Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History - Hardcover

Benjamin, Sandra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586421018 ISBN 13: 9781586421014

Publisher: Steerforth, 2006

Synopsis

The rich, recorded history of Sicily reaches back for more than three thousand years. Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Hohenstaufens, Spaniards, Bourbons, the Savoy Kingdom of Italy and the modern era have all held sway, and left lasting influences on the island’s culture and architecture. And yet no contemporary book tells the story of Sicily in a single volume for the general reader.
Tourists, armchair travelers, and historians will all delight in this fluid narrative that can be read straight through, dipped into over time, or used as a reference guide to each period in Sicily’s fascinating tale.
It is a general history, an account of welfare and warfare. Emigration of people from Sicily often overshadows the importance of the people who immigrated to the island through the centuries. Immigrants have included several who became Sicily’s rulers, along with Jews, Ligurians, and Albanians. All are ancestors of modern Sicilians. Sicily’s character has also been determined by what passed it by: events that affected Europe generally, namely the Crusades and Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, had remarkably little influence on Italy’s most famous island.

Maps, biographical notes, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, pronunciation keys, and much more make this book as essential as it is enjoyable.

About this title

About the Author

Sandra Benjamin was born in Troy, New York, and moved to New York City when she was sixteen. After earning a doctorate in economics at the New School for Social Research, she began moving around Europe, learning a few of its languages. Along the way she acquired a love for southern Italy. Reflecting her interest in the area, ten years ago she published The World of Benjamin of Tudela: A Medieval Mediterranean Travelogue. Since then she has spent much of her time in Sicily. Always fascinated by the varied ethnic groups of New York City, she was similarly attracted by the diversity of peoples who became part of the fabric of Sicily.

From Publishers Weekly

This solid narrative of the Mediterranean island emphasizes how its location has subjected it to one wave of conquest after another. Benjamin (The World of Benjamin Tudela), who has lived in Sicily for the past decade, traces Sicilian history back to the indigenous Neolithic cultures, which dated from 7000 B.C. up through the first millennium B.C. The Greeks and the Carthaginians fought one another to exhaustion, leaving Sicily a prey to the Romans, who converted it into a rich granary of estates worked by (often rebellious) slaves. Muslims from Africa succeeded the Romans in the seventh century A.D., and they in turn gave way to Norman French, the best rulers the island ever had. From the famous rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Aragonese, Hapsburg and Bourbon Spaniards ruled, until Garibaldi used the island as a springboard for his unification of Italy in the 1860s. In this engaging read, Benjamin ably explains the temperament and culture of modern-day Sicilians, through the island's checkered political climate; its rugged and seismic terrain (the still-active Mt. Etna looms to the east); its poor soil and scant rainfall; as well as the mass emigration it endured in the 19th and 20th centuries. (June)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Steerforth
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1586421018
• ISBN 13: 9781586421014
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512