syracuse and Akragas often surpassed that of the major shrines in Greece. But the settlers also imported their native rivalries, and the history of Hellenic Sicily is one of almost uninterrupted warfare between the cities, even if they did generally join forces in the face of common foes such as the Carthaginians.

The Rise of Syracuse

It was the alliance against Carthage of Gela, Akragas and Syracuse, and the resulting Greek victory at Himera in 480 BC, that determined the ascendancy of Syracuse in Sicily for the next 270 years. The defeat, in about 450 BC, of a rebellion led by Ducetius, a Hellenized Sikel, extinguished the remnants of any native resistance to Greek hegemony, and the century which followed has been hailed as the “Golden Age” of Greek Sicily.

  The accumulation of power by Syracusan tyrants attracted the attention of the mainland Greek states; Athens in particular was worried by the rapid spread of Corinthian influence in Sicily. In 415 BC, Athens dispatched the greatest armada ever to have sailed from its port. Later known as the Great Expedition, the effort was in response to a call for help from its ally, Segesta, while at war with Syracuse-supported Selinus. By 413 BC Syracuse itself was under siege, but the disorganization of the attacking forces, who were further hampered by disease, led to their total defeat, the execution of their generals and the imprisonment of 7000 soldiers in Syracuse’s limestone quarries. This victory represented the apogee of Syracusan power. Civil wars continued throughout the rest of the island, attracting the attention of the Carthaginians, who responded to attacks on their territory by sacking in turn Selinus, Himera, Akragas and Gela. A massive counterattack was launched by the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius I, or “the Elder” (405–367 BC). That culminated in the complete destruction of the Phoenician base at Motya; its survivors founded a new centre at Lilybaeum, modern Marsala, on the western tip of the island.

  The general devastation in Sicily caused by these wars was to some extent reversed by Timoleon (345–336 BC), who rebuilt many of the cities and re-established democratic institutions. But the carnage continued under the tyrant Agathocles (315–289 BC), who was unrivalled in his sheer brutality. Battles were fought on the Italian mainland and North Africa, and the strife he engendered back in Sicily didn’t end until Hieron II (265–215 BC) opted for a policy of peacekeeping, and even alliance, with the new power of the day, Rome.

  The First Punic War – which broke out in 264 BC after the mercenary army in control of Messina, the Mamertines, appealed to Rome for help against their erstwhile Carthaginian protectors – left Syracuse itself untouched. It did however once again lead to the ruin of much of the island, before the final surrender of the Carthaginian base at Lilybaeum in 241. For Syracuse and its territories, though, this was a period of relative peace, and Hieron used the breathing space to construct some of the city’s most impressive monuments.

Roman Sicily

Roman rule in Sicily can be said to have begun with the fall of Syracuse. That momentous event became inevitable when the city, whose territory was by now the only part of Sicily still independent of Rome, chose to side with Carthage in the Second Punic War, provoking a two-year siege that ended with the sacking of Syracuse in 211 BC. For the next seven hundred years, Sicily was a province of Rome, though in effect a subject colony, since few Sicilians were granted citizenship until the third century AD, when all inhabitants of the empire were classified as Romans. The island became Rome’s granary or, as Cato had it, “the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed”. As a key strategic province, Sicily suddenly became susceptible to age-old Roman political intrigue, notably during the civil war between Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, and Sextus Pompey, who seized Sicily in 44 BC. For eight years the island’s crucial grain exports were interrupted, and the final defeat of Sextus – in a sea battle off Mylae, or Milazzo – was followed by harsh retribution.

  Once Octavian was installed as emperor, in 27 BC, Sicily entered a more peaceful period of Roman rule, with isolated instances of imperial splendour, notably the extravagant villa at Casale near Piazza Armerina. The island benefited especially from its important role in Mediterranean trade, and Syracuse, which handled much of the passing traffic, became a prominent centre of early Christianity, supposedly visited by Sts Peter and Paul on their way to Rome. Here, and further inland at Akrai, catacombs were burrowed from the third century AD onwards – and in caves throughout Sicily, Christian sanctuaries took their place alongside the shrines of the dozens of other cults prevalent on the island.

LIFE IN ROMAN SICILY

Much of Sicily’s present appearance was determined during the Roman period. Forests were cut down to make way for grain cultivation, and the land was apportioned into large units, or latifondia, which became the basis for the vast agricultural estates into which the island is still to a certain extent divided. Conditions on these estates were so harsh that the second century BC saw two slave revolts, in 135–132 BC and 104–101 BC, involving tens of thousands of men, women and children, most of whom had been Greek-speaking citizens from all over Rome’s newly won Mediterranean and Asian empire. These were isolated incidents, however, and on the whole Sicily benefited from the relative calm bestowed by the Romans. But little of the heavy tribute exacted by Rome was expended on the island itself and, though a degree of local administration existed, all important decisions were taken by the Roman Senate. That was represented on the island by two tax collectors, or quaestors, stationed in Syracuse and Lilybaeum, and a governor (praetor), who normally spent his year-long term extracting as much personal profit from the island as he could. The praetor Verres used his three terms of office, from 73 to 71 BC, to strip the countryside and despoil a large part of the treasure still held in the island’s lavish temples. Cicero’s prosecution of Verres, though undoubtedly exaggerated, constitutes our main source of information on Sicily under the Roman Republic: “When I arrived in Sicily after an absence of four years, it seemed to me a land in which there had been fought a prolonged and cruel war. Those fields and hills which I had seen bright and green I now saw devastated and deserted, and it seemed as if the land itself wept for its ancient farmers.”

Barbarians, Byzantines and the arrival of the Arabs

Though Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 AD, Sicily became prey to another Germanic tribe, the Vandals, who launched their invasion from the North African coast. The island was soon reunited with Italy under the Ostrogoth Theodoric, but the barbarian presence in Sicily was only a brief interlude, terminated in 535 AD when the Byzantine general Belisarius occupied the island. Although a part of the population had been Latinized, Greek remained the dominant culture and language of the majority, and the island willingly joined the Byzantine fold.

  Constantinople was never able to give much attention to Sicily, however. The island was perpetually harried by piratical attacks, particularly from North Africa, where the Moors had become the most dynamic force in the Mediterranean. In around 700, the island of Pantelleria was taken, and only discord among the Arabs prevented Sicily itself from being next. In the event, trading agreements were signed, Arab merchants settled in Sicilian ports, and a fully fledged Arab invasion did not take place until 827, when a Byzantine admiral rebelled against the emperor and invited in the Aghlabid Emir of Tunisia. Ten thousand Arabs, Berbers and Spanish Muslims (known collectively as Saracens) landed at Mazara del Vallo, and Palermo fell four years later, though the invading forces only reached the Straits of Messina in 965. As with the Roman invasion, however, the turning point came with the fall of Syracuse in 878, when its population was massacred and the city plundered of its legendary wealth.

Arab Sicily

Palermo became the capital of the Arabs in Sicily, under whom it grew to become one of the world’s greatest cities, wholly cosmopolitan in outlook, furnished with gardens, mosques (more than anywhere the traveller Ibn Hauqal had seen, barring Cordoba) and luxurious palaces. The Arabs brought great benefits to the rest of the island, too, renovating and extending irrigation works, breaking down many of the unwieldy latifondia and introducing new crops, including citrus trees, sugar cane, flax, cotton, silk, melons and date palms. Mining was developed, the salt industry greatly expanded and commerce improved, with Sicily once more at the centre of a flourishing trade network. Many Sicilian place names testify to the extent of the Arab settlement of the island. Prefixes such as calta (castle) and gibil (mountain) are plentiful, while other terms still in use indicate their impact on fishing, such as the name of the swordfish boats prowling the Straits of Messina (felucca), or the tuna-fishing terminology of the Egadi Islands. Taxation was rationalized and reduced, and religious tolerance was greater than under the Byzantines (though non-Muslims were subject to a degree of social discrimination).

  The Arabs were prone to divisive feuding, however, and when in the tenth century the Aghlabid dynasty was toppled in Tunisia and their Fatimid successors shifted their capital to Egypt, Sicily lost its central position in the Arab Mediterranean empire and was left vulnerable to external attack. In 1038, the Byzantine general George Maniakes attempted to draw the island back under Byzantine sway, but he was unable to extend his occupation much beyond Syracuse. The real threat came from western Europe, particularly from the Normans, some of whom had accompanied Maniakes and seen for themselves the rewards to be gained. One of these, William “Bras de Fer” (“Iron Arm”), who had earned his nickname by his slaying of the Emir of Syracuse with one blow, was the eldest of the Hauteville brothers, whose exploits were soon to change the map of southern Europe.

The Normans

The Hauteville brothers had long been active in southern Italy by the time the youngest of them, Roger, seized Messina in 1061 in response to a call for help by one of the warring Arab factions. It took another thirty years to take control of the whole island, in a series of bloody and destructive campaigns that often involved the enlistment of Arabs on the Norman side. In 1072 Palermo was captured and adopted as the capital of Norman Sicily, and was subsequently adorned with palaces and churches that count among the most brilliant achievements of the era.

  The most striking thing about the Norman period in Sicily is its brief span. In little more than a century, five kings bequeathed an enormous legacy of art and architecture that is still one of the most conspicuous features of the island. When compared with the surviving remains of the Byzantines, who reigned for three centuries, or the Arabs, whose occupation lasted roughly two, the Norman contribution stands out, principally due to its absorption of previous styles: the finest examples of Arab art to be seen in Sicily are elements incorporated into the great Norman churches. It was this fusion of talent that accounted for the great success of Norman Sicily, not just in the arts but in administration, justice and religious tolerance. The policy of integration was largely determined by force of circumstances: the Normans could not count on having adequate numbers of their own settlers, or bureaucrats to form a governmental class, and instead were compelled to rely on the existing framework. They did, however, gradually introduce a Latinized aristocracy and clerical hierarchy from northern Italy and France, so that the Arabic language was largely superseded by Italian and French by 1200.

The Hauteville dynasty

The first of the great Sicilian-Norman dynasty was Count Roger, or Roger I. He was a resolute and successful ruler, marrying his daughters into two of the most powerful European dynasties, one of them to the son of the western (or Holy Roman) emperor Henry IV. Roger’s death in 1101, followed soon after by the death of his eldest son, left Sicily governed by his widow Adelaide as regent for his younger son, who in 1130 was crowned Roger II. This first Norman king of Sicily was also one of medieval Europe’s most gifted and charismatic rulers, who made the island a great melting pot of the most vigorous and creative elements in the Mediterranean world. He spoke Greek, kept a harem and surrounded himself with a medley of advisers, notably George of Antioch, his chief minister, or Emir of Emirs. Roger extended his kingdom to encompass all of southern Italy, Malta and parts of North Africa, and more enduringly drew up the first written code of law in the island.

  His son, William I (1154–66) – “William the Bad” – dissipated these achievements by his enthusiasm for pleasure-seeking and his failure to control the barons, who exploited racial tensions to undermine the king’s authority. During the regency that followed, the Englishman Walter of the Mill had himself elected archbishop of Palermo and dominated the scene for some twenty years, along with two other Englishmen, his brother Bartholomew and Bishop Palmer. This triumvirate preserved a degree of stability, but also encouraged the new king William II (1166–89), “William the Good”, to establish a second archbishopric and construct a cathedral at Monreale to rival that of Palermo, just 10km away. The period saw a shift away from Muslim influence, though Arabs still constituted the bulk of the rural population and William himself resembled an oriental sultan in his style and habits, building a number of Arab-style palaces.

  The death of William, aged only 36 and with no obvious successor, signalled a crisis in Norman Sicily. The barons were divided between Tancred, William’s illegitimate nephew, and Constance, Roger II’s aunt, who had married the Hohenstaufen (or Swabian) Henry, later to become the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. Tancred’s election by an assembly was the first sign of a serious erosion of the king’s authority: others followed, notably a campaign in 1189 against Muslims living on the island, which caused many of them to flee; and a year later the sacking of Messina by the English Richard I, on his way to join the Third Crusade. Tancred’s death in 1194 and the succession of his young son, William III, coincided with the arrival in the Straits of Messina of the Hohenstaufen fleet. Opposition was minimal, and on Christmas Day of the same year Henry crowned himself king of Sicily. William and his mother were imprisoned in the castle at Caltabellotta, never to be seen again.

Hohenstaufen and the Angevins

Inevitably, Henry’s imperial concerns led him away from Sicily, which represented only a source of revenue for him on the very outer limits of his domain. A revolt broke out against his authoritarian rule, which he repressed with extreme severity, but in the middle of it he went down with dysentery, died, and the throne passed to his three-and-a-half-year-old son, who became the emperor Frederick II, Frederick I of Sicily.

