INTRODUCTION
God first made the world and then he made the Straits of Messina to separate men from madmen. - Sicilian proverb
At the centre of the Mediterranean, but on the periphery of Europe, Sicily is a quite distinct entity from the rest of Italy. Although just 3km away across the water, it's much further away in appearance, feel and culture. A hybrid Sicilian language is still widely spoken, and many place names are tinged with the Arabic that was once in wide use on the island; the food is noticeably different, spicier and with more emphasis on fish, fruit and vegetables; while the flora echoes the shift south - oranges, lemons, olives, almonds and palms are ubiquitous. The nature of day-to-day living is somehow different here, too, experienced outdoors with an exuberance that is almost operatic, and reflected in numerous traditional festivals and processions that take place around the island throughout the year.
There's certainly an immediately separate quality in the people, who see themselves as Sicilians first and Italians a very firm second. The island's strategic importance meant it was held as a colony by some of the richest civilizations in the western world - from the Arabs to the Normans to the Spaniards - who looted Sicily mercilessly and made it the subject of countless foreign wars, leaving it with many fine monuments but little economic independence. Hundreds of years of oppression have bred insularity and resentment, as well as poverty, and the island was probably the most reluctantly unified Italian region in the last century, with Sicilians almost instinctively suspicious of the intentions of Rome. Even today, relations with the mainland are often strained, for many here illustrated every time they look at a map to see the island being kicked - the perpetual football.
And Sicilians do have a point. There's much that hasn't changed since Unification, and this century has brought a host of new problems, with mass emigration, both to the mainland and abroad, a high level of crime, and the continuing marginalization of the island from the Italian political mainstream. Even modernization has brought associated ills. Pockets of the island have been devastated by a tide of bleak construction and disfiguring industry, and although Sicily does now, at last, have some degree of autonomy, with its own parliament and president, little has really been done to tackle the island's more deep-rooted problems: poverty is still endemic, and there's an almost feudal attitude to business and commerce. Both European and central government aid continues to pour in, but much has been siphoned off by organized crime, which, in the west of the island at least, is still widespread.
However, this is just the background, and the island's appeal for travellers is astonishingly wide ranging. You'd do well to investigate the life - and monuments - of Palermo, one of Italy's most visually striking and lively cities; and the second city of Catania, where you may well arrive, also has a live-wire energy. But the chief pleasure is in the landscape: much of the island is mountainous, making for some of Italy's most dramatic scenery and providing one of its most beautiful rugged coastlines. The graceful cone of Mount Etna, Europe's largest volcano, dominates the east of the island, the most memorable of Sicily's natural sights; the northern Monti Madonie offer strenuous walking country; or there's the simple, isolated grandeur of the interior - the island's most sparsely populated, and most undiscovered, region. The coast is home to much of the island's life, with any number of resorts along its northern and eastern stretches, from lively sun-worshippers' haunts like Taormina and Cefal to simple fishing villages fronted by long beaches - out of season, at least, amazingly uncrowded. And for real solitude there are Sicily's outlying islands, where the sea is as clean as you'll find anywhere in the Mediterranean and you truly feel you're on the edge of Europe.
Sicily's diverse history has also left it with what is for many a surprising abundance of archeological remains. The island was an important power-base during the Hellenistic period, and the island's Greek relics, especially, are superb, most spectacularly at Agrigento, Selinunte, Siracusa and a host of remoter sites dotted around the countryside which stand comparison with any of the ruins in Greece itself - and are for the most part a good deal less crowded. There are also well-preserved mosaics at Piazza Armerina which recall the lavish trappings of Sicily's Roman governors. In terms of later architecture, too, the island is remarkably varied, the Arab and Norman elements of its history vividly manifest, particularly on the west and north coasts, and Baroque architecture showing its face in the elegantly restrained cities of the south east, Catania, Noto and M--dica, all planned new towns rebuilt after an earthquake in the seventeenth century.
