Sicily
Three Thousand Years of Human History
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Take a tour through the Mediterranean’s largest island in this fascinating history of Sicily for armchair travelers, history buffs, and anyone planning their next trip to Italy.
PLUS: Includes Sicily travel guide resources like maps, pronunciation keys, and suggestions for further reading!
The emigration of people from Sicily often overshadows the importance of the people who immigrated to its shores throughout the centuries. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Spaniards, Bourbons, the Savoy Kingdom of Italy—and countless others—have all held sway and left lasting influences on the island’s culture and architecture. Moreover, Sicily’s character has been shaped by what has passed it by. Events that affected Europe, namely the Crusades and Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, had little influence on Italy’s most famous island.
A fascinating history of Sicily for the general reader, this book examines how location turned this charming Mediterranean island into the epicenter of major historical conquests, cultures, and more. Complete with maps, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, and pronunciation keys, this is at once a useful travel guide and an informative, entertaining exploration of the island’s remarkable history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This solid narrative of the Mediterranean island emphasizes how its location has subjected it to one wave of conquest after another. Benjamin (The World of Benjamin Tudela), who has lived in Sicily for the past decade, traces Sicilian history back to the indigenous Neolithic cultures, which dated from 7000 B.C. up through the first millennium B.C. The Greeks and the Carthaginians fought one another to exhaustion, leaving Sicily a prey to the Romans, who converted it into a rich granary of estates worked by (often rebellious) slaves. Muslims from Africa succeeded the Romans in the seventh century A.D., and they in turn gave way to Norman French, the best rulers the island ever had. From the famous rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Aragonese, Hapsburg and Bourbon Spaniards ruled, until Garibaldi used the island as a springboard for his unification of Italy in the 1860s. In this engaging read, Benjamin ably explains the temperament and culture of modern-day Sicilians, through the island's checkered political climate; its rugged and seismic terrain (the still-active Mt. Etna looms to the east); its poor soil and scant rainfall; as well as the mass emigration it endured in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Customer Reviews
Lucid, Perceptive and Witty
Sandra Benjamin's book is a great guide to the history of Sicily, which has been conquered, occupied or run by just about every major European power. In the final sections, Mafia and anti-Mafia actions are addressed; fortunately, the tourist is safe from the Mafia, generally accepted in Sicily as a fact of life.