  At first the running of the kingdom was entrusted to Frederick’s mother Constance, but there was little stability, with the barons in revolt and a rash of race riots in 1197. Frederick’s assumption of the government in 1220 marked a return to decisive leadership, with an immediate campaign to bring the barons to heel and eliminate a Muslim rebellion in Sicily’s interior. The twin aims of his rule in Sicily were to restore the broad framework of the Norman state, and to impose a more imperial stamp on society, indicated by his fondness for classical Roman allusions in his promulgations and coinage. He allowed himself rights and privileges in Sicily that were impossible in his other possessions, emphasizing his own authority at the expense of the independence of the clergy and the autonomy of the cities. As elsewhere in southern Italy, strong castles were built, such as those at Milazzo, Catania, Siracusa and Augusta, to keep the municipalities in check.

  A unified legal system was drawn up, embodied in his Liber Augustales, while his attempts to homogenize Sicilian society involved the harsh treatment of what had now become minority communities, such as the Muslims. He encouraged the arts, too, championing Sicilian vernacular poetry, whose pre-eminence was admitted by Petrarch and Dante. Frederick acquired the name “Stupor Mundi” (“Wonder of the World”), reflecting his promotion of science, law and medicine, and the peace that Sicily enjoyed during the half-century of his rule.

  However, the balance of power Frederick achieved within Sicily laid the foundations for many of the island’s future woes – for example, the weakening of the municipalities at a time when most European towns were increasing their autonomy. His centralized government worked so long as there was a powerful hand to guide it, but when Frederick died in 1255, decline set in, despite the efforts of his son Manfred, who strove to defend his crown from the encroachments of the barons and the acquisitiveness of foreign monarchs. New claimants to the throne were egged on by Sicily’s nominal suzerain, the pope, anxious to deprive the Hohenstaufen of their southern possession, and he eventually auctioned it, selling it to the king of England, who accepted it on behalf of his 8-year-old son, Edmund of Lancaster. For ten years Edmund was styled “King of Sicily” despite the fact that the bill was never paid.

Charles of Anjou

French pope Urban IV deposed Edmund, who had never set foot in Sicily, and gave the title instead to Charles of Anjou, brother of the French king, on condition that he took over England’s debt and paid the papacy a huge annual tribute. Backed by the papacy, Charles of Anjou embarked on a punitive campaign against the majority of the Sicilian population, who had supported the Hohenstaufen. He plundered land to give to his followers, and imposed a high level of taxation, though in the end it was a grassroots revolt that sparked off the Sicilian Vespers, an uprising against the French that began on Easter Monday 1282; it is traditionally held to have started after the bell for evening services, or Vespers, had rung at Palermo’s church of Santo Spirito. The incident that sparked it all off was an insult to a woman by a French soldier, which led to a general slaughter in Palermo, soon growing into an island-wide rebellion against the French. This was the one moment in Sicilian history when the people rose up as one against foreign oppression – though in reality it was more an opportunity for horrific butchery and the settlement of old scores than a glorious expression of patriotic fervour.

  The movement was given some direction when a group of nobles enlisted the support of Peter of Aragon, who landed at Trapani five months after the initial outbreak of hostilities and was acclaimed king at Palermo a few days later. The ensuing Wars of the Vespers, fought between Aragon and the Angevin forces based in Naples, lasted for another 21 years, mainly waged in Spain and at sea, while, in Aragonese Sicily, people settled down to over five centuries of Spanish domination.

The Spanish in Sicily

Sicily’s new orientation towards Spain, and its severance from mainland Italy, meant that the island was largely excluded from all the great European developments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Large parts of Sicily were granted to the Spanish aristocracy, meaning a continuation of suffocating feudalism, and little impact was made by the Renaissance, while intellectual life on the island was stifled by the strictures of the Spanish Inquisition.

  Although Peter of Aragon insisted that the two kingdoms of Aragon and Sicily should be ruled by separate kings after his death, his successor James reopened negotiations with the Angevins to sell the island back to them. His younger brother Frederick, appointed by James as Lieutenant of Palermo, convened a “parliament”, which elected him king of an independent Sicily as Frederick II (1296–1337). Factions arose, growing out of the friction between Angevin and Aragonese supporters, and open warfare followed until 1372, when the independence of Sicily was guaranteed by Naples. Under the terms of the subsequent treaty the island became known as Trinacria (“three-cornered”), an ancient name revived to distinguish the island from the mainland Regnum Siciliae, ruled by the kingdom of Naples.

  The constant feuding had laid waste to the countryside and the interior of Sicily became depopulated and unproductive, exacerbated by the effects of the Black Death. The feudal nobility lived mainly in the towns, building wealthy mansions in the Chiaramonte or the later, richly ornate Catalan-Gothic styles. A tradition of artistic patronage grew up, though most of the artists operating in Sicily came from elsewhere – for example, Francesco Laurana and the Gagini family were originally from northern Italy. A notable exception was Antonello da Messina (1430–79), who soaked up the latest Flemish techniques on his continental travels. Following the closing off of the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, Sicily was isolated from everywhere except Spain – from which, after 1410, it was ruled directly. Sicily found itself on the very fringes of Europe, and the unification of Castile and Aragon in 1479, followed soon after by the reconquest of the whole Spanish peninsula from the Moors, meant that Sicily’s importance to its Spanish monarchs declined even further. The island came under the rule of a succession of viceroys, who were to wield power for the next four hundred years. Few of these were Sicilian (none at all after the first fifty years), while the only Spanish king to visit the island during the entire viceregal period was Charles V, on his way back from a Tunisian crusade in 1535.

  The island’s political bond to Spain meant that its degeneration deepened in tandem with Spain’s decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were occasional revolts against the excesses of the zealous Inquisition, but on the whole discontent manifested itself in a resort to brigandage, for which the forest and wild maquis of Sicily’s interior provided an ideal environment. The mixed fear and respect that the brigand bands generated played a large part in the future formation of an organized criminal class in Sicily.

  Already burdened by the ever-increasing taxes demanded by Spain to finance its remote religious conflicts (principally, the 1618–48 Thirty Years’ War), the misery of the Sicilians was compounded at the end of the seventeenth century by two appalling natural disasters. The eruption of Etna in 1669 devastated a large part of the area around Catania, while the earthquake of 1693 – also in the east of the island – flattened whole cities, and killed around five percent of the island’s population. With the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and the subsequent Wars of the Spanish Succession, the island once more took a back seat to mainland European interests. It was bartered in the Treaty of Utrecht that negotiated the peace, and given to the northern Italian House of Savoy, only to be swapped for Sardinia and given to Austria seven years later.

The Bourbons

The Austrian government of the island lasted only four years, cut short by the arrival of another Spaniard, Charles of Bourbon, who claimed the throne for himself. Although he never visited Sicily again after his first landing, Charles III (1734–59) brought a refreshingly constructive air to the island’s administration, showing a more benevolent attitude towards his new subjects. But, with his succession to the Spanish throne in 1759 and the inheritance of the Neapolitan crown by his son, Ferdinand IV, it was back to the bad old days. Any meagre attempts at reform made by his viceroys were opposed at every turn by the reactionary local aristocracy, who were closing ranks in response to the progress of the Enlightenment and the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution. When the ensuing Napoleonic Wars wracked Europe, Sicily, along with Sardinia, was the only part of Italy not conquered by Napoleon, while the Neapolitan ancien régime was further buttressed by the decision of Ferdinand (brother-in-law of Marie Antoinette) to wage war against the revolutionary French. He was supported in this by the British, who sustained the Bourbon state, so that when Ferdinand and his court were forced to flee Naples in 1799, it was Nelson’s flagship they sailed in, accompanied by the British ambassador to Naples, Sir William Hamilton, and his wife Lady Emma. Nelson was rewarded for his services by the endowment of a large estate at Bronte, just west of Etna.

The arrival of the British

Four years later, Ferdinand was able to return to Naples, though he had to escape again in 1806 when Napoleon gave the Neapolitan crown to his brother Joseph. This time he had to stay longer, remaining in Palermo until after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 – a stay that was accompanied by a larger contingent of British troops and a heavy involvement of British capital and commerce. Liberalism became a banner of revolt against the king’s continuing tax demands, and Ferdinand’s autocratic reaction provoked the British commander William Bentinck to intervene. Manoeuvring himself into a position where he was the virtual governor of Sicily, Bentinck persuaded the king to summon a new parliament and adopt a constitution whereby the independence of Sicily was guaranteed and feudalism abolished.

  Although this represented a drastic break with the past, the reforms had little direct effect on the peasantry, and, following the departure of the British, the constitution was dropped and Ferdinand (now styling himself Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies) repealed all the reforms previously introduced. Renewed talk of independence in Sicily spilled over into action in 1820, when a rebellion was put down with the help of Austrian mercenaries. The repression intensified after Ferdinand I’s death in 1825, and the island’s fortunes reached a new low under Ferdinand II (1830–59), nicknamed “Re Bomba” for his five-day bombardment of Messina following major insurrections there and in Palermo in 1848–49. Another uprising in Palermo in 1860 proved a spur for Giuseppe Garibaldi to pick Sicily as the starting point for his unification of Italy.

Unification

On May 11, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala with a thousand men. A professional soldier and one of the leading lights of Il Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification, Garibaldi intended to liberate the island from Bourbon rule, in the name of the Piedmont House of Savoy. His skill in guerrilla warfare, backed by an increasingly cooperative peasantry, ensured that the campaign progressed with astonishing speed. Four days after disembarking, he defeated 15,000 Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, closely followed by an almost effortless occupation of Palermo. A battle at Milazzo in July decided the issue: apart from Messina (which held out for another year), Sicily was free of Spain for the first time since Peter of Aragon acquired the crown in 1282.

  A plebiscite was held in October, which returned a 99.5 percent majority in favour of union with the new kingdom of Italy under Vittorio Emanuele II. The result, greeted by general euphoria, marked the official annexation of the island to the Kingdom of Savoy. Later, however, many began to question whether anything had been achieved by this change of ruler. The new parliamentary system, in which only one percent of the island’s population was eligible to vote, made few improvements for the majority of people. Attempts at opposition were met with ruthless force, sanctioned by a distant and misinformed government convinced that the island’s problems were fundamentally those of law and order. Sicilians responded with their traditional defence of omertà, or silent non-cooperation, along with a growing resentment of the new Turin government (transferred to Rome in 1870) that was even stronger than their distrust of the more familiar Spanish Bourbons.

The “southern problem”

A series of reports made in response to criticism of the Italian government’s failure to solve what was becoming known as the “southern problem” found that the lot of the Sicilian peasant was, if anything, worse after Unification than it had been under the Bourbons. Power had shifted away from the landed gentry to the gabellotti, the middlemen to whom they leased the land. These men became increasingly linked with the Mafia, a shadowy, loose-knit criminal association that found it easy to manipulate voting procedures, while simultaneously posing as defenders of the people. At the end of the nineteenth century a new, more organized opposition appeared on the scene in the form of fasci – embryonic trade-union groups demanding legislation to protect peasants’ interests. Violence erupted and the Italian prime minister, Francesco Crispi – a native Sicilian who had been one of the pioneers of the Risorgimento – dispatched a fleet and 30,000 soldiers to put down the “revolt”, while also closing newspapers, censoring postal services and detaining suspects without trial.

  Although there were later signs of progress, in the formation of worker cooperatives and in the enlightened land-reform programmes of individuals such as Don Sturzo, mayor of Caltagirone, the overwhelming despair of the peasantry was expressed in mass emigration. One and a half million Sicilians decided to leave in the years leading up to 1914, most going to North and South America. Many had been left homeless in the wake of the great Messina earthquake of 1908, in which upwards of 80,000 lost their lives. Though the high rate of emigration was a crushing indictment of the state of affairs on the island, it had many positive effects for those left behind, who benefited not only from huge remittances sent back from abroad but from the wage increases that resulted from labour shortages.

The world wars

The Italian conquest of Libya in 1912 was closely followed by World War I, and both were heavy blows to the Sicilian economy. In 1922 Mussolini gained power in Rome and dispatched Cesare Mori to solve “the southern problem” by putting an end to the Mafia. Free of constitutional and legal restrictions, Mori was able to imprison thousands of suspected mafiosi. The effect was merely to drive the criminal class deeper underground, while the alliance he forged with the landed classes to help bring this about dissolved all the gains that had been made against the ruling elite, setting back the cause of agrarian reform. In the 1930s Mussolini’s African concerns and his drive for economic and agricultural self-sufficiency gave Sicily a new importance for Fascist Italy, the island now vaunted as “the geographic centre of the empire”. In the much publicized “Battle for Grain”, wheat production increased, though at the cost of the diversity of crops that Sicily required, resulting in soil exhaustion and erosion. Mussolini’s popularity on the island is best illustrated by his order, in 1941, that all Sicilian-born officials be transferred to the mainland, on account of their possible disloyalty.

  During World War II, Sicily became the first part of Europe to be invaded by the Allies when, in July 1943, Patton’s American Seventh Army landed at Gela, and Montgomery’s British Eighth Army came ashore between Pachino and Pozzallo further east. This combined army of 160,000 men was the largest ever seen in Sicily, but the campaign was longer and harder than had been anticipated, with the Germans mainly concerned with delaying the advance until they had moved most of their men and equipment across the Straits of Messina. Few Sicilian towns escaped aerial bombardment, and Messina itself was the most heavily bombed of all Italian cities before it was taken on August 18.

