Diversions in Sicily

by Henry Festing Jones

Publisher: London, Alston Rivers Publication date: 1909 Subjects: Sicily (Italy) -- Description and travel Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Henry Festing Jones was an English solicitor and writer, known as the friend and posthumous biographer of Samuel Butler.

Reviews

[X · Rating 2 out of 5]

So boring! He spends half the book rambling about puppets.

[Timothy Ferguson · Rating 2 out of 5]

An odd book, interesting but lopsided in its structure, about a Victorian-era tourist's time in Sicily, and his friendship with a particular Sicilian waiter. The book is eventually revealed to be written for his godson, to explain how the waiter met his wife, but on that level it makes little sense. Why tell a Sicilian boy how Sicilian marionettes work, and spend chapter after chapter on their stories, when he will experience them himself?

As a work for English readers, it doesn't have quite enough of the other to make it interesting as a travel diary. The main fellow, aside from some racism, is an unassuming sort, and he is surrounded by generous and happy people. There is no real goal or disappointment in it, and so no real conflict. Perhaps, like some of Twain's books, it is ruined by television: none of the marvels are still marvellous, because we have seen them. Maybe it's that Italians are not some mysterious people, who live months away by road, doing odd things and eating odd things and worshipping odd things, as they were for Jones, but are people we know and work with, and whose customs are unremarkable. At the time the book must have been popular, because a sequel was written.

The reader of the Librivox version is brilliant, though, and shows that a good reader can draw you in to even quite sparse material.


This review originally appeared on book coasters.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable travel journal written at the turn of the twentieth century, at about the time that my grandparents emigrated from Sicily. It was fun to read about the customs and traditions of the Sicily that they called home, and many of those ancient festivals are still celebrated today in that beautiful country.