Update, 16 Aug 2024: We have been made aware that this article has been referenced by a news article originating in the US reporting a comment made on a late night news programme. If you are visiting this post via a link, we wish it to be known that we absolutely do not endorse the…
The first question people often ask is: is Sicilian a language or a dialect? It is an interesting question open to debate and the answer depends on one’s interpretation of linguistic terminology. But let us leave aside the question for now and come back to it at the end… Do people still speak Sicilian? Absolutely…
The story of the second World War in Sicily is not overtly apparent to the casual visitor. There are few monuments, few reminders, few tangible remnants. And yet there are still people alive who lived through it and can recount it. And the story is an important one. There is one – excellent – museum…
Without a doubt, the greatest advertisement for Sicily in the last few years has been the television series of Inspector Montalbano. Since it was first aired in Italy in 1999 there have been almost forty episodes and it has come to be considered one of the most successful Italian television dramas of all time. It…
Anyone who has visited Monreale cathedral in Sicily will have had been filled with lasting awe on stepping inside and first glimpsing the fabulous Byzantine mosaics. One is almost stunned to disbelief at how they might have been achieved, let alone conceived or paid for. To visit for the first time is to feel like…
The Madonie Mountains :: Sicily’s finest landscapes Ma-do-ni-e: four syllables not three, the final two vowels being pronounced as separate syllables: ee-ay. Or in Sicilian it is somewhat simpler: they are known as the Li Marunìi. But whichever version you prefer, the name is derived from the Madonia Estate of the Crescimanni family, of Norman…
Most of the Sicilian wine that finds its ways to the shelves of British supermarkets comes from the Trapani or Melfi areas of the island, but this is only a very small sample of a great variety of Sicilian wine. As the largest wine producing area of Italy and with such a variety of topography…
Without a doubt, one of the most colourful and joyful spectacles in Sicily takes place on Easter Sunday in Piana degli Albanesi. Ethnically and linguistically of Albanian origin and identifying themselves as Arbëreshë, the people of Piana degli Albanesi migrated to Sicily in the fifteenth century under the threat of the Turks. They were granted…
The town of Gangi in Sicily recently made international headlines when the story broke that properties were being sold there for the price of a euro (and the proviso that the property had to be done up within a year). The previous year, Gangi had already won the prestigious title “Borgo più bello d’Italia” (The…
About thirty miles drive south from Palermo, on the road towards Corleone, the road makes a sharp right turn and an easily-missable side road to the left leads to the village of Ficuzza.The centre of the village is dominated by a fine, handsome sandstone building – the Palazzina Reale built in 1803 by Venanzio Marvuglio…
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