Post-war Sicily

The aftermath of the war saw the most radical changes in Sicily since Unification. With anarchy and hunger widespread, a wave of banditry and crime was unleashed, while the Mafia were reinstated in their behind-the-scenes role as adjudicators and powerbrokers, now allied to the landowners in the face of large-scale land occupations by a desperate peasantry. Separatism became a potent rallying cry for protesters of all persuasions, who believed that Sicily’s ills could best be solved by cutting its links with the mainland. A Separatist army was formed, financed by some of the gentry, but it lacked the organization or resources to make any great impact. It was largely in response to this call for independence that, in 1946, Sicily was granted regional autonomy, with its own assembly and president. The same year saw the declaration of a republic in Italy, the result of a popular mandate.

  Autonomy failed to heal the island’s divisions, however, and brute force was used by the Mafia and the old gentry against what they perceived as the major threat to their position – communism. The most famous bandit of the time, Salvatore Giuliano, who had previously been associated with the Separatists, was enlisted in the anti-communist cause. He organized a campaign of bombings and assassinations, most notoriously at the 1947 May Day celebrations at Portella della Ginestra. Giuliano’s betrayal and murder in 1950 was widely rumoured to have been carried out to prevent him revealing who his paymasters were, though it all helped to glorify his reputation in the popular imagination.

  By the 1950s, many saw the Christian Democrat party, Democrazia Cristiana, as the best hope to defend their interests. Along with the emotional hold it exerted by virtue of its close association with the Church, the DC could draw on many of the Sicilians’ deepest fears of change; the party was also too closely involved with business and the land-owning classes to have any real enthusiasm for genuine reform. All attempts at enterprise were channelled through the DC’s offices, and favours were bought or bartered. Cutting across party lines, political patronage, or clientelismo, grew to be stronger than ever. It still affects people’s lives on every level today, especially in the field of work – from finding a job to landing a contract. The favours system was also evident in the workings of Sicily’s sluggish bureaucracy, so that the smallest reforms often took years to effect. The essential problem is unchanged today, with the elaborate machinery of the civil service often exploited to accumulate and dispense personal power.

  One area that managed to avoid bureaucratic control or planning of any sort was construction – one of Sicily’s greatest growth industries, the physical evidence of which is among the visitor’s most enduring impressions of the island. The building boom was inextricably connected with the Mafia’s involvement in land speculation, and boosted by the phenomenal rate of urban growth all over Sicily. But in both the towns and rural areas, minimum safety standards were rarely met, as highlighted by the 1968 earthquake, in which 50,000 were made homeless along the Valle di Belice in the west of the island. Industry, too, has been subject to mismanagement and, apart from isolated cases, has rarely fulfilled the potential it promised after the discovery of oil near Ragusa and Gela in the 1950s, and the development of refineries and petrochemical plants along the Golfo di Augusta.

  Substantial subsidies have been channelled into many ventures, largely from the European Union, which Italy joined in 1958. However, it’s still the great urban centres in the north that flaunt their prosperity, while the south of Italy, known as Il Mezzogiorno, is left far behind. Conversely, the huge financial concessions made to Sicily have provoked resentment from Italy’s more self-sufficient regions, who point to massive corruption and incompetence on the island. Few Sicilians would wholly deny this; a longer view, however, argues that Sicily’s disadvantages are derived principally from the past misuse of resources, coupled with a culture and mentality that have never given much credence to collectivist ideals. There is more awareness, too, on the part of the state that the fight against organized crime requires more than moralistic speeches. Indeed, in 1992, following the murders of anti-Mafia investigators Falcone and Borsellino, the chief of police of Palermo was sacked, while 7000 troops were sent to the island to patrol prisons and search towns with a known Mafia presence. There have been significant breakthroughs, though these are mostly connected with a change in the public attitude towards criminality, resulting in part from a campaign to reform Sicily’s dilapidated education system. In the 1990s, a campaign of anti-Mafia education began in Sicilian schools, aiming to cut the secondary-school drop-out rate by encouraging children away from the traditional path of corruption and crime.

Sicily today

Despite superficial improvements, the deep problems that have always bedevilled Sicily remain in some form. Unemployment is still high, and not helped by the diminishing opportunities for emigration, though a million still managed to escape the island between 1951 and 1971, along with the majority of Sicily’s most outstanding artists and writers. Ironically, the late 1990s saw the problem of immigration hitting the agenda for the first time, as political and economic refugees from North Africa started to arrive by regular boatloads, particularly on the two southernmost islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria. These extracomunitari (literally, “those from non-EU countries”) are routinely rounded up and sent to crowded processing centres, where they languish for months, before almost all are eventually returned to their countries of origin. Others slip through and join the already strained jobs market. Despite harsh anti-immigration legislation introduced by the Italian government, illegal immigration continues to be a contentious issue that has affected Italy more than most EU countries.

  In the long run, perhaps the greatest hope for Sicily lies in tourism and related services. Visitor numbers are growing (helped by budget airline routes to fast-growing Trapani airport and the new airport at Comiso), and there’s an increasing emphasis on boutique and eco-tourism, in the shape of hundreds of new B&Bs, rural tourism ventures and outdoor activity operators. Many towns and resorts (particularly on the outlying islands) have a positively fashionable air, while more and more Italians are throwing off their distrust of the south and discovering the island’s potential, especially its outdoor attractions, wildlife and crystal-clear seas. The creation of regional parks in Etna and the Nébrodi and Madonie ranges, and the marine reserves around Ustica and the Egadi and Pelagie islands, are a reflection of this, and an encouraging pointer for the future.

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THE MAFIA IN SICILY

In Sicily, there is “mafiosità” and there is “the Mafia”. Mafiosità refers to a criminal mentality, the Mafia to a specific criminal organization. In Italy’s deep south, a man can look mafioso, or talk like a mafioso, meaning he has the aura – or stench – of criminality about him, even though he has no explicit connection to the crime syndicate. And, while notions of family solidarity and the moral stature of the outlaw mean that mafiosità can never be completely extirpated from Sicilian society, the Mafia is an entity whose members can be eliminated and its power emasculated.

What has always prevented this is the shadowy nature of the organization, protected by the longstanding code of silence, or omertà, that invariably led to accusations being retracted at the last moment, or to crucial witnesses being found dead with a stone, cork or a wad of banknotes stuffed into their mouths, or else simply disappearing off the face of the earth. As a result, many have doubted the very existence of the Mafia, claiming that it’s nothing more than the creation of pulp-thriller writers, the invention of a sensationalist press and the fabrication of an Italian government embarrassed by its inability to control an unusually high level of crime in Sicily.

The background

In 1982, however, proof of the innermost workings of the Mafia’s organization emerged when a high-ranking member, Tommaso Buscetta, was arrested in Brazil, and – after a failed suicide attempt – agreed to prise open the can of worms. His reason for daring this sacrilege, he claimed, was to destroy the Mafia. In its stampede to grab huge drug profits, the “Honoured Society” (La Società Onorata) had abandoned its original ideals: “It’s necessary to destroy this band of criminals”, he declared, “who have perverted the principles of Cosa Nostra and dragged them through the mud.” He was doubtlessly motivated by revenge: all of those he incriminated – Michele Greco, Pippo Calò, Benedetto Santapaola, Salvatore Riina and many others – were leaders of, or allied to, the powerful Corleone family who had recently embarked on a campaign of terror to monopolize the drugs industry, in the process eliminating seven of Buscetta’s closest relatives in the space of four months, including his two sons.

  Buscetta’s statements to Giovanni Falcone, head of Sicily’s anti-Mafia “pool” of judges, and later to the Federal Court in Manhattan, provided crucial revelations about the structure of Cosa Nostra. Mafia “families” are centred on areas, he revealed: villages or quarters of cities from which they take their name. The boss (capo) of each group is chosen by election, and appoints a lieutenant (sottocapo) and one or more consiglieri, or counsellors. Above the families is the cupola, or Commission, a governing body that includes representatives from all the major groupings. Democracy and collective interest, Buscetta claimed, had been replaced in the Commission by the greed and self-interest of the individuals who had gained control. Trials of strength alone now decided the leadership, often in the form of bitter feuds between rival factions – or cosche (literally, “artichokes”, their form symbolizing solidarity).

  The existence of the Commission sets the Mafia apart from the normal run of underworld gangs, for without a high level of organization the international trafficking in heroin in which they engage would be inconceivable. The route is circuitous, starting in the Middle and Far East, moving on to the processing plants in Sicily, and ending up in New York, where American Mafia channels are said to control sixty percent of the heroin market. This multimillion-dollar racket – known in the US as the “Pizza Connection”, because Sicilian pizza parlours were used as covers for the operation – was blown apart chiefly as a result of Buscetta’s evidence, and led to the trial and conviction of the leading members of New York’s Mafia Commission in September 1986.

The history

The Mafia has certainly come a long way since its rustic beginnings in feudal Sicily. Although Buscetta denied that the word “Mafia” is used to describe the organization – the term preferred by its members is “Cosa Nostra” – the word has been in currency for centuries, and is thought to derive from the Arabic, mu’afah, meaning “protection”. In 1863, a play entitled Mafiusi della Vicaria, based on life in a Palermo prison, was a roaring success among the high society of the island’s capital, and gave the word its first extensive usage. When the city rose against its new Italian rulers three years later, the British consul described a situation where secret societies were all-powerful: “Camorre and maffie, self-elected juntas, share the earnings of the workmen, keep up intercourse with outcasts, and take malefactors under their wing and protection.” Until then, mafiosi had been able to pose as defenders of the poor against the tyranny of Sicily’s rulers, but in the years immediately following the toppling of the Bourbon state in Italy mafiosi were able to entrench themselves in Sicily’s new power structure, acting as intermediaries in the gradual redistribution of land and establishing a modus vivendi with the new democratic representatives.

  There is little documentary proof of the rise to power of the “Honoured Society”, but most writers agree that between the 1890s and the 1920s its undisputed boss was Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who had close links with the American “Black Hand”, a Mafia-type association of southern Italian emigrants. Ferro’s career ended with Mussolini’s anti-Mafia purges, instigated to clear the ground for the establishment of a vigorous Fascist structure in Sicily. Cesare Mori, the Duce’s newly appointed Prefect of Palermo, arrived in the city in 1925 with the declared aim of “clearing the ground of the nightmares, threats and dangers which are paralyzing, perverting and corrupting every kind of social activity”. This might have worked, but the clean sweep that Mori made of the Mafia leaders (in all, 11,000 cattle rustlers, thieves and “conspirators” were jailed during this period, often on the basis of flimsy hearsay) was annulled after World War II when the prisons were opened and Mafia leaders, seen as unjustly jailed by the Fascist regime, returned to their regular operations. In the confusion that reigned during Italy’s reconstruction, crime flourished throughout the south, and criminal leagues regrouped in Naples (the Camorra) and Calabria (’ndrangheta). In Sicily, men such as Don Calogero Vizzini were the new leaders, confirmed in their power by the brief Anglo-American postwar administration, in return for their contribution towards the smooth progress of the Allied landings. One of them, Lucky Luciano, a founder member of the American Commission, was even flown out from prison in America to facilitate the invasion. Later he was alleged to be responsible for setting up the Sicilian-American narcotics empire, which was taken over at his death in 1962 by Luciano Leggio, who subsequently manoeuvred himself into the leadership of the Corleone family.

The new Mafia

The cycle was by now complete: the Mafia had lost its original role as a predominantly rural organization, and had transferred its operations to the cities, moving into entrepreneurial activities such as construction, real estate and, ultimately, drug smuggling. The growth of the heroin industry raised the stakes immensely, as shown by the vicious feuds fought over the division of the spoils, and the struggle for control of narcotics trafficking played a key role in the consolidation of power within the Mafia. The Italian state responded with an anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission that sat from 1963 to 1976, and posed enough of a threat to provoke a change of tactics by the Mafia, who began to target important state officials in a sustained campaign of terror. In 1971, Palermo’s chief public prosecutor, Pietro Scaglione, became the first in a long line of “illustrious corpses” – cadaveri eccellenti – which have included journalists, judges, lawyers, police chiefs and left-wing politicians. A new peak of violence was reached in 1982 with the murder in Palermo’s city centre of Pio La Torre, regional secretary of the Communist Party in Sicily, who had proposed a special government dispensation to allow lawyers access to private bank accounts.

  Among the mourners at La Torre’s funeral was the new Sicilian prefect of police, General Dalla Chiesa, a veteran in the state’s fight against the anarchist/terrorist Red Brigades. The prefect began to investigate Sicily’s lucrative construction industry, and his scrutiny of public records and business dealings threatened to expose one of the most enigmatic issues in the Mafia’s organization: the extent of corruption and protection in high-ranking political circles, the so-called “Third Level”. However, exactly 100 days after La Torre’s death, Dalla Chiesa himself was gunned down, together with his wife, in Palermo’s Via Carini. The whole country was shocked, and the murder revived questions about the depth of government commitment to the fight. In his engagement with the Mafia, Dalla Chiesa had received next to no support from Rome, to the extent that Dalla Chiesa’s son had accused the mandarins of the Christian Democrat party – former prime minister Andreotti among them – of isolating his father. Nando Dalla Chiesa refused to allow many local officials to his father’s funeral, including Vito Ciancimino, former mayor of Palermo and a Christian Democrat. Later, Ciancimino was accused, not just of handling huge sums of drug money, but of actually being a sworn-in member of the Corleone family. Those who were present at the funeral included the Italian president and senior cabinet ministers, all of them jeered at by an angry Sicilian crowd.

