Sicily Italy Quotes

Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra." ("We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.")

Maybe the whole of italy is becoming a sort of Sicily.

Cooking is about surrender.

Scientists say that the palm tree line, that is the climate suitable to growth of the palm, is moving north, five hundred metres, I think it was, every year...The palm tree line...I call it the coffee line, the strong black coffee line...It's rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up throughout Italy and already passed Rome...

All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.

There's a proverb, a maxim, that runs, 'The dead man is dead; let's give a hand to the living.' Now, you say that to a man from the North, and he visualizes the scene of an accident with one dead and one injured man; it's reasonable to let the dead man be and to set about saving the injured man. But a Sicilian visualizes a murdered man and his murderer, and the living man who's to be helped is the murderer.

My dear Homer, if you are really only once removed from the truth, with reference to virtue, instead of being twice removed and the manufacturer of a phantom, according to our definition of an imitator, and if you need to be able to distinguish between the pursuits which make men better or worse, in private and in public, tell us what city owes a better constitution to you, as Lacedaemon owes hers to Lycurgus, and as many cities, great and small, owe theirs to many other legislators? What state attributes to you the benefits derived from a good code of laws? Italy and Sicily recognize Charondas in this capacity, and we solon. But what state recognizes you.

But you don't come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime.

For war was not just a military campaign but also a parable. There were lessons of camaraderie and duty and inscrutable fate. There were lessons of honor and courage, of compassion and sacrifice. And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again in the coming weeks as they fought across Sicily, and in the coming months as they fought their way back toward a world at peace: that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.

Many critics of the Crusades would seem to suppose that after the Muslims had overrun a major portion of Christendom, they should have been ignored or forgiven; suggestions have been made about turning the other cheek. This outlook is certainly unrealistic and probably insincere. Not only had the Byzantines lost most of their empire; the enemy was at their gates. And the loss of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, as well as a host of Mediterranean islands, was bitterly resented in Europe. Hence, as British historian Derek Lomax (1933-1992) explained, 'The popes, like most Christians, believed war against the Muslims to be justified partly because the latter had usurped by force lands which once belonged to Christians and partly because they abused the Christians over whom they ruled and such Christian lands as they could raid for slaves, plunder and the joys of destruction.' It was time to strike back.

Allied air forces flying from England lost twenty bombers a day in March; another three thousand Eighth Air Force bombers were damaged that month. Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The

the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.

He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home,” wrote one journalist.

carton of cigarettes would buy you a whole province here,” an American officer reported, “and a suit of clothes would get you the whole island.

In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according

Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.

I don't want to go to Italy no more, I don't want to go nowhere no more. You end up crashing in a private airplane, in the mountains of Tennessee... or Sicily...

though Italy governed Sicily, no true Sicilian felt he was an Italian.

And across the water, you would swear you could sniff it all; the cinnamon and the cloves, the frankincense and the honey and the licorice, the nutmeg and citrons, the myrrh and the rosewater from Persia in keg upon keg. You would think you could glimpse, heaped and glimmering, the sapphires and the emeralds and the gauzes woven with gold, the ostrich feathers and the elephant tusks, the gums and the ginger and the coral buttons mynheer Goswin the clerk of the Hanse might be wearing on his jacket next week. . . . The Flanders galleys put into harbor every night in their highly paid voyage from Venice, fanned down the Adriatic by the thick summer airs, drifting into Corfu and Otranto, nosing into and out of Sicily and round the heel of Italy as far as Naples; blowing handsomely across the western gulf to Majorca, and then to the north African coast, and up and round Spain and Portugal, dropping off the small, lucrative loads which were not needed for Bruges; taking on board a little olive oil, some candied orange peel, some scented leather, a trifle of plate and a parrot, some sugar loaves.

forces. What utter treachery!” Hitler then makes misleading statements about how he and Mussolini had agreed to defend Sicily. The Fuehrer also offers a backhanded apology to the Japanese for allowing a large amount of the Italian Navy to fall into Allied hands. However, it is Hitler’s current plan for the defense of Italy that interests Washington. Oshima quotes him on this as saying: “[The Allies] have two courses: either they will go north in Italy or they will try to land in the Balkans. I am inclined to believe they will take the latter course. I

You must never let the enemy choose the ground on which you fight. … He must be made to fight the battle according to your plan. Never his plan. Never. … You must never attack until you are absolutely ready.

