In Sicily by Norman Lewis (2001) is all about the Italian island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, much frequented by the author, a London-based British travel writer.
Sicily is a volcanic island, where ‘everyone living under a volcano is affected by it whether they know it or not.’ It is fertile ground for farmers.
The author first visited Sicily in wartime in the 1950s. Over the course of 60 years visiting the island, Norman Lewis has seen many changes and developments. In 1998, he returned to Sicily specifically to write this book.
He writes of the old parts of cities and their traditions, and the new ways amid the shortage of housing and pockets of poverty. He writes of the Mafia and emigration and immigration.
He writes of its prehistory and the political regimes. Of course, he writes about Palermo and its palace ruins. He writes of the famed Roman mosaics of Piazza Armerina: ‘there is nothing of the kind to compare with them elsewhere on earth.’ But he also writes of Partinico, only 15 miles from the capital, and once rich in rare fauna and flora – animals and plants. And Ficuzza, now a village, but once the holiday destination of kings and queens, particularly King Ferdinand.
He writes of the local witches and exorcists known as the maghi. Finally, he writes of the country’s greatest wonder and attraction: the sea. Down by ‘the water’ people enter another world: ‘the life of the coastal town is normally concentrated along the shore of the sea’s great oasis of calm, and few urban areas exist where it is simpler to relax.’
This is a short book of 166 pages, which rolls along interestingly but somewhat in need of another visit to update it. That won’t happen because Norman Lewis (1908-2003) died two years after its publication at the age of 95. But not before writing two more travel books: A Voyage by Dhow (2001) and The Tomb in Seville (2003).
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.
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