  To ward off accusations of government inertia or complicity, the law that La Torre had demanded was rushed through Parliament soon afterwards, and was used in the super-trials, or maxiprocessi, that arose from the confessions of Buscetta and the other pentiti (penitents) who had followed his lead. The biggest of these trials, lasting eighteen months, started in February 1986, when five hundred mafiosi appeared in a specially built maximum-security bunker adjoining Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. The insecurity felt by the Mafia was reflected in continuing bloodshed in Sicily throughout the proceedings, but the worst was to come after the trial closed in December 1986, starting right on the steps of the courthouse with the murder of one of the accused mafiosi – many of whom were freed after they had squealed on their accomplices. Of those who were convicted, 19 received life sentences, and 338 others sentences totalling 2065 years.

The fightback in the 1990s

The violence reached a new level of ferocity during the 1990s, starting in 1992 with a wave of assassinations of high-profile figures. In March, Salvatore Lima, a former mayor of Palermo who later became a Euro MP, was shot dead outside his villa in Mondello. Lima didn’t have police bodyguards because he didn’t believe he needed them; he had, in fact, been in the Mafia’s pocket throughout his political career. His “crime” was his failure to fix the Supreme Court, which had gone ahead and confirmed the convictions of scores of mafiosi who had been incriminated in the super-trials of the 1980s.

  This murder was followed by two more atrocities in quick succession: in May, the best-known of Sicily’s anti-Mafia crusaders, Giovanni Falcone, was blown up by half a tonne of TNT on his way into Palermo from the airport, together with his wife and three bodyguards, while two months later his colleague, Paolo Borsellino (with five of his police guards), was the victim of a car bomb outside his mother’s house, also in Palermo. As ever, public opinion was divided over what it all meant. There were those who claimed that these murders were public gestures, while others saw in them increasing evidence of the panic percolating through the Mafia’s ranks in the face of the growing number of defections of former members who were turning pentiti.

  The carnage certainly propelled the state into action, and a dramatic breakthrough came shortly afterwards. In January 1993, Salvatore Riina, the so-called “Boss of all the Bosses”, and the man held ultimately responsible for the murder of the anti-Mafia judges, was arrested. Leoluca Bagarella, Riina’s successor and brother-in-law, and the convicted killer of the chief of the Palermo Flying Squad in 1979, was captured in 1995 (Bagarella’s hideout turned out to be a luxury apartment overlooking the heavily guarded home of two of the judges who had helped catch him). Another of the Corleone clan, Giovanni Brusca, was arrested in 1996 – a particularly gratifying coup for the anti-Mafia forces, as Brusca was one of the organization’s most ruthless hitmen, the mastermind behind Falcone’s assassination and believed to have been responsible for the strangling of an informant’s 11-year-old son, whose body was then disposed of in a vat of acid. Elsewhere, Natale D’Emanuele, alleged to be the financial wizard behind the Mafia in Catania, was arrested and charged with trafficking arms throughout Italy, using hearses and coffins to transport them in a throwback to 1930s Chicago.

  On the political front, Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo who was forced out of office by his own Christian Democrat party in 1990, established an independent power base on an anti-Mafia ticket, at the head of his Rete (Network) party. Meanwhile, the confessions of Tommaso Buscetta began to provide evidence for the first time of the postwar alliance between Italy’s former leading party and organized crime. Allegations inexorably focused on the very highest levels of government, and specifically on the relationship of Mafia stooge Salvatore Lima to his protector, Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat leader and Italy’s most successful postwar politician. Formerly considered untouchable, Andreotti finally bowed to increasing pressure to relinquish his parliamentary immunity and, in September 1995, aged 75, went on trial in Palermo for complicity and criminal association. Much fuss was made of the famous bacio, a kiss he was reported to have symbolically exchanged with Riina, according to pentiti revelations in 1994. However, the fact that most of the charges levelled against Andreotti were based on the testimony of Mafia informers (and therefore unreliable witnesses) led to Andreotti’s complete acquittal in 1999. Many saw the result as simply further evidence of the famous cunning and survival skills of this political stalwart, which have given him the nickname la volpe (“the fox”).

  Statements by pentiti and others accused of Mafia associations were also at the bottom of investigations into the business dealings of the then-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. This time they were considered serious enough to warrant a raid on Berlusconi’s Milan headquarters by an elite anti-Mafia police unit in July 1998, and a hasty dash to Sicily by Berlusconi to defend himself against charges of money-laundering for Cosa Nostra. Despite these high-profile events, though, the very concept of Mafia involvement was becoming increasingly irrelevant to most Italians, as reports of political and business corruption began to dominate public life throughout the 1990s. As the mayor of Venice remarked, in response to whispers of Mafia involvement in the fire that destroyed La Fenice opera house in 1996, “claiming it was burnt by the Mafia is about as useful as saying it was attacked by alien spacecraft.”

Contemporary events

Since the turn of the millennium, the violence has for the most part calmed down. While killings still occur, few political figureheads are targeted these days, perhaps because fewer are willing to take the visible risks that sealed the fate of crusaders like Falcone and Borsellino. More Mafia bosses have been jailed – Bernardo Provenzano, for thirteen years capo dei capi, was captured in 2006, quickly followed by 52 arrest warrants against the top echelons of Cosa Nostra in Palermo, while the man thought to be Provenzano’s successor, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, was arrested in 2007. Perhaps more significantly, the last decade has seen the repossession by Palermo’s anti-Mafia magistrate of billions of euros in assets held by mafiosi, largely from the real estate and construction industries.

  The most important development, however, has been the growth of a new open attitude towards the Mafia, in contrast to the previous denial and omertà. One of the most watched TV programmes in Italy in recent years has been La Piovra (“The Octopus”), a drama series along the lines of The Sopranos, while in Corleone, an anti-Mafia centre has opened to educate both foreigners and Sicilians alike. Sicilians themselves are now bolder than ever in their public demonstrations of disgust at the killings and intimidation, and a new movement against paying pizzo, or protection money, has gathered force throughout the island. An increasing number of brave individuals are willing to make a stand: people such as Rita Borsellino, sister of murdered judge Paolo Borsellino and now an anti-Mafia figurehead, or Giovanna Terranova, widow of another “illustrious” victim, Judge Cesare Terranova (killed in 1979), who launched a women’s movement against the Mafia with the words, “If you manage to change the mentality, to change the consent, to change the fear in which the Mafia can live – if you can change that, you can beat them.”

  It is precisely that element of “consent” among ordinary Sicilians that has always been the strongest weapon in the Mafia’s armoury, indeed the very foundation of the Mafia’s existence, bolstered by an attitude that has traditionally regarded the mafioso stance as a revolt against the State, justified by centuries of oppression by foreign regimes. This historical dichotomy is perhaps best expressed by one of Sicily’s greatest writers, Leonardo Sciascia, who proclaimed, “It hurts when I denounce the Mafia because a residue of Mafia feeling stays with me, as it does in any Sicilian. So in struggling against the Mafia I struggle against myself. It is like a split, a laceration.”

  At least the problem is being confronted, and few Sicilians now hold any illusions about the true nature of the Mafia, shorn of its one-time altruistic ideals – if they ever existed. And crucially, the myth of the Mafia’s invincibility has been irreparably dented.

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SICILIAN BAROQUE

Most of the church and civic architecture that you’ll come across in Sicily, certainly in the east of the island, is Baroque in style. More particularly, it’s of a type known as Sicilian Baroque. What follows is a brief introduction to the subject, designed to serve as a handy reference for some of the more important aspects of the style mentioned in the Guide.

Origins

To some extent, the qualities that attract art historians to the Sicilian Baroque – its “warmth and ebullience”, “gaiety”, “energy”, “freedom and fantasy”– typify all Baroque architecture. The style grew out of the excesses of Mannerism, a distorted sixteenth-century mode of painting and architecture that had flourished in Italy in reaction to the restraint of the Renaissance. The development of a full-blown, ornate Baroque style followed in the late sixteenth century, again originating in Italy, and it quickly found a niche in other countries touched by the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits saw in Baroque art and architecture an expression of a revitalized Catholicism, its theatrical forms involving the congregation by portraying spiritual ecstasy in terms of physical passion. The origin of the word “Baroque” itself is uncertain: the two most popular theories are that it comes either from the seventeenth-century Portuguese barroco, meaning a misshapen pearl, or the term barocco, used by philosophers in the Middle Ages to mean a contorted idea. Whatever its origins, it was used by contemporary critics in a derogatory sense, implying odd or extravagant shapes, as opposed to the much-vaunted Classical forms of the Renaissance.

  Although Baroque was born in Rome, the vogue quickly spread throughout Europe. Everywhere, the emphasis was firmly on elaborate ornamentation and spectacle, something that reflected the growing power of the aristocracy, who had begun to challenge the established wealth and tradition of the Church. The primary motivating force behind the decoration of the buildings was the need to impress the neighbouring gentry; building to the glory of God came a poor second.

  Some of the finest examples of Baroque architecture are to be found in Sicily, although there’s some debate as to the specific origins of the Sicilian Baroque style. During the eighteenth century alone, Sicily was conquered and ruled in turn by the Spanish Habsburgs, the Spanish Bourbons, the House of Savoy, the Austrian Habsburgs and the Bourbons from Naples, lending a particularly exuberant flavour to its Baroque creations – which some say was borrowed from Spain. Others argue that the dominant influence was Italian: Sicilian architects tended to train and to travel in Italy, rather than Spain, and brought home what they learned on the mainland, adapting prevalent Roman Baroque ideas to complement peculiarly Sicilian architectural traditions. Both theories contain an element of the truth, though perhaps more pertinent is Sicily’s unique long-term history: two and a half millennia of invasion and domination have produced a very distinct culture and society – one that is bound to have influenced, or even produced, an equally distinct architectural form.

Baroque towns

Sicily’s seismic instability has profoundly affected its architectural history. The huge earthquake of 1693 that almost flattened Catania, and completely destroyed Noto, Ragusa, Avola and Modica, provided a fantastic opportunity for local architects, who began massive rebuilding programmes in the southeast corner of Sicily. To them, a Baroque town aspired to be, and should be seen to be, a centre of taste and sophistication, They designed their new towns to delight their citizens, to encourage the participation of passers-by and to impress outsiders, with long vistas contriving to focus on the facade of a church or a palace, or an unexpected view of the sea. To enhance the visual effect even more, a building was designed to offer multiple, changing views from different angles of approach. This way, a completed plan might include all the buildings in a square or series of squares, and the experience of walking from place to place through varied but harmonious spaces was considered as important as the need to arrive at a destination. Moreover, as much of eighteenth-century Sicilian town-life took place outside, the facade of a building became synonymous with the wealth and standing of its occupant. External features became increasingly elaborate and specialized, and some parts of buildings – windows and staircases, for example – were often merely there for show. Invariably, what seem to be regular stone facades have been cosmetically touched up with plaster to conceal an asymmetry or an angle of less than ninety degrees: a self-conscious approach to town planning that can sometimes give the impression of walking around a stage set. Interestingly, this approach remained confined to the south and east of Sicily; outside the earthquake zone, in the west of the island, local architectural traditions continued to dominate in towns that hadn’t had the dubious benefit of being levelled and left for the planners.

The “ideal city”

Ideally, where there was scope for large-scale planning, an entire city could be constructed as an aesthetic whole. As early as 1615 the Venetian architect and theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi published a treatise, Dell’Idea dell’architettura universale, in which he stated that the architectural harmony of the “ideal city” should reflect the perfect relationship between the prince, the judiciary, the Church, the marketplace and the populace.

  Noto is an almost perfect example of Scamozzi’s ideal. After the 1693 earthquake, the old town was so devastated that it was decided to move its site and rebuild from scratch, and the plan that was eventually accepted was almost an exact replica of Scamozzi’s. Noto is constructed on a grid plan, traversed from east to west by a wide corso crossing a main piazza, which is itself balanced by four smaller piazzas. The buildings along the corso show remarkable balance and grace, while the attention of the Baroque planners to every harmonious detail is illustrated by the use of a warm, golden stone for the churches and palazzi.

  Neighbouring towns in the southeast were also destroyed by the earthquake and rebuilt along similar lines. Both Avola and Grammichele were moved from their hill-top positions to the coastal plain, and their polygonal plans were similarly influenced by Scamozzi. Grammichele, particularly, retains an extraordinary hexagonal layout, unique in Sicily. Ragusa is more complex, surviving today as two towns: the medieval Ragusa Ibla, which the inhabitants rebuilt after the earthquake, and the Baroque upper town of Ragusa, which is built on a sloping grid plan, rather similar to Noto. Although Ibla isn’t built to any kind of Baroque pattern, it does lay claim to one of the most spectacular of Sicilian Baroque churches.