Montgomery intended to bludgeon his way through the German opposition. What he had learned in North Africa, in Sicily and in southern Italy was that the Germans always counter-attacked. It was almost Pavlovian.

The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.

On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had “seemed outlandish in 1942,” as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.

The calm skies that drifted above us lulled us into thinking this traversée would be smooth, but after several hours, the unsteady sea had taken its toll on me and after a light lunch and a brief swim in the open sea failed to do so, I attempted to remedy my mal de mer with rest. When I awoke, the sun had already set and the cool air and soft light of twilight helped recalibrate my disoriented thoughts. Although my seasickness had subsided, I lay starboard side facing the heavens - that were now a deep shade of purple - so as to not provoke another episode. We set to anchoring behind several large volcanic pillars just a stone’s-throw away from where the Tyrrhenian Sea kissed the east of the island. A handful of wishes scattered the skies as we approached the shores of Aci Trezza. As these stars traced their dying song across the void above, part of me felt ashamed for even entertaining the notion of wishing upon a star, but that voice was speedily silenced by words He had once shared with me in Scotland: “There is always some truth to fiction.

A later age would conflate them into a single, featureless demigod, possessed of mythical courage and fortitude, and animated by a determination to rebalance a wobbling world. Keith Douglas, a British officer who had fought in North Africa and would die at Normandy, described “a gentle obsolescent breed of heroes…. Unicorns, almost.” Yet it does them no disservice to recall their profound diversity in provenance and in character, or their feet of clay, or the mortality that would make them compelling long after their passing.

By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It's a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy's most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island's agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.

... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods? I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs.

All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren't so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa. The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari- a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island's cherished cephalopod. And Palermo's most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky- Palermo in a single bite.

In 1934, strongman Fulgencio Batista forced President Grau’s resignation. Then in 1940, Grau lost his bid for the Presidency to his adversary Batista. Four years later in 1944, he did win the election and took office for a four-year term starting on October 10th. After Grau won the election and was the President elect, Batista still in office, blatantly attacked the National Treasury, leaving the cupboards bare by the time Grau was actually sworn in as President. Since Grau and Batista were staunch adversaries, it is highly unlikely that any deal could have been made in 1946 to allow “Lucky” Luciano into Cuba, especially with Luciano having been exiled to Sicily by the United States government that preceding February. Still, Lansky had enough political pull within the Cuban government to prepare for a strong Mafia presence in Havana. In October of 1946, in an attempt to keep his whereabouts a secret, “Lucky” Luciano covertly boarded a freighter taking him from Naples, Italy, to Caracas, Venezuela. Then Luciano flew south to Rio de Janeiro and returned north to Mexico City. On October 29, 1946, he arranged for a private flight from Mexico City to Camagüey, Cuba, where Meyer Lansky met him. Having the right connections, Luciano passed through Cuban customs unimpeded and was whisked by car to the splendid Grand Hotel. Luciano, having just arrived in Cuba, was looking forward to setting up operations. Cuba would actually be a better place than the United States for what he had in mind.

Tracing the career of the Teuton through mediaeval and modern history, we can find no possible excuse for denying his actual biological supremacy. In widely separated localities and under widely diverse conditions, his innate racial qualities have raised him to preeminence. There is no branch of modern civilization that is not of his making. As the power of the Roman empire declined, the Teuton sent down into Italy, Gaul, and Spain the re-vivifying elements which saved those countries from complete destruction. Though now largely lost in the mixed population, the Teutons are the true founders of all the so-called Latin states. Political and social vitality had fled from the old inhabitants; the Teuton only was creative and constructive. After the native elements absorbed the Teutonic invaders, the Latin civilizations declined tremendously, so that the France, Italy, and Spain of today bear every mark of national degeneracy. In the lands whose population is mainly Teutonic, we behold a striking proof of the qualities of the race. England and Germany are the supreme empires of the world, whilst the virile virtues of the Belgians have lately been demonstrated in a manner which will live forever in song and story. Switzerland and Holland are veritable synonyms for Liberty. The Scandinavians are immortalized by the exploits of the Vikings and Normans, whose conquests over man and Nature extended from the sun-baked shores of Sicily to the glacial wastes of Greenland, even attaining our own distant Vinland across the sea. United States history is one long panegyric of the Teuton, and will continue to be such if degenerate immigration can be checked in time to preserve the primitive character of the population.

