Sicilian Region

The ancient Greeks thought Sicily to be a land inhabited by monsters and pirates until Theocles of Athens, who had been shipwrecked in that area, returned home and described the beauty of this unknown land. This led to the founding of the Greek cities of Selinunte, the ruins of which are among the most charming in the whole Mediterranean area, Segesta with its Doric temple, still standing intact, isolated and solemn, on a hill overlooking the sea, and Agrigento, described by Pindarus as “the most beautiful town of humans”, where the colours are those of Africa, with the sun-scorched earth, but also with the delicate pink blossoms of the almond trees that fill the Valley of the Temples. The area around Agrigento is most beautiful and full not only of great contradictions but also of great literature: this is where Luigi Pirandello and Leonardo Sciascia were born. Andrea Camilleri is from around here too: Vigata, where his most famous character, Superintendent Montalbano, lives and works, is in reality Porto Empedocle, his native town. Not forgetting Syracuse with its magnificent Greek Theatre.
But Sicily also means the fascination of the volcanic area dominated by Mount Etna, the fascination of the sun seen through the clefts of the Gole dell’Alcantara, the staircase with 142 steps decorated with majolica tiles leading up to Santa Maria del Monte, symbol of Caltagirone, or the famous Norman Duomo in Cefalù, also fascinating for its fishing village with its old houses overlooking the sea and its long strand with fine sand; or the other, equally splendid, Duomo and its cloister in Monreale. This town, which has a wonderful view of the Conca d’Oro, is home to a famous Opera dei Pupi, traditional Sicilian puppet theatre; here you can often meet carretti siciliani, gaily painted wagons drawn by plumed horses. And then there is magical Erice, perched on top of a cliff and full of alleyways, staircases and stonework. Taormina, with the wonderful tiers of the Greek Theatre, and Ragusa, famous for its baroque architecture and the most imposing noble residence in south-east Sicily: the Castello di Donnafugata, build on the orders of Baron Corrado Arezzo, whose portrait surveys the first floor with a slightly ironic sneer; the plain and majestic 122-roomed castle, with its Guelphic battlements, suddenly materialises in one of the most beautiful views in Sicily.
The Romans, on the other, left one of the absolutely most precious remains on the island: the Villa del Casale, in Piazza Armerina, with its splendid mosaics.
Sicily is a generous land, famous for its blood oranges, for clementines, for Pachino cherry tomatoes; for its sumptuous marzipan cakes of oriental inspiration, for the cannolo siciliano, a crispy tube of pastry stuffed with a creamy filling that must never make the pastry soggy, for cassata ice cream, made with sweetened ricotta (cottage cheese) and fancy candied-peel decorations and for the granita crushed flavoured ice, as well as for excellent wines like Nero d’Avola, Donnafugata, Malvasia and Marsala. It is generous with amusements also: the wonderful Carnival of Acireale was already famous in the 16th century.
On the journey to Palermo, the city that emerges from the pages of Lampedusa’s book The Leopard, we can admire the sea shining like a sheet of glass and the countryside with its scattered cottages, immersed in the blinding light of the sulphury Sicilian sun. And here is Palermo with its domes and the towers standing out against the sky: in via Alloro, in the heart of the old Kalsa district, stands the late fifteenth-century church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Gothic-Catalan style, known as La Gancia, close to the crenelated towers of palazzo Abatellis which houses the Regional Gallery of Sicily, which has beautiful paintings by Antonello da Messina, including a San Girolamo (Saint Jerome) and L’Annunziata (the Annunciation). Its plain facade might be misleading but once we cross the threshold we find ourselves faced with an unexpected and wonderful scene: carved marble, stuccowork and paintings, underneath a gilded ceiling that looks like a starry sky, a church with an “inner beauty”, a triumph by the sculptor Antonello Gagini. Palermo has everything: the ostentatious wealth and shabby alleys of the old town, the Norman palaces and the bright colours of the Vucciria, the famous market immortalised by Renato Guttuso in one of his best and most famous paintings: here, among Middle-Eastern colours and scents we feel the true soul of this land, proud and troubled land, described in Verga’s novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree). Beside it are the jagged mountains of the Madonie, with another culture and another history, made up of olives and livestock, as we go up towards Corleone, through a landscape that becomes increasingly rugged and not at all like the wonderful Mondello: a little fishing village set on a dream beach.
The last gift of Sicily is the Aeolian Islands, 7 underwater volcanoes rising from the sea and dotted with white houses: Massimo Troisi, chose Salina to make his most famous film: The Postman, in a pink house above an indescribable sea.

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