  Catania was not completely destroyed by the earthquake, but was instead rebuilt over its old site. Broad streets were built to link existing monuments and to facilitate rescue operations in case of another earthquake. The city is divided into four quarters by wide streets that meet in Piazza del Duomo, and wherever possible these spaces are used to maximize the visual impact of a facade or monument. The main Piazza del Duomo was conceived as a uniform set piece, while the main street, Via Etnea, cuts a swath due north from here, always drawing the eyes to Mount Etna, smoking in the distance.

  On the other side of the island, Baroque Palermo evolved without the impetus of natural disaster. There’s no comparable city plan, Palermo’s intricate central layout owing more to the Arabs than to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century designers; what Baroque character the city possesses has almost entirely to do with its highly individual churches and palaces. These were constructed in a climate of apparent opulence but encroaching bankruptcy; as the Sicilian aristocrats were attracted to Palermo to pay court to the Spanish viceroy, they left the management of their lands to pragmatic agents, whose short-sighted policies allowed the estates to fall into neglect. This ate away at the wealth of the gentry, who responded by mortgaging their lands in order to maintain their living standards. The grandiose palaces and churches they built in the city still stand, but following the damage caused during World War II many are in a state of terrible neglect and near collapse; wild flowers grow out of the facades, and chunks of masonry frequently fall into the street below.

Specific features

Eighteenth-century aristocrats in Palermo escaped the heat to summer villas outside the city, and many of these still survive around Bagheria. The villas tend to be simply designed, but are bedecked with balconies and terraces for afternoon strolling, and were approached by long, impressive driveways. Above all, they are notable for their external staircases, leading to the main entrance on the first floor (the ground floor usually contained the kitchen and servants’ quarters). It’s typical of the Baroque era that an external feature should take on such significance in a building – and that they should show such a remarkable diversity, each reflecting the wealth of the individual owners. Beyond the fact that they were nearly always double staircases, symmetrical to the middle axis of the facade, each was completely different.

  While balconies had always been a prominent feature of Sicilian domestic architecture, during the eighteenth century they became prolific. The balcony supports, or buttresses, were elaborately carved: manic heads, griffins, horses, monsters and mythical figures all featured as decoration, fine examples of which survive at Noto’s Palazzo Villadorata, as well as in Modica and Scicli. The wrought-iron balustrades curved outwards, almost like theatre boxes, to allow room for women’s billowing skirts.

  Church building, too, flourished during this period. Baroque architects could let their imaginations run wild: the facade of the Duomo at Siracusa was begun in 1728, based on designs by Andrea Palma of Palermo, and the result is highly sophisticated and exciting. Other designs adapted and modified accepted forms for church architecture, as well as inventing new ones. In Palermo especially, typically Sicilian elements – like central circular windows – were used to great effect.

  It was in the church interiors, however, that Sicilian Baroque came into its own, with tomb sculpture ever more ostentatious and stucco decoration abundant. Inlaid marble, a technique introduced from Naples at the start of the seventeenth century, became de rigueur and reached its prime during the second half of the century, when entire walls or chapels would be decorated in this way. Palermo fields some of the best examples of all these techniques, at their most impressive in the church of San Giuseppe dei Teatini, designed by Giacomo Besio, a Genovese who lived most of his life in Sicily. For real over-the-top detail, though, the churches of Santa Caterina and II Gesù, also in Palermo, conceal a riot of inlaid marble decoration.

Architects and sculptors

Rosario Gagliardi was responsible for much of the rebuilding of Noto and Ragusa, and became known as one of the most important architects in southeast Sicily. Born in Siracusa in 1698, he worked in Noto as a carpenter from the age of 10, and was first acknowledged as an architect in 1726. Between 1760 and 1784 he was chief architect for the city of Noto, and during this time also worked on many different projects in Ragusa and Modica. As far as is known, he never travelled outside Sicily, let alone to Rome, yet he absorbed contemporary architectural trends from the study of books and treatises, and reproduced the ideas with some flair.

  Gagliardi’s prime interest was in facades, and his work achieved a sophisticated fusion of Renaissance poise, Baroque grandeur and local Sicilian ornamentation. He had no interest, however, in spatial relationships or structural innovation, and the interiors of his buildings are disappointing when compared to the elaborate nature of their exteriors. Perhaps his most significant contribution was his development of the belfry as a feature. Sicilian churches traditionally didn’t have a separate belltower, but incorporated the bells into the main facade, revealed through a series of two or three arches – an idea handed down from Byzantine building. Gagliardi extended the central bay of the facade into a tower, a highly original compromise satisfying both the local style and the more conventional notions of design from the mainland. The belfry on the church of San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla, Gagliardi’s masterpiece, is an excellent example of this.

  The principal architect on the design and rebuilding of Catania after the 1693 earthquake, Giovanni Battista Vaccarini, was born in Palermo in 1702. He trained in Rome and embraced the current idiom, working with such illustrious figures as Alessandro Specchi (who built the papal stables) and Francesco de Sanctis (designer of the Spanish Steps). In 1730 he arrived in Catania, having been appointed as city architect by the Senate, and at once began work on finishing the Municipio. Outside he placed a fountain, whose main feature is an obelisk supported by an elephant, the symbol of Catania – reminiscent of Bernini’s elephant fountain in Rome.

  Giacomo Serpotta, master of the Palermitan oratories, was born in Palermo in 1656. He cashed in on the opulence of the Church and specialized in decorating oratories with moulded plasterwork in ornamental frames. He would include life-sized figures of Saints and Virtues, surrounded by plaster draperies, trophies, swags of fruit, bouquets of flowers and other extravagances much beloved of the Baroque. Among his most remarkable works is the Oratory of the Rosary in the church of Santa Zita, where the end wall is a reconstruction of the Battle of Lépanto. Three-dimensional representation is taken to an extreme here, and actual wires are used as rigging.

  Other Baroque architects are less well known, but are influential in Sicily all the same. Giacomo Amato (1643–1732) was a monk, sent to Rome in 1671 to represent his Order, where he came into contact with the works of Bernini and Borromini. Dazzled by what he’d seen, he neglected his religious duties after his return to Palermo in order to design some of the city’s most characteristic churches, Sant’Ignazio all’Olivell and San Domenico among them. Vincenzo Sinatra had a more traditional career, starting as a stonecutter before working with Gagliardi in the 1730s as his foreman. In 1745 he married Gagliardi’s niece, a move which did him no harm at all, since by 1761, when Gagliardi had a stroke, Sinatra was managing all his affairs. For ten years he directed the construction of Noto’s Municipio, and during the rest of his life Sinatra worked in collaboration with the other city architects on a variety of projects. More important was Giovanni Vermexio, who was active in Siracusa at around the same time. His work graces the city’s Piazza del Duomo, notably the Palazzo Arcivescovile, while he gets a couple of ornate-interior credits, too, in the shape of one of the Duomo’s chapels, and the octagonal Cappella di San Sepolcro in the church of Santa Lucia in the Achradina quarter of Siracusa.

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BOOKS

Although only a few modern writers have travelled in and written about Sicily, the island has provided the inspiration for some great literature, by both Sicilians and foreign visitors. Translations of Italian and Sicilian classics are also often available at bookshops in major towns and resorts in Sicily. The best books in this selection are marked by a   symbol.

TRAVEL AND GENERAL

 Vincent Cronin The Golden Honeycomb. Disguised as a quest for the mythical golden honeycomb of Daedalus, this classic, erudite travelogue is a searching account of a sojourn in Sicily in the 1950s.

Duncan Fallowell To Noto. Follows the author’s trip from London to Baroque Noto in an old Ford – a witty tale, complete with pithy observations on Sicily and the Sicilians.

Matthew Fort Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons. Cheery food-writer Fort returns to the island he first visited in the 1970s, only this time he comes on a Vespa and eats his way around, from ice cream to anchovies.

 Norman Lewis In Sicily. A sweeping portrait of the island which Lewis came to know well through his wife and her family. Subjects range from reflections on Palermo’s ruined palazzi to the impact of immigration, and there’s plenty on the Mafia.

Daphne Phelps A House in Sicily. An Englishwoman inherits a grand palazzo in Taormina in the late 1940s, and turns it into a guesthouse to make ends meet. Cue the usual cultural misunderstandings while she learns to love the locals, leavened by vignettes of her eminent guests – including Bertrand Russell, Tennessee Williams and Roald Dahl.

Gaia Servadio Motya. On one level, an account of Phoenician history and culture as they relate to the excavated ruins of Motya – but in truth, so much more than that, as Servadio explores the fabric of Sicily and its people in uncompromising, enlightening detail.

 Mary Taylor Simeti On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal. Sympathetic record of a typical year in Sicily by an American who married a Sicilian professor and has lived in the west of the island since the early 1960s. It’s full of keenly observed detail about flora and fauna, customs, the harvests, festivals and – above all – the Sicilians themselves.

Elio Vittorini Conversations in Sicily. A Sicilian emigrant returns from the north of Italy after fifteen years to see his mother on her birthday. The conversations of the title are with the people he meets on the way, and reveal a prewar Sicily that, while affectionately drawn, is ridden with poverty and disease.

SICILIAN CUISINE AND COOKBOOKS

There are Sicilian recipes in all the major Italian cookbooks, starting with Elizabeth David’s classic Italian Food (published 1954), the book that introduced Mediterranean flavours and ingredients to Britain. (Olive oil, famously, was previously something you could only buy in chemists’.) Antonio Carluccio, Britain’s avuncular Italian master, is good on Sicilian fish and snacks in his Southern Italian Feast – his arancini recipe is definitive – while Southern Italian Cooking by Valentina Harris has an excellent chapter on Sicilian cooking. However, there are also plenty of specifically Sicilian books on the market, notably  Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti, which combines recipes with fascinating detail about life and traditions on the island. Simeti also co-authored Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood, alongside Maria Grammatico, who was raised in a convent where she learned the pastry-cooking skills that she employs in her outlets in Erice. For an anecdotal trawl through the classics and the lesser-known dishes, including several from out-of-the-way places like Pantelleria and Stromboli, consult The Flavors of Sicily by Anna Tasca Lanza, the respected owner of a cooking school established at her family estate on the island – hence also her Heart of Sicily: Recipes and Reminiscences of Regaleali, a Country Estate. At the other end of the social scale, Pani Caliatu, by Susan Lord and Danilo Baroncino, explores the austere cuisine of the Aeolian Islands in a fascinating and beautifully designed book that combines social history, interviews, recipes and photographs.

HISTORY, POLITICS AND ARCHEOLOGY

David Abulafia Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor. Definitive account of the Hohenstaufen king, greatest of the medieval European rulers, with much on his reign in Sicily. It’s a reinterpretation of the received view of Frederick, revealing a less formidable king than the omnipotent and supreme ruler usually portrayed. Also see the same author’s Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean, 1100–1400.

 Sandra Benjamin Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History. An instantly engaging, intelligently researched book that brings the history of Sicily vividly to life. If you buy only one book on Sicily, make it this one.

Samuel Butler The Authoress of the Odyssey. Eccentric book by the author of dystopian novel Erewhon which presents the argument that the Odyssey was written by a Sicilian woman, and was set around Trapani and in the Egadi Islands.

Brian Caven Dionysius I: Warlord of Sicily. The life of Dionysius I, by a historian who sees him not as a vicious tyrant but as a valiant crusader against the Carthaginians.

Christopher Hibbert Garibaldi and His Enemies. A popular treatment of the life and revolutionary works of Giuseppe Garibaldi, thrillingly detailing the exploits of “The Thousand” in their lightning campaign from Marsala to Milazzo.

R. Ross Holloway The Archaeology of Ancient Sicily. The standard work on the ancient monuments and archeological discoveries of Sicily, from the Paleolithic to the later Roman period.

 John Julius Norwich The Normans in Sicily. Published together under one title, J.J. Norwich’s The Normans in the South and Kingdom in the Sun tell the story of the Normans’ explosive entry into the south of Italy, and their creation in Sicily of one of the most brilliant medieval European civilizations.

Steven Runciman The Sicilian Vespers. The classic account of Sicily’s large-scale popular uprising in the thirteenth century. Runciman’s A History of the Crusades: 1, 2 & 3, meanwhile, covers the Norman kings of Sicily, as well as the crusading Frederick II.

CRIME AND SOCIETY

John Dickie Cosa Nostra. Dickie, an Italian professor at University College London, is an expert on the Mafia and its role in Sicilian society, and offers an in-depth look at the secret workings of the Mafia, from its early days in the mid-1800s to its current manifestation.

David Lane Into the Heart of the Mafia. This look at life in the Italian south offers a contemporary journey through corruption from Naples to Sicily, an essential counterpoint to any number of expat-life-in-a-vineyard experiences.

Norman Lewis The Honoured Society. Originally written in the 1960s, this is the most famous account of the Mafia, its origins, personalities and customs, and is still the most accessible introduction available to the subject.