The troupe also made a 20,000–mile trip into the European war. Hope was the first American entertainer to perform in Sicily. He did a show at Messina just after the enemy had fled the town and was still bombarding the area with its artillery. By the end of the war, it was estimated that Hope had appeared at virtually every camp, naval base, and hospital in the country. He had made half a dozen trips overseas, including a tour of the South Pacific in 1944 that was highlighted by a crash landing in Australia. With him then was the same crew that had gone to Italy the year before: Langford, Colonna, dancer Patty Thomas, guitarist Tony Romano, and an old vaudeville pal, Barney Dean. Newsweek called it “the biggest entertainment giveaway in history,” a pace that no one in show business has ever equaled. “It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective,” novelist John Steinbeck said of Hope. For his service to the country, Hope was given more than 100 awards and citations and two special Oscars. He was voted a place in the Smithsonian’s Living Hall of Fame.

Palermo is dotted everywhere with frittura shacks- street carts and storefronts specializing in fried foods of all shapes and cardiac impacts. On the fringes of the Ballarò market are bars serving pane e panelle, fried wedges of mashed chickpeas combined with potato fritters and stuffed into a roll the size of a catcher's mitt. This is how the vendors start their days; this is how you should start yours, too. If fried chickpea sandwiches don't register as breakfast food, consider an early evening at Friggitoria Chiluzzo, posted on a plastic stool with a pack of locals, knocking back beers with plates of fried artichokes and arancini, glorious balls of saffron-stained rice stuffed with ragù and fried golden- another delicious ode to Africa. Indeed, frying food is one of the favorite pastimes of the palermitani, and they do it- as all great frying should be done- with a mix of skill and reckless abandon. Ganci is among the city's most beloved oil baths, a sliver of a store offering more calories per square foot than anywhere I've ever eaten. You can smell the mischief a block before you hit the front door: pizza topped with french fries and fried eggplant, fried rice balls stuffed with ham and cubes of mozzarella, and a ghastly concoction called spiedino that involves a brick of béchamel and meat sauce coated in bread crumbs and fried until you could break someone's window with it.

You'll find trattorie brimming with the spirit of Sicily no matter which direction you head from the Four Corners. At Zia Pina, you will find no menu at all, just Pina and her helpers cooking up great piles of stuffed sardines, baby octopus, and fried red mullet. At Trattoria Basile, you take your ticket and build your meal piece by piece: a few stuffed eggplant, a plate of spaghetti and clams, maybe a bit of grilled sausage.

According to the Koran and the Hadith, aggressive warfare for the purpose of imposing Islam on the world is the ultimate religious obligation of jihad. Second, the history of the expansion of Islam clearly reveals its aggressive, offensive nature. In the seventh century, Islam did not emerge peacefully from the Arabian Peninsula floating harmlessly on the breeze. Islam was spread across the Middle East and North Africa at the edge of the sword. The only choice offered by the Muslim conquerors was conversion or submission to Islam, or death. The same choice was offered when Muslims subjugated Spain and Portugal in 711, and occupied all or part of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, an occupation of almost eight centuries. Shortly after conquering Spain and Portugal, the Muslims invaded France, but they were repulsed in 732. Muslims also invaded, conquered, and occupied Sicily and large parts of Italy. In addition to invading Spain, France, Sicily, and Italy from North Africa, Muslim armies repeatedly invaded Europe from the east, until they were finally driven out for the last time in 1683. Islam was not waging ‘defensive’ war when it conquered and occupied Spain, Sicily, and Italy or when it besieged Vienna three times.

Climate Italy’s climate varies greatly from north to south. In the Alps, at the top of the boot, snow lingers on the highest peaks throughout the summer. The foot of the boot has hot, dry summers and mild winters. In summer, the temperature can easily reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) or higher. This climate draws many northerners to the Mediterranean beaches in the winter. Rome, Italy’s capital, is in the middle of the boot. It’s average high temperature in January is about 52°F (11°C), and its average high temperature in July is 86°F (30°C). In 2003, Italy suffered a heat wave in which the temperature reached 100°F (38°C) or more throughout the summer. An estimated three thousand people, mostly elderly, died. Rain is the heaviest during the fall and winter months. The rainiest areas are in the north. The city of Udine, in the northeast, receives about 60 inches (150 centimeters) of rain a year, but only about 18 inches (46cm) fall on southern Sicily each year.

