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.
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