Clare Longrigg Boss of Bosses. One of the Mafia’s most notorious capo dei capi (Boss of Bosses), Bernardo Provenzano, was arrested in Sicily in 2006 after four decades spent evading the law. Longrigg’s careful unravelling of his successful shifting of criminal enterprise into mainstream business explains the subtitle: How One Man Saved the Sicilian Mafia.

 Gavin Maxwell The Ten Pains of Death. Maxwell lived in Scopello during the 1950s, and recorded the lives of his neighbours in their own words. There’s much on Sicilian small-town life and poverty, and sympathetic portraits of traditional festivals and characters. His God Protect Me from My Friends is a sympathetic biography of the notorious bandit Salvatore Giuliano, ripe with intrigue and double-dealing.

 Peter Robb Midnight in Sicily. The Australian Robb spent fifteen years in the Italian south tracing the contorted relations between organized crime and politics. Here, he focuses on the structure of the Mafia, the trials of the bosses in the 1980s, the high-profile assassinations that ensued, and the trial of Andreotti, providing deep insights into the dynamics of Sicilian society.

Alexander Stille Excellent Cadavers. An important book tracing the modern fight against the Mafia as led by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, whose assassinations in 1992 finally sparked the Italian state into action.

NOVELS ABOUT SICILY

Allen Andrews Impossible Loyalties. Fast-moving narrative of an Anglo-Sicilian family caught up in the turmoil of World War II, containing an authentic portrait of prewar Messina society.

Michael Dibdin Blood Rain. Dibdin’s Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen, is an idiosyncratic loner, always up against the Italian state and society in an unequalled series of crime novels. Here, Dibdin sends him to Sicily, with dark consequences for all concerned, and offers the only glimpse you are ever likely to have of Catania’s long-closed Museo Civico.

Simonetta Agnello Hornby The Marchesa; The Almond Picker. From aristocratic nineteenth-century Palermo to 1960s’ village life, Hornby’s bestselling Sicily novels are full of subtle intrigue, voluptuous imagery and period detail.

Norman Lewis The March of the Long Shadows. An affectionate novel set in postwar Sicily, dealing with the Separatist movement, the bandit Giuliano and a whole cast of endearing characters. The Sicilian Specialist is Lewis’s Mafia thriller, which flits from Sicily to the US to Cuba on the trail of a Mob assassin.

 Dacia Maraini The Silent Duchess. The tale of a noble eighteenth-century family seen through the eyes of a young duchess – beautifully written and dripping with authentic detail. Bagheria, meanwhile, is a delightfully engaging memoir of Maraini’s childhood in the town of the title.

Lily Prior La Cucina. Subtitled a “novel of rapture”, this chronicles the romance between a spinster librarian from Castiglione and an enigmatic English chef. Drawn into the plot are the Mafia, copious recipes and the convolutions of Sicilian family life.

 Mario Puzo The Godfather. The New York Godfather – Don Corleone – was born in Sicily and the majestic book (a great read, even if you’ve seen the films) touches on all things Sicilian.

SICILIAN LITERATURE

Gesualdo Bufalino The Plague Spreader’s Tale, Blind Argus, The Keeper of Ruins and Night’s Lies. Bufalino arrived late on the literary scene, publishing his first novel, The Plague Sower, in his 60s. Subsequent publications enhanced the reputation made by this remarkable debut, notably Night’s Lies, which won Italy’s most respected literary award, the Strega Prize, in 1988. Bufalino himself – seeking to explain the Sicilian character – commented, “Don’t forget that even our most obscene vices nearly always bear the seal of sullen greatness”.

 Andrea Camilleri Inspector Montalbano Mysteries. Born in Agrigento, Camilleri is one of Italy’s favourite modern authors, though he writes in Sicilian dialect that not all Italians can understand. His intelligent – and often vulgar and graphic – crime novels have subsequently become hugely popular all over Europe, masterfully translated into English by the New York poet, Stephen Sartorelli. Inspector Montalbano delves deep into the folds of Sicilian culture in an ongoing series, starting with The Shape of Water. More than a dozen of the books have been translated into English, including The Terracotta Dog, The Voice of the Violin and August Heat.

 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard. The most famous Sicilian novel, written after World War II but recounting the dramatic nineteenth-century years of transition from Bourbon to Piedmontese rule from an aristocrat’s point of view. David Gilmour’s The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, is the first biography in English of Lampedusa, a readable account of the life of an otherwise rather dull man.

Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Late Mattia Pascal, Short Stories. His most famous and accomplished work, Six Characters…, written in 1921, and his Henry IV, written a year later, contain many of the themes that dogged Pirandello throughout his writing career – the idea of a multiple personality and the quality of reality. The Late Mattia Pascal is an entertaining early novel (1904), though the collection of abrasive short stories is perhaps the best introduction to Pirandello’s work.

 Leonardo Sciascia Sicilian Uncles, The Wine-Dark Sea, Candido, The Knight and Death, Death of an Inquisitor, The Day of the Owl, Equal Danger. Sciascia’s short stories and novellas are packed with incisive insights into the island’s quirky ways, and infused with the author’s humane and sympathetic view of its people. The first to describe the Mafia in Italian literature, he wrote metaphysical thrillers in which the detectives often turn out to be the hunted; the best known is The Day of the Owl.

Giovanni Verga Short Sicilian Novels, Cavalleria Rusticana, Maestro Don Gesualdo, I Malavoglia or The House by the Medlar Tree, A Mortal Sin, La Lupa and Sparrow. Born in the nineteenth century in Catania, Verga spent several years in various European salons before coming home to write his best work. Much of it is a reaction against the pseudo-sophistication of society circles, stressing the simple lives of ordinary people, with much emotion, wounded honour and feuds to the death. D.H. Lawrence’s translations are suitably vibrant, with excellent introductions.

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FILMS

Though Sicily doesn’t have its own motion picture industry, the island’s stunning scenery has served as a backdrop to a number of very successful films. The Aeolian and Pelagie islands, in particular, have proved popular settings for some interesting films, a few of them now classics of Italian cinema.

Michelangelo Antonioni L’Avventura (1960). Shot on the barren rocks of Panarea’s Lisca Bianca, this film notes the beginning of a marked change in postwar Italian social mores. When a group of friends get together for a day out in the islands, one gets lost, and the relationships between those remaining begin to fracture. Here, Antonioni focuses ingeniously on the internal responses of those affected.

Emanuele Crispalese II Respiro (2002). Filmed on the southern island of Lampedusa, this is a timeless, well-constructed look at how an eccentric mother is misunderstood by other islanders. Crispalese’s second film, it addresses the overwhelming patriarchy of Italian families and the sexual tension latent between family members.

Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather (1971). Mario Puzo’s brilliant screenplay tells the story of how Don Vito Corleone, capo of the New York Sicilian Mafia, tries to maintain his hold on the family business and his old-world values, despite his renegade son Michael. Since the town of Corleone itself was far too developed for the period filming, much of it was shot in Savoca and Forza d’Agro, outside Taormina.

Pietro Giermi Divorzio alla Siciliana (1961). Proof that not all Sicilian films need be deep or cinematic, this is a hilarious and pointed satire of Italian marital conventions. Marcello Mastroianni plays a Sicilian nobleman trying to prove his wife unfaithful so he can kill her and marry his younger cousin. Known as Divorce Italian Style in English, it was filmed in Ispica near Ragusa, and got Giermi nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

Nanni Moretti Dear Diary (1994). Moretti plays himself as he tours Italy on a Vespa, visiting all the Aeolian Islands, showing how the inhabitants of each differ in mentality and lifestyle. Mostly comic, but a real downer at the end.

Michael Radford II Postino (1994). An international favourite, featuring a postman on a small island who learns to love poetry after befriending the exiled poet Pablo Neruda. The film was shot in the town of Pollara on Salina, leading to a dramatic increase in tourism to the island.

Roberto Rossellini Stromboli: Terra di Dio (1949). Starring Ingrid Bergman as a tormented young refugee who marries an Italian to escape the war, this is a sad story of solitude and cynicism, which received little praise in its home country. The real star, however, is the volcano itself, whose brooding presence undermines the illusion of an idyllic, happy island.

Giuseppe Tornatore Cinema Paradiso (1988). Though derided by critics for its saccharine storyline, this Oscar-winning film by Sicilian director Tornatore received popular acclaim the world over. Shot around Cefalù, it follows the friendship between a young boy and the local cinema projectionist, and is in many ways a homage to cinema itself.

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ITALIAN

The ability to speak English confers enormous prestige in Sicily, and plenty of locals – particularly returned emigrati – are willing to show off their knowledge. Few outside the tourist resorts, however, actually know more than a few simple words and phrases, more often than not culled from pop songs or films. To get the most from your visit, therefore, you’d do well to master at least a little Italian.

THE SICILIAN LANGUAGE

For political reasons, all regional languages in Italy are considered dialects of Italian. In reality, however, each has its own history and influences, and the majority of them are, linguistically speaking, separate languages. During the 600-year-long Roman occupation of Sicily, Vulgar Latin became the lingua franca for the entire island, though it was highly influenced by close contacts with Arabic, Norman and Spanish languages. The grammar, lexicon and phonology of Sicilian thus differs immensely from modern standard Italian – so much so that during the American Mafia trials of the 1980s, the FBI had to enlist special agents fluent in Sicilian to translate the conversations of mafiosi based in New York. The Sicilian language even has its own regional dialects (parrati), though in general these are understood by all Sicilians.

  Today nearly all Sicilians speak and understand standard Italian, though, unlike numerous other dialects spoken throughout Europe, the language is in no danger of extinction: in most towns, the younger generation prefers Sicilian to Italian, and almost everyone speaks Sicilian at home. While Sicilians are well known for using their hands and arms as much as their vocal cords to communicate, their language is rich in idioms and sayings. Here are some favourite

SICILIAN PROVERBS

Si vo’ passari la vita cuntenti, statti luntanu di li parenti.

If you want a quiet life, stay away from relatives.

Sciarri di maritu e mugghieri duranu finu a lu lettu.

Quarrels between wives and husbands always end in the bed.

Cu’arrobba pri manciari nun fa piccatu.

He who steals to eat is no sinner.

Cu’asini caccia e fimmini cridi, faccia di paradisu nun ni vidi.

He who seeks girls and asses will never reach heaven.

Camina chi pantofuli finnu a quannu non hai i scarpi.

Walk with your slippers until you find your shoes (ie make the best of a bad situation).

Cu’ va a Palermu e nun va a Murriali, si nni parti sceccu e torna maiali.

He who visits Palermo and not Monreale arrives an ass and returns a pig.

Some tips

Attempting to speak Italian brings instant rewards; your halting efforts will often be greeted with smiles and genuine surprise that an English-speaker should stoop to learn the language. In any case, Italian is one of the easiest European languages to learn, especially if you already have a smattering of French or Spanish, both of which are extremely similar grammatically. The best phrasebook is Rough Guides’ own Italian Phrasebook (Penguin), while Collins publishes a comprehensive series of dictionaries.

  Easiest of all is the pronunciation, since every word is spoken exactly as it’s written, and usually enunciated with exaggerated, open-mouthed clarity. The only difficulties you’re likely to encounter are the few consonants that are different from English:

c before e or i is pronounced as in church, while ch before the same vowels is hard, as in cat.

g is soft before e and i, as in gentle; hard when followed by h, as in garlic.

gn has the ni sound of our onion.

gl in Italian is softened to something like li in English, as in vermilion.

h is not aspirated, as in hour.

sci or sce are pronounced as in sheet and shelter respectively.

When speaking to strangers, the third person is the polite form (ie Lei instead of Tu for “you”); using the second person is a mark of disrespect or stupidity. It’s also worth remembering that Italians don’t use “please” and “thank you” half as much as we do: it’s all implied in the tone, though if you’re in doubt, err on the polite side.

  All Italian words are stressed on the penultimate syllable unless an accent denotes otherwise, although accents are often left out in practice. Note that the ending -ia or -ie counts as two syllables, hence trattoria is stressed on the i. We’ve put accents in, throughout the text and in the following sections, wherever it isn’t immediately obvious how a word should be pronounced: for example, in Marittima, the accent is on the first i; conversely Catania should theoretically have an accent on the second a. Other words where we’ve omitted accents are common ones (like Isola, stressed on the I), some names (Domenico, Vittorio/-a), and words that are stressed similarly in English, such as Repubblica and archeologico.

  None of this will help very much if you’re confronted with a particularly harsh specimen of the Sicilian dialect, which virtually qualifies as a separate language. However, television has made a huge difference, and almost every Sicilian can now communicate in something approximating standard Italian.

USEFUL WORDS AND PHRASES

BASICS

Good morning

Buongiorno

Good afternoon/evening

Buonasera

Goodnight

Buonanotte

Hello/goodbye

Ciao (informal; when speaking to strangers use the phrase above)

Goodbye

Arrivederci (formal)

Goodbye

Arrivederla (more formal)

Yes

Sì

No

No

Please

Per favore

Thank you (very much)

Grazie (molte/mille grazie)

You’re welcome/after you

Prego

Alright/that’s OK

Va bene

How are you?