The Coming of the Greeks The southern part of the Italian boot is close to Greece, and several Greek cultures influenced he cultures of Italy. People from the Greek city of Corinth settled on Sicily. Starting about 734 B.C., they built a city called Syracuse on the island’s east coast. The Greeks ruled this city, and the Sicilians were enslaved. The Greeks established other cities on the mainland, in a cluster known as Magna Graecia, which means “Great Greece” in Latin, the language of ancient Rome. A later Greek city, called Poseidonia after Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, flourished in about 550 B.C. When Italic people conquered the city, which was located south of Naples, they changed its name to Paestum. The ruins of Greek temples there are among the best-preserved Greek structures anywhere.

Rumbling Mountains Four active volcanoes shake the southern Apennines. One of these, Mount Vesuvius, lies on the shore of the Bay of Naples. The people who lived near it two thousand years ago didn’t know it was a volcano. Then, in A.D. 79, Vesuvius suddenly blew its top and hot ash filled the sky, burying the city of Pompeii and neighboring towns. Over the centuries, Vesuvius has erupted again from time to time, often with little warning. Mount Etna, on the island of Sicily, is more than three times higher than Vesuvius. It is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, producing frequent lava flows. Italy’s other two active volcanoes, Stromboli and Vulcano, belong to a group of islands called the Aeolians, off the northern coast of Sicily. Earthquakes also strike Italy. In 1693, an estimated one hundred thousand people died in an earthquake in Sicily. The most deadly recent quake in Italy occurred near Naples in 1980. It killed three thousand people.

North and south Italy is a nation of contrasts. Most of the industries and businesses are in the north, where people can earn much money. The south is less prosperous and some farming people, such as this man from Sicily, may have to struggle to make a living. Even so, the average standard of living in Italy is one of the highest in Europe.

You’ve saved your money and bought a ticket to Fashion Week in Milan. All the world’s great clothing designers will be showing their startling and beautiful designs. You’ll be one of the first to see them! Or picture yourself in Rome. You’re at a performance of the opera Aïda, written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. You’re seated amid eighteen-hundred-year-old ruins under a starry sky, listening to magnificent music. You’ve got your snowboard and warm clothing so you can glide down the slopes the world’s greatest skiers took during the 2006 Winter Olympics near Turin. Or perhaps it’s summer, and you’re going to explore the sea caves of Capri, off the coast of Naples. Later, you can take a look at the towering columns at Agrigento, among the temples the ancient Greeks built on the island of Sicily long before Italy existed. In any one of these places, you might be one of the millions of tourists who visit Italy every year. But alongside the tourists are Italians, also appreciative of the wonders of their own country.

Europe’s earliest cookbook came from ancient Rome. In it, the writer Epicius described the recipes for dishes such as stuffed dormouse, and snails soaked in wine and oil. Food fashions may have changed, but many Italians still take great pride in their cooking. Regional Italian dishes have become familiar in countries around the world. They include bolognaise sauce from Bologna, cassata siciliana (an ice-cream dessert) from Sicily, and from Parma, the smoked parma ham which is often served thinly sliced with fresh figs. Italian restaurants are found in towns and cities in many other countries. Traditionally, the midday meal is the main meal of the day, and a family event. Fresh ingredients are usually used, and packaged “convenience foods” are less common than in many other countries. Fresh raw vegetables, sliced very thinly and arranged in a colorful display, are often served as an appetizer. Common drinks are wine (though often watered down for children) and mineral water. For dessert there is usually fresh fruit and more Italian specialties, ice cream and espresso coffee.

she believed in the healthy influence of natural surroundings, never having been in Sicily, where things are different.

A calculated risk is a known risk for the sake of a real gain. A risk for the sake of a risk is a fool’s choice.

optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.

Three hundred DUKWs and other vessels swarmed between island and mainland “like so many gnats on a pond,” a witness reported, and this first invasion of continental Europe—an all-British operation code-named BAYTOWN—had proved so placid that Tommies soon called it the Messina Strait Regatta.

