GUY DE MAUPASSANT, the master of the nineteenth-century French
short story, visited Sicily in the spring of 1885 and wrote his
travel memoir as a tribute to the art, architecture, people and
landscape of this Mediterranean island. He provides a vivid account
of this "strange and divine museum of architecture," where Greek,
Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman influences combine to produce
monuments of beauty and a unique Sicilian style. In a land then
little touched by modern transportation, with and without guides,
he traveled by train, boat, horse and foot to reach the places he
had set out to see: Palermo and the great cathedral of Monreale;
the ancient Greek sites of Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento;
Messina and the Aeolian Islands; Catania, Taormina, Syracuse.
Maupassant climbs to the top of Vulcano, Mount Etna, and the
fortified monastery on Monte Cuccio, and down into the Capuchin
catacombs in Palermo and the sulphur mines of Casteltermini. He
visits many places that had special aesthetic and poetic importance
for him, like the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse and its famous
statue of Venus and in Palermo both the Palatine Chapel and
Wagner's room in the Hotel des Palmes where the composer wrote the
final notes of his last opera, Parsifal. Sicily is edited and
translated by Robert W. Berger, an art historian who has published
extensively on French art and architecture and on the history of
Paris. Introduction, notes, bibliography, map. 25 engravings and
photographs. Historical Travel, Paperback.
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