Come stai/sta? (informal/formal)

I’m fine

Bene

Do you speak English?

Parla inglese?

I don’t speak Italian

Non parlo italiano

I don’t understand

Non capisco

I haven’t understood

Non ho capito

I don’t know

Non lo so

Excuse me/sorry

Scusa (informal)

Excuse me/sorry

Mi scusi (formal)

Excuse me

Permesso (in a crowd)

I’m sorry

Mi dispiace

I’m here on holiday

Sono qui in vacanza

I live in…

Abito a…

I’m English

Sono inglese

I’m Welsh

Sono gallese

I’m Scottish

Sono scozzese

I’m Irish

Sono irlandese

I’m American

Sono americano/a (masculine/feminine)

I’m Australian

Sono australiano/a (masculine/feminine)

I’m Canadian

Sono canadese

I’m from New Zealand

Sono neozelandese

I’m South African

Sono sudafricano/a (masculine/feminine)

Today

Oggi

Tomorrow

Domani

Day after tomorrow

Dopodomani

Yesterday

Ieri

Now

Adesso

Later

Più tardi

Wait a minute!

Aspetta!

In the morning

Di mattina

In the afternoon

Nel pomeriggio

In the evening

Di sera

Tonight

Stasera

Here/there

Qui/là

Good/bad

Buono/cattivo

Big/small

Grande/piccolo

Cheap/expensive

Economico/caro

Early/late

Presto/ritardo

Hot/cold

Caldo/freddo

Near/far

Vicino/lontano

Vacant/occupied

Libero/occupato

Quickly/slowly

Velocemente/lentamente

Slowly/quietly

Piano

With/without

Con/senza

More/less

Più/meno

Enough/no more

Basta

Mr…

Signor…

Mrs…

Signora…

Miss…

Signorina… (il signore, la signora, la signorina when speaking about someone else)

First name

Primo nome

Surname

Cognome

ACCOMMODATION

Hotel

Albergo

Is there a hotel nearby?

C’è un albergo qui vicino?

Do you have a room…

Ha una camera…

for one/two/three people

per una persona, due/tre persone

for one/two/three nights

per una notte, due/tre notti

for one/two weeks

per una settimana, due settimane

with a double bed

con letto matrimoniale

with a shower/bath

con doccia/bagno

with a balcony

con terrazza

hot/cold water

acqua calda/fredda

How much is it?

Quanto costa?

It’s expensive

È caro

Is breakfast included?

È compresa la prima colazione?

Do you have anything cheaper?

Ha niente che costa di meno?

Full/half itard

Pensione completa/ mezza pensione

Can I see the room?

Posso vedere la camera?

I’ll take it

La prendo

I’d like to book a room

Vorrei prenotare una camera

I have a booking

Ho una prenotazione

Can we camp here?

Possiamo fare il campeggio qui?

Is there a campsite nearby?

C’è un camping qui?

Tent

Tenda

Cabin

Cabina

Hostel

Ostello

Youth hostel

Ostello per la gioventù

QUESTIONS AND DIRECTIONS

Where? (Where is/are…?)

Dove? (Dov’è/ Dove sono?)

When?

Quando?

What? (What is it?)

Cosa? (Cos’è?)

How much/many?

Quanto/Quanti?

Why?

Perché?

It is/There is (Is it/Is there…?)

È/C’è (È/C’è…?)

What time is it?

Che ora è?/ Che ore sono?

How do I get to…?

Come arrivo a…?

How far is it to…?

Quant’è lontano a…?

Can you give me a lift to...?

Mi può dare un passaggio a...?

Can you tell me when to get off?

Può dirmi quando devo scendere?

What time does it open?

A che ora apre?

What time does it close?

A che ora chiude?

How much does it cost?/do they cost?

Quanto costa?/Quanto costano?

What’s it called in Italian?

Come si chiama in italiano?

Left/right

Sinistra/destra

Go straight ahead

Sempre diritto

Turn to the right/left

Gira a destra/sinistra

GETTING AROUND

Aeroplane

Aereo

Bus

Autobus/Pullman

Train

Treno

Car

Macchina

Taxi

Taxi

Bicycle

Bicicletta

Ferry

Traghetto

Ship

Nave

Hydrofoil

Aliscafo

Hitch-hiking

Autostop

On foot

A piedi

Bus terminal

Capolinea

Bus station

Autostazione

Train station

Stazione ferroviaria

Ferry terminal

Stazione marittima

Port

Porto

A ticket to…

Un biglietto a…

One way/return

Solo andata/andata e ritorno

Can I book a seat?

Posso prenotare un posto?

What time does it leave?

A che ora parte?

When is the next bus/train/ferry to…?

Quando parte il prossimo pullman/treno/traghetto per…?

Where does it leave from?

Da dove parte?

Which platform does it leave from?

Da quale binario parte?

Do I have to change?

Devo cambiare?

How many kilometres is it?

Quanti chilometri sono?

How long does it take?

Quanto ci vuole?

What number bus is it to…?

Che numero di autobus per…?

Where’s the road to…?

Dov’è la strada a…?

Next stop, please

La prossima fermata, per favore

SIGNS

Entrance/exit

Entrata/uscita

Free entrance

Ingresso libero

Gentlemen/ladies

Signori/signore

WC/bathroom

Gabinetto/bagno

Vacant/engaged

Libero/occupato

Open/closed

Aperto/chiuso

Arrivals/departures

Arrivi/partenze

Closed for restoration

Chiuso per restauro

Closed for holidays

Chiuso per ferie

Pull/push

Tirare/spingere

Out of order

Guasto

Drinking water

Acqua potabile

Not for drinking

Non potabile

To let

Affitasi

Platform

Binario

Cash desk

Cassa

Go/walk

Avanti

Stop/halt

Alt

Customs

Dogana

Do not touch

Non toccare

Danger

Pericolo

Beware

Attenzione

First aid

Pronto soccorso

Ring the bell

Suonare il campanello

No smoking

Vietato fumare

DRIVING

Parking

Parcheggio

No parking

Divieto di sosta/ Sosta vietata

One-way street

Senso unico

Both sides of the street

Ambo i lati

No entry

Senso vietato

Slow down

Rallentare

Road closed

Strada chiusa

No through road

Vietato il transito

No overtaking

Vietato il sorpasso

Crossroads

Incrocio

Speed limit

Limite di velocità

Traffic light

Semaforo

NUMBERS AND DAYS OF THE WEEK

1

Uno

2

Due

3

Tre

4

Quattro

5

Cinque

6

Sei

7

Sette

8

Otto

9

Nove

10

Dieci

11

Undici

12

Dodici

13

Trédici

14

Quattordici

15

Quindici

16

Sédici

17

Diciassette

18

Diciotto

19

Diciannove

20

Venti

25

Venticinque

30

Trenta

40

Quaranta

50

Cinquanta

60

Sessanta

70

Settanta

80

Ottanta

90

Novanta

100

Cento

1000

Mille

Monday

Lunedì

Tuesday

Martedì

Wednesday

Mercoledì

Thursday

Giovedì

Friday

Venerdì

Saturday

Sabato

Sunday

Domenica

FOOD AND DRINK

BASICS AND SNACKS

Aceto

Vinegar

Aglio

Garlic

Biscotti

Biscuits

Burro

Butter

Caramelle

Sweets

Cioccolato

Chocolate

Formaggio

Cheese

Frittata

Omelette

Gelato

Ice cream

Grissini

Bread sticks

Maionese

Mayonnaise

Marmellata

Jam

Olio

Oil

Olive

Olives

Pane

Bread

Pane integrale

Wholemeal bread

Panino

Bread roll

Patatine

Crisps/potato chips

Patatine fritte

Chips/French fries

Pepe

Pepper

Pizzetta

Small pizza

Riso

Rice

Sale

Salt

Uova

Eggs

Yogurt

Yoghurt

Zucchero

Sugar

Zuppa

Soup

ANTIPASTI AND STARTERS

Antipasto misto

Usually mixed cold cuts, salamis and cheese (sometimes accompanied by olives, sundried tomatoes or tasters of other dishes in this list)

Caponata

Mixed aubergine, olives and tomatoes

Caprese

Tomato and mozzarella cheese salad

Insalata di mare

Seafood salad

Insalata di riso

Rice salad

Insalata russa

“Russian salad”: diced vegetables in mayonnaise

Melanzane alla parmigiana

Fried aubergine baked in tomato sauce with parmesan cheese

Mortadella

Salami-type cured meat with nuggets of fat, often with pistachios

Pancetta

Italian bacon

Peperonata

Grilled green, red or yellow peppers stewed in olive oil

Pomodori ripieni

Stuffed tomatoes

Prosciutto cotto

Ham (cooked, usually boiled, sometimes roast)

Prosciutto crudo

Parma ham

Salame

Salami

Salmone/tonno/pesce spada/affumicato

Smoked salmon/tuna/swordfish

PIZZAS

Biancaneve

“Snow white”: mozzarella only, popular with kids

Calzone

Folded pizza with cheese, ham and tomato

Capricciosa

“Capricious”: topped with whatever they’ve got in the kitchen, usually including baby artichoke, ham and egg

Cardinale

Ham and olives

Diavolo

“Devil”: spicy, with hot salami or Italian sausage

Funghi

Mushroom: tinned, sliced button mushrooms unless it specifies fresh mushrooms, either funghi freschi or porcini

Frutti di mare

Seafood: usually mussels, prawns, squid and clams

Margherita

Cheese and tomato

Marinara

Tomato and garlic

Napoli/Napoletana

Tomato, anchovy and olive oil (often mozzarella too)

Norma

Tomato, grilled or fried aubergine and grated ricotta (either salted, salata, or baked, infornata)

Quattro formaggi

“Four cheeses”: usually mozzarella, fontina, Gorgonzola and Gruyère

Quattro stagioni

“Four seasons”: the toppings split into four separate sections, usually including ham, peppers, onion, mushrooms, artichokes, olives, egg etc

Palermitana

Tomato, anchovies, breadcrumbs

Rianata

Fresh tomato, pecorino, oregano, garlic and anchovy; a western Sicilian speciality

Romana

Anchovy and olives

THE FIRST COURSE (IL PRIMO)

PASTA

Cannelloni

Large tubes of pasta, stuffed

Farfalle

Literally “bow”-shaped pasta; the word also means “butterflies”

Fettuccine

Narrow pasta ribbons

Gnocchi

Small potato and dough dumplings

Lasagne

Lasagne

Maccheroni

Macaroni (tubular pasta)

Pappardelle

Pasta ribbons

Pasta al forno

Oven-baked pasta, usually with minced meat, eggs, tomato and cheese

Penne

Smaller version of rigatoni

Ravioli

Ravioli (stuffed, square-shaped pasta)

Rigatoni

Large, grooved, tubular pasta

Risotto

Cooked rice dish, with sauce

Spaccatelle

Long, open pasta curls

Spaghetti

Spaghetti

Spaghettini

Thin spaghetti

Tagliatelle

Pasta ribbons, another word for fettuccine

Tortellini

Small rings of pasta, stuffed with meat or cheese

Vermicelli

Very thin spaghetti (literally “little worms”)

PASTA SAUCES (SALSA)

Aglio e olio (e peperoncino)

Tossed in garlic and olive oil (and hot chillies)

Amatriciana

Cubed pork and tomato sauce, with onions and hot chillies (originally from Rome)

Arrabbiata

Spicy tomato sauce, with chillies

Bolognese

Meat sauce

Burro e salvia

Butter and sage

Carbonara

Cream, ham and beaten egg

Frutta di mare

Seafood

Funghi

Mushroom

Panna

Cream

Parmigiano

Parmesan cheese

Pesto

Ground basil, pine nut, garlic and pecorino

Pomodoro

Tomato sauce

Puttanesca

Tomato, anchovy, olive oil and oregano sauce (literally “whorish”)

Ragù

Meat sauce

Trapanese

Cold puréed tomato, garlic and basil

Vongole (veraci)

Clam and tomato sauce (fresh clams in shells, usually served with oil and herbs)

THE SECOND COURSE (IL SECONDO)

MEAT (CARNE)

Agnello

Lamb

Bistecca

Steak

Cervello

Brain

Cinghiale

Wild boar

Coniglio

Rabbit

Costolette/cotolette

Cutlets/chops

Fegatini

Chicken livers

Fégato

Liver

Involtini

Steak slices, rolled and stuffed

Lepre

Hare

Lingua

Tongue

Maiale

Pork

Manzo

Beef

Ossobuco

Shin of veal

Pollo

Chicken

Polpette

Meatballs

Rognoni

Kidneys

Salsiccia

Sausage

Saltimbocca

Veal with ham

Scaloppina

Escalope (of veal)

Spezzatino

Stew

Tacchino

Turkey

Trippa

Tripe

Vitello

Veal

FISH (PESCE) AND SHELLFISH (CROSTACEI)

Note that surgelato or congelato written on the menu next to a dish means “frozen” – it often applies to squid and prawns.

Acciughe

Anchovies

Anguilla

Eel

Aragosta

Lobster

Baccalà

Dried salted cod

Bottarga

Fish roe

Calamari

Squid

Céfalo

Grey mullet

Cernia

Grouper

Cozze

Mussels

Dattile

Razor clams

Déntice

Dentex (like sea bass)

Gamberetti

Shrimps

Gamberi

Prawns

Granchio

Crab

Merluzzo

Cod

Nasello

Hake

Orata

Gilthead bream

Ostriche

Oysters

Pesce spada

Swordfish

Polpo/polipo

Octopus

Ricci di mare

Sea urchins

Ricciola

Amberjack

Rospo

Monkfish

Sampiero

John Dory

Sarago

White bream

Sarde

Sardines

Séppie

Cuttlefish

Sgombro

Mackerel

Sogliola

Sole

Spigola

Sea bass

Tonno

Tuna

Totani

Species of squid

Triglie

Red mullet

Trota

Trout

Vongole

Clams

VEGETABLES (CONTORNI) AND SALAD (INSALATA)

Asparagi

Asparagus

Basilico

Basil

Broccoli

Broccoli

Capperi

Capers

Carciofi

Artichokes

Carciofini

Artichoke hearts

Carotte

Carrots

Cavolfiori

Cauliflower

Cavolo

Cabbage

Ceci

Chickpeas

Cetriolo

Cucumber

Cipolla

Onion

Fagioli

Beans

Fagiolini

Green beans

Finocchio

Fennel

Funghi

Mushrooms

Insalata verde/mista

Green salad/mixed salad

Melanzane

Aubergine/eggplant

Origano

Oregano

Patate

Potatoes

Peperoni

Peppers

Piselli

Peas

Pomodori

Tomatoes

Radicchio

Red chicory

Spinaci

Spinach

Zucca

Pumpkin

Zucchini

Courgettes

DESSERTS (DOLCI)

Amaretti

Macaroons

Cassata

Ice-cream cake with candied fruit

Gelato

Ice cream

Macedonia

Fruit salad

Torta

Cake, tart

Zabaglione

Dessert made with eggs, sugar and marsala wine

Zuppa Inglese

Trifle

CHEESE

Caciocavallo

A type of dried, mature mozzarella

Fontina

Northern Italian cheese used in cooking

Gorgonzola

Soft, strong, blue-veined cheese

Mozzarella

Soft white cheese, traditionally made from buffalo’s milk

Parmigiano

Parmesan cheese

Pecorino

Strong-tasting, hard sheep’s cheese

Provolone

Cheese with grooved rind, either mild or slightly piquant

Ricotta

Soft white cheese made from ewe’s milk, used in sweet or savoury dishes

Ricotta Salata

Ricotta which has been salted to preserve it; can be grated

Ricotta Infornata

Oven-baked ricotta, with a sweet caramelized crust

Vastedda

Similar to Caciocavallo, but tastes slightly more acidic

FRUIT AND NUTS

Albicocca

Apricot

Ananas

Pineapple

Anguria/coccomero

Watermelon

Arancia

Orange

Banana

Banana

Cacco

Persimmon

Chicco d’uva/uva

A grape/grapes

Ciliegia

Cherry

Fico

Fig

Fico d’India

Prickly pear

Fragola

Strawberry

Lemone

Lemon

Mandorla

Almond

Mela

Apple

Melone

Melon

Néspola

Medlar

Pera

Pear

Pesca

Peach

Pinolo

Pine nut

Pistacchio

Pistachio nut

Smerge/Sberge

Cross between a plum and a peach with a hint of vanilla

COOKING TERMS

Affumicato

Smoked

Arrosto

Roast

Ben cotto

Well done

Bollito/lesso

Boiled

Alla brace

Barbecued

Brasato

Cooked in wine

Cotto

Cooked (not raw)

Crudo

Raw

Al dente

Firm, not overcooked

Ferri

Grilled without oil

Al forno

Baked

Fritto

Fried

Grattugiato

Grated

Alla griglia

Grilled

Al marsala

Cooked with marsala wine

Milanese

Fried in egg and breadcrumbs

Pizzaiola

Cooked with tomato sauce

Ripieno

Stuffed

Sangue

Rare

Allo spiedo

On the spit

Stracotto

Braised, stewed

Surgelati

Frozen

In umido

Stewed

Al vapore

Steamed

SICILIAN SPECIALITIES

STARTERS AND PASTA

Arancini

“Little oranges”: deep-fried rice balls with minced meat, cheese and peas (al ragù) or cheese, ham and bechemal (al burro). Also made with spinach, pistachio, or aubergine

Caponata

Sautéed aubergine, with olives, peppers, almonds and tomatoes; served cold

Cozze alla marinara

Mussels in a rich wine-based soup

Cozze pepata

Mussels in spicy tomato stock

Crocchè di patate

Potato croquettes

Insalata di arance

Orange salad, dressed with oil and parsley, and sometimes with fennel

Maccu

Fava-bean soup flavoured with wild fennel

Panelle

Chickpea fritters

Pasta con i broccoli arriminati

Pasta cooked with broccoli, anchovy paste, pine nuts and saffron

Pasta con la mollica

Pasta with oil and toasted breadcrumbs

Pasta con le sarde

Macaroni with fresh sardines, fennel, raisins and pine kernels; a speciality of Palermo

Penne all’arrabbiata

Short tubular pasta with spicy tomato sauce made with chillies (arrabbiata means “angry”)

Peperonata

Peppers (capsicum) sautéed in olive oil until soft and sweet, either served as antipasto or as a vegetable

Spaghetti alla carrettiera

“Carter’s spaghetti”, cooked with garlic, oil, pecorino and salt and pepper; common in Catania province

Spaghetti alla Norma

Spaghetti with tomato sauce topped with fried aubergine and parmesan or pecorino cheese; a speciality of Catania, named after one of Bellini’s operas

Spaghetti alla Trapanese

Spaghetti tossed with cold puréed tomatoes, basil and garlic; a pungent dish from Trapani

Uova/funghi in tegame

Eggs/mushrooms fried in olive oil, served at the table in a little metal pan

Zuppa di San Giuseppe

A kind of maccu made pulses and a mixture of short or broken pasta, usually spiked with chilli and wild fennel.

MAIN COURSES

Cuscus

Couscous, usually served with fish and vegetable sauce, sometimes meat; a common dish in western Sicily and on the islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria

Fritto misto

A standard seafood dish; deep-fried prawns and squid rings in batter

Fritto di pesce

As mentioned in the previous section but also with other fried fish, like sardines and whitebait

Involtini di pesce spada

Slices of swordfish, stuffed, rolled and fried

Pesce spada alla Ghiotta

Swordfish cooked in spicy tomato sauce with capers and olives; from Messina province

Sarde a beccafico

Sardines stuffed with breadcrumbs, nuts, dried fruit and anchovies; a Palermitan speciality

Scaloppine di maiale al Marsala

Escalopes of pork cooked in marsala wine; the most common way of cooking meat with this Sicilian wine

Stocca alla Messinese

Dried cod stewed with potatoes, olives, tomatoes, capers and celery; a speciality of Messina, although there are other regional variations

Zuppa di cozze/vongole

A big dish of mussels/clams in rich wine-based soup

Zuppa di pesce

As mentioned in the previous section but usually with pieces of cod, squid and prawns, and served with fried bread

DESSERTS AND FESTIVAL FOOD

Cannoli

Fried pastry stuffed with sweet ricotta and candied peel; a Carnevale speciality

Cassata

Ice-cream cake with candied fruit

Crispelle di riso

Sweet rice fritters

Frutti di Martorana

Marzipan-based confection shaped and coloured to look like fruit, vegetables, and even fish

Ossa dei morti

Literally “dead men’s bones”, a clove-flavoured, sugared pastry handed out to children on All Hallows’ Eve (October 31), and almost identical to Agnellini pasquali (Easter lambs)

Sfinci

Fried pastry stuffed with ricotta; served at the festival of St Joseph (San Giuseppe)

Torrone di mandorle

Crystallized almonds and sugar, sold at markets around All Saints’ Day

Zeppole

Deep-fried bread dough, stuffed with ricotta and anchovies, or nutella

DRINKS

Acqua minerale

Mineral water

Aranciata

Orangeade

Bicchiere

Glass

Birra

Beer

Bottiglia

Bottle

Caffè

Coffee

Cioccolata calda

Hot chocolate

Ghiaccio

Ice

Granita

Iced coffee/fruit drink

Latte

Milk

Limonata

Lemonade

Selz

Soda water

Spremuta

Fresh fruit juice

Spumante

Sparkling wine

Succo di frutta

Concentrated fruit juice with sugar

Tè

Tea

Tonico

Tonic water

Vino

Wine

Rosso

Red

Bianco

White

Rosato

Rosé

Secco

Dry

Dolce

Sweet

Litro

Litre

Mezzo

Half-litre

Quarto

Quarter-litre

Salute!

Cheers!

GLOSSARIES

ARTISTIC AND ARCHITECTURAL TERMS

Agora Square or marketplace in an ancient Greek city

Apse Domed recess at the altar-end of a church

Architrave The lowest part of the entablature

Atrium Forecourt, usually of a Roman house

Bothros A pit that contains votive offerings

Campanile Belltower

Capital Top of a column

Catalan-Gothic Hybrid form of architecture, mixing elements from fifteenth-century Spanish and northern European building styles

Cavea The seating section in a theatre

Cella Sanctuary of a temple

Cupola A dome

Decumanus The main street in a Roman town

Entablature The part of the building above the capital on a classical building

Ex-voto A thanksgiving or offering to a saint – sometimes a plaque, often a silver or pewter body part

Hellenistic period 323–30 BC (Alexander the Great to Augustus)

Hypogeum Underground vault, often used as an early Christian church

Kouros Standing male figure of the Archaic period (700 BC to early fifth century BC)

Krater Ancient conical bowl with round base

Loggia Roofed gallery or balcony

Metope A panel on the frieze of a temple

Naumachia Mock naval combat, or the deep trench in a theatre in which it took place

Nave Central space in a church, usually flanked by aisles

Odeon Small theatre, usually roofed, for recitals

Orchestra Section of the main floor of a theatre, where the chorus danced

Pantocrator Usually refers to Christ, portrayed with outstretched arms

Pediment The triangular front part of a building, usually surmounting a portico of columns

Polyptych Painting or carving on several joined wooden panels

Portico The covered entrance to a building

Punic Carthaginian/Phoenician

Scene-building Structure holding scenery in Greek/Roman theatre

Stelae Inscribed stone slabs

Stereobate Visible base of any building, usually a temple

Stoa A detached roofed porch, or portico

Stylobate Raised base of a columned building, usually a temple

Telamon A supporting column in the shape of a male figure

Thermae Baths, usually elaborate buildings in Roman villas

Triptych Painting or carving on three joined wooden panels

ITALIAN WORDS

Aliscafo Hydrofoil

Anfiteatro Amphitheatre

Autostazione Bus station

Autostrada Motorway

Belvedere A lookout point

Cappella Chapel

Castello Castle

Cattedrale Cathedral

Centro Centre

Chiesa Church (main “mother” church, Chiesa Matrice/Madre)

Comune An administrative area; also, the local council or the town hall

Corso Avenue/boulevard

Duomo Cathedral

Entrata Entrance

Faraglione Obelisk-shaped deposits of volcanic rock rising out of the sea

Festa Festival, carnival

Fiume River

Fumarola Volcanic vapour emission from the ground

Golfo Gulf

Lago Lake

Largo Place (like piazza)

Lungomare Seafront promenade or road

Mare Sea

Mercato Market

Mongibello Sicilian name for Mount Etna

Municipio Town hall

Palazzo Palace, mansion or block (of flats)

Parco Park

Passeggiata The customary early-evening walk

Pedaggio Toll

Piano Plain (also “slowly”, “gently”)

Piazza Square

Pineta Pinewood

Pro Loco Local office, usually funded by the Comune, overseeing cultural events and providing tourist information

Santuario Sanctuary

Sottopassaggio Subway

Spiaggia Beach

Stazione Station (train station is stazione ferroviaria; bus station is autostazione; ferry terminal is stazione marittima)

Strada Road/street

Teatro Theatre

Tempio Temple

Torre Tower

Traghetto Ferry

Uscita Exit

Vicolo/Vico Alley

Via Road (always used with name, as in Via Roma)

X Quick way of writing per, or for, and often found on timetables, which means the opposite of the English “ex”. So, for example “aliscafo x Salina” refers to a hydrofoil to Salina.

Zona Zone

ACRONYMS

ACI Italian Automobile Club

FS Ferrovie Statali (Italian State Railways)

IVA Imposta Valore Aggiunto (VAT)

RAI The Italian state TV and radio network

SP Strada Provinciale; a minor road, eg SP116

SC Strada Comunale, a road maintained by the local council

SS Strada Statale; a main highway, eg SS120

ZTL Zona di Trafico Limitato – limited access area (eg for residents only)

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