History on the Hoof: A Traveler's Two Sicilies (PDF)

Travel at its best meets culture and its history first hand at street level on shoeleather. These Sicilian walks meet that criterion.

Take this book in hand. Use it to enjoy a unique travel experience. Let it guide you through a region that for millennia lent primary impulses to world history while sorting out a destiny of its own.

The Two Sicilies even today are a world apart in mood. Europe seems left behind. The feel of the place is that different. Imagine a cultural recipe that blends the flavors of North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Mix nuances of the Nile Valley and Old Athens with a bit of Byzantium and the Holy Land. Fold in a spiritual sense that combines something of Mont Saint Michel and the Dome of the Rock. Here is a travel book that captures all that as a personal discovery, leading you step by step through one of the most fascinating experiences of a lifetime of travel.

A Sicilian junket has a further advantage for the jaded traveler. Travel in Sicily for the most part takes you away from the tourist mob scenes now so common on the continent. You know the places to find them: Florence, Athens, Venice and other fabulous cities cursed with the popularity problem of tourism. In contrast, most of the sights to which this book will guide you in the Sicilies may be approached without having to endure gigantic convocations of tour buses and can be enjoyed without mood shattering mobs surging this way and that with flash cubes blinding one and all to the remarkable heritage left us by the Sicilian genius. Even better, those sights compare favorably with the most prestigious attractions of the Italian north as well as with those of Greece, France and the other tourist Meccas of Europe.

In this guide to that extraordinary land, do not expect a compendium of listings and pointings typical of most guidebooks. This is a book of do-it-yourself travel presented in narrative form. The narratives describe, step-by-step, walks and motoring excursions along selected routes through a sequence of cities and nearby points of interest. Each page is an encounter with culture and history met as an experience of places and things. Each adventure is introduced by a background brief on the personalities and events against which your encounters with streets and structures obtain vital meanings, meanings usually missing from mere touristic viewings of assorted vestiges of a more or less obscure past.