Our holidays began here in Catania, this loud, bustling city pulsing with memories. I know these scenes, like a movie once adored and now almost forgotten. I know the large square lava-stone pavers that line the footpaths. I can smell salty, fishy air coming from the fish market I think is just down the far end of the square. I remember this intense heat, the sea breeze flowing like water between the buildings, down the alleyways, never quite cooling enough.

About the author. While still a boy, Russell Evans sought the road to high adventure the classical way - by stowing himself aboard a ship. But it had steam up for moving only from one to another and didn't leave port! On finishing school he tried again, but this time by getting a job as cabin boy on a tramp shipping wheat from Russia's Black Sea ports. This was at the height of the muzhik famine when every bushel of grain exported could have saved a peasant's life. The experience left him hating dictatorships and admiring the astonishing fortitude of people who have to endure them. After training as a newspaper reporter, he volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, only to end up being grilled by a kangaroo court in Red Montmartre on suspicion of being a Franco spу. Disillusioned, he left for South America on a madcap scheme for starting a new republic in a remote corner of Amazonia. Two years later he emerged from the wilderness to find Hitler's war had started and hurried home. He fought in Wavell's Western Desert campaign, including the siege of Tobruk, was rescued from a sinking destroyer, took part in the Sicily landings, then served in Italy and finally in the Far East. He was a captain in the Intelligence Corps, and one of his earliest assignments was frontier control work in Egypt with the late Maurice Oldfield who was to become, as chief of MI6, Britain's top spymaster. After the war Russell Evans returned to South America for a final adventure before marrying and settling down to the more predictable life of a newspaper reporter. For fifteen years he was editor of a county weekly in mid Wales and then taught journalism in Cardiff College of Commerce. Now he works from home, writing. His wife is a doctor and they have one son.

(It was said that Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, spoke only four words of English: “Yes,” “No,” and “Second front.”) Moscow

In Field Order No. 1, Patton had advised his commanders, “Attack both by day and night to the limit of human endurance and then continue to attack.” For

That Allied victory had cost them 44,000 casualties since DIADEM began on May 11: 18,000 Americans—among them more than 3,000 killed in action—along with 12,000 British, 9,600 French, and nearly 4,000 Poles. German casualties were estimated at 52,000, including 5,800 dead. Americans

The Arab soldier is interested in just three things: women, horses, and guns,” a French officer told an American colonel, who replied, “The American soldier is the same, except that he doesn’t care anything about horses and guns.

Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The

A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somesault through our formation. No chute.

Italy police arrest 8 in Mafia wind farms plot. Operation “Aeolus,” named after the ancient Greek god of winds, netted eight suspects, arrested in the Trapani area of western Sicily [and on the Italian mainland]. Police in Trapani said the local Mafia bribed city officials in nearby Mazara del Vallo so the town would invest in wind farms to produce energy. (Associated Press, 2009 [Google hosted])

The plunder of the coasts of Italy, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, and Spain continued almost unchecked. Ruinous economic and demographic decline particularly affected Southern Italy. Sometimes the wholesale evacuation of a patch of coast was ordered by the local governor to save the population from an Ottoman raid, as on the Adriatic coast in 1566. Five hundred square miles of countryside were devastated anyway. Sea trade between Spain and Italy was intermittently on the brink of paralysis; the whole structure of Spain’s Mediterranean empire seemed threatened by this merciless raiding.

I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,” wrote the pilot John Muirhead, “for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

The rates of venereal disease soared and the 82nd Airborne opened a medically certified brothel in Trapani under a supervising officer soon known as the Madam;

The stepped-up patrols began last October after 366 migrants fleeing African countries drowned when their boat capsized a mile from Sicily. After that episode, the European Union pledged nearly $41 million in emergency funds, mainly for financing immigration facilities. The number of migrants who have reached Italy by boat this year has already topped the total of more than 40,000 for the whole of 2013. The pace of arrivals is on track to exceed the record of 62,000 set in 2011.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith recalls a story from Plutarch’s Lives that may shed light on my friend’s inability to quit his job. It’s the story of Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, a region of Greece. Pyrrhus is planning an attack on Rome. His trusted adviser, Cineas—Smith him calls the king’s “favorite”—thinks it’s a bad idea. Cineas is an impressive guy, a brilliant wordsmith and negotiator whom the king often uses to represent himself. But even though he has the trust and ear of the king, it’s usually not a great idea to tell the king he’s making a mistake, even when you’re a favorite of his, so Cineas takes a roundabout approach. Here’s how Cineas begins in Plutarch’s version: “The Romans, sir, are reported to be great warriors and conquerors of many warlike nations; if God permits us to overcome them, how should we use our victory?” Well, says Pyrrhus, once we conquer Rome, we’ll be able to subdue all of Italy. And then what? asks Cineas. Sicily would be conquered next. And then what? asks Cineas. Libya and Carthage would be next to fall. And then what? asks Cineas. Then all of Greece, says the king. And what shall we do then? asks Cineas. Pyrrhus answers, smiling: “We will live at our ease, my dear friend, and drink all day, and divert ourselves with pleasant conversation.”   Then Cineas brings down the hammer on the king: “And what hinders Your Majesty from doing so now?” We have all the tools of contentment at hand already. You don’t have to conquer Italy to enjoy the fundamental pleasures of life. Stay human and subdue the rat within. Life’s not a race. It’s a journey to savor and enjoy. Ambition—the relentless desire for more—can eat you up.

I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Italian troops from the Assietta and Aosta Divisions surrendered by the thousands, grousing at German betrayal. “One never seemed to be able to do enough to please them,” an Italian POW explained.

Mount up and continue,” Patton told his armor crews. “Don’t stop except for gas.” Omar

One can always do what one wants if it takes people by surprise,” he explained. “There is not time for plotters to develop their nefarious plans.

Carpathian battalion

That the

In October 1347, several trading ships from Genoa, Italy, pulled into the harbor at Messina in Sicily. Everyone aboard those ships was dead or dying of a mysterious plague. Europeans called it the Black Death, because victims had black swellings (each the size of an egg) on their bodies and black splotches on their skin.

The doctor stopped in the middle of the operation to smoke a cigarette and he gave me one too.” Another sergeant from the same company told a medic, “Patch up these holes and give me a gun. I’m going to kill every son of a bitch in Germany.

British Spitfires, using signals intelligence to pinpoint the German Luftwaffe headquarters, shot up the San Domenico Palace—a grand hotel in Taormina, once favored by D. H. Lawrence—and unhinged the Axis air defenses just as invaders approached the island. Little

thousand);

Nobody really knows what he’s doing, Bill Mauldin had written of his first week in combat with the 180th Infantry. Yet other primal lessons also could be gleaned, from Licata to Augusta. For war was not just a military campaign but also a parable. There were lessons of camaraderie and duty and inscrutable fate. There were lessons of honor and courage, of compassion and sacrifice. And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again in the coming weeks as they fought across Sicily, and in the coming months as they fought their way back toward a world at peace: that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.

Driving in Sicily is an extreme sport.

Imperial strategy in the west had pivoted from Sicily to southern Italy.

By two A.M. the first waves had turned toward shore, using the burning wheat straw as a beacon or following compass headings. Gunboats with blue lights stood in toward shore, hailing the first waves: “Straight ahead. Look out for mines. Good luck.” Now the Navy guns opened up, their concussive booms and smoke rings carrying on the wind. Shells glowed cherry red against the starlight. In graceful arcs they floated over the puttering boats before splattering in sprays of white and gold on the distant shore. Coxswains steered by the shells, but soldiers instinctively slumped in their vessels, peering over the gunwales. Major General John P. Lucas, dispatched by Eisenhower as an observer of HUSKY, watched the spectacle from Monrovia’s bridge with Hewitt and Patton, then confided a small, filthy secret to his diary: “War, with all its terror and dirt and destruction, is at times the most beautiful phenomenon in the world.

Sicily--- Oranges, pistachios, and/or aubergine. Sicilian food a product of immense, diverse history. Have sardines! Try the orange cake. You'll find it all over, but there used to be a good one in Taormina. I shake my head in amazement. Somehow, it feels like Dad had been quietly guiding me. Tuscany--- Wild boar is good but tomatoes are better. Nothing else! Please say something with Chiara's tomatoes. I want to help her. Farm is a century old and sells some obscure varieties. Tomato salads, tomato bread soup, panzanella. And here too, Leo and I had organically found the path my father laid out for us. The notes on Liguria are less specific, but when I read his scrawled handwriting, I smile to myself. Liguria--- Was thinking about beans, but basil a good opinion. Oh boy, I cannot wait to show that note to Leo. Basil a good option! Leo. I sit and write with an open heart, not shying away from treacly memories of cut oranges shared in the sea. Pushing my cynicism to the side and allowing the love I have for food, for Italy, for my father, to run from my heart down my veins to my fingers and onto the page.

Eleanor of Castile had experience of far more countries, both to live in (Castile, Gascony, England, Wales, Sicily, the Holy Land) and to visit (Scotland, Aragon, France, Italy, Tunisia). She

The smells of barbecued seafood waft through the air, and I think about the crazy difference between here, with its blue sea and salty air; luscious, green Tuscany; and sun-burnished Sicily.

In his stepfather’s household, he had seen the typical Athenian politician who sought to exploit rather than end these ancient antagonisms. The mission of Plato’s Philosopher Ruler was to end this kind of madness. On his mother’s side he had an ancestor who could serve as his model statesman. This was the legendary legislator Solon, whose laws ended the civil strife that had divided Athens in the sixth century BCE. Solon’s reforms, which embodied “his preference for an ordered life, with its careful gradations giving its class its proper place,” earned him pride of place among the Seven Wise Men of Greece. They also made Solon the real-life paradigm for Plato’s Philosopher Rulers in the Republic, where “those we call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy come into the same hands.”17 A truly utopian hope, we might say—but amazingly, Plato got the chance to try it himself in 367 BCE, when he was nearly sixty. Twenty years earlier during his trip to Italy, he had visited Syracuse, Sicily’s largest city-state, and made fast friends with the brother of its ruler, a man named Dion. Two decades later Dion invited him to return as political adviser to Syracuse’s new ruler, Dion’s nephew Dionysius II.

There were over a half million troops in Italy at the beginning of June 1944. Driving out the Germans would eventually cost 40,455 lives, including those killed on Sicily. Those men weren’t a sideshow, and they certainly deserve our respect and thanks today.

The Knights Hospitaller, along with a ragtag group of around two thousand soldiers drawn from Spain, Italy, Greece, and Sicily, held the island for four months,

Into that malevolent place they walked, emerging with pathetic little bundles: a coat, a cap, perhaps a frayed pair of trousers. In the seam of a soiled shirt, one family found a hidden note. “I dream of the hills around Siena, and of my love whom I shall never see again,” the doomed man had written. “I shall become one gaping wound—like the winds, nothing.

The Socratic dialogues Plato “chronicled” included those with Protagoras from the Balkan city of Abdera, Hippias from Peloponnesian Elis, Parmenides from Italy’s Elea, and Gorgias from Sicily’s Leontini. Each visiting intellect had been shaped by contact with a unique group of surrounding tribes, and by the exigencies imposed on city structure, domestic habit, and vested interest by distinctive forms of enterprise. One result: each arrival presented a philosophy which appealed to a very different configuration of the human mind.

Italy without Sicily leaves no trace upon the soul. Sicily is the key to everything.

It became increasingly fashionable for wealthy Romans to amass large private libraries in their town houses and country villas. (There were no bookshops in the early years in Rome, but, in addition to the collections seized as booty, books could be purchased from dealers in southern Italy and Sicily where the Greeks had founded such cities as Naples, Tarentum, and Syracuse.)

We’ve had a grand life and I hope there’ll be more. Should it chance that there’s not, at least we can say that in our years together we’ve packed enough for ten ordinary lives. We’ve known triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow, all that goes to fill the pattern of human existence…. We have no reason to be other than thankful come what may.

From Algiers, he would take the template for an Allied headquarters and use it to build SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—and eventually NATO.

My life is a mixture of politics and war. The latter is bad enough…. The former is straight and unadulterated venom.

Muses, launch your song! What kings were fired for war, what armies at their orders thronged the plains? What heroes sprang into bloom, what weapons blazed, even in those days long ago, in Italy’s life-giving land? Virgil, The Aeneid

A single crude acronym that captured the soldier’s lowered expectations—SNAFU, for “situation normal, all fucked up”—had expanded into a vocabulary of GI cynicism: SUSFU (situation unchanged, still fucked up); SAFU (self-adjusting fuck-up); TARFU (things are really fucked up); FUMTU (fucked up more than usual); JANFU (joint Army-Navy fuck-up); JAAFU (joint Anglo-American fuck-up); FUAFUP (fucked up and fucked up proper); and FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition).

After Italian, Sicilian is the most widely spