At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from the vantage of Europe’s historically most stable society, have gazed with fascination at perhaps its least stable.
There were already links between us in the age of the Normans, who conquered Sicily at roughly the same time as they conquered us. The revival of classical learning in the Renaissance made the English increasingly familiar with the Sicilian connections of Homer, Plato, Archimedes, Aeschylus, Pindar, Empedocles, Theocritus, Virgil and Cicero, and with the island’s mythological and classical geography. Shakespeare set several plays there. English travellers and reprobates were among the first to make Naples and Sicily their playground. Nelson saved the island from Napoleon. The Inghams and Whitakers established Sicily’s wine trade. And in the 19th century the English and Germans between them made Palermo and Taormina the most romantic winter resorts in Europe.
Since we never ruled Sicily, it was also an escape. So it is not surprising to find this book packed with British writers who wanted to get away. Matthew Arnold, Samuel Butler, Coleridge, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Lear, Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilde and Yeats all cavorted from pillar to vineyard to crag, and as we discover, did not necessarily find the personal emancipation they craved. Aleister Crowley did — and was deported by Mussolini as a result.
Not far behind are the Americans. Bernard Berenson, Truman Capote, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Ezra Pound and Tennessee Williams launched themselves at the legendary land whose mafia had done so much to enliven American society. As this book hints, it was criminal money remitted from the USA which more or less kept Sicily afloat during the poverty days before the arrival of postwar tourism, the mafia drug trade, and the EU.
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