Sicily Books

“The island of Sicily is the largest in the Mediterranean. It has also
proved, over the centuries, to be the most unhappy. The stepping-stone
between Europe and Africa, the gateway between the East and the West, the
link between the Latin world and the Greek, at once a stronghold,
observation-point and clearing-house, it has been fought over and occupied
in turn by all the great powers that have at various times striven to extend
their dominion across the Middle Sea. It has belonged to them all—and yet
has properly been part of none; for the number and variety of its
conquerors, while preventing the development of any strong national
individuality of its own, have endowed it with a kaleidoscopic heritage of
experience which can never allow it to become completely assimilated.
Even today, despite the beauty of its landscape, the fertility of its fields and
the perpetual benediction of its climate, there lingers everywhere some
dark, brooding quality—some underlying sorrow of which poverty, Church
influence, the Mafia and all the other popular modern scapegoats may be
the manifestations but are certainly not the cause. It is the sorrow of long,
unhappy experience, of opportunity lost and promise unfulfilled; the
sorrow, perhaps, of a beautiful woman who has been raped too often and
betrayed too often and is no longer fit for love or marriage. Phoenicians,
Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans,
Germans, Spaniards, French—all have left their mark. Today, a century
after being received into her Italian home, Sicily is probably less unhappy
than she has been for many centuries; but though no longer lost she still
seems lonely, seeking always an identity which she can never entirely find.”
― john julius norwich, The Normans in Sicily : The Magnificent Story of 'the Other Norman Conquest'