I will be gone for two weeks as I take a little trip to Italy, focusing on Sicily. I've been there virtually over the last few months, reading Goethe - "Without Sicily, Italy leaves no clear and lasting impression; this place is the key to everything." - and one of my favorite travel writers, Norman Lewis, whose travel book, In Sicily, begins with this oddly-weighted sentence: "My early fascination with things Sicilian grew from a close acquaintance with Ernesto Corvaja, in whose London house I lived for several years and whose daughter Ernestina I had married."
I also read, finally, Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, which in parts was better than any travel book at giving me a feel for Palermo: "It was the religious houses that gave the city its grimness and its character, its sedateness and also its sense of death which not even the vibrant Sicilian light could ever manage to disperse."
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