Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Sicily is anything like the Isle of Wight: it’s 70 times the size, and mountainous. Despite some beautifully engineered roads, it always takes longer to get around than one expects. Even my Sicilian friend has to stop to ask the way. Autostrade are closed, bridges under repair. It doesn’t help that every other motorist drives as though he’s your enemy. Which, unless he comes from your village, he probably is.
Beautiful, fertile, sunny, with fabulous wine and cuisine — no island is so blessed by nature. Even the terrible communications, which meant that neighbouring communities couldn’t reach each other, have bestowed a legacy in the form of teeming variety. Each town has its traditions. ‘Sicily is a continent,’ say the farmers, who grow pistachios, capers, blood oranges, grapes and almonds, depending on their location.
If you only visit the province of Ragusa, whose stone walls and (in springtime) green fields could have come from the Cotswolds, you will have no idea of the weird, white landscape around Trapani, where they’ve been extracting salt from the sea since Roman times. Someone who has spent a holiday amid olive groves, or driven through the biscuit-coloured plains of summer, will be astonished to find that the Nebrodi national park remains as green as Switzerland. On the edge of it, incidentally, is Gangi, the Mafia stronghold which Mussolini’s Iron Prefect, Cesare Mori, besieged in 1928, crushing the organisation. (It came back, via America, after the second world war.) Gangi is rated as one of the most beautiful towns in Italy — although such is the difficulty of living here that the council recently put some ruined houses on the market at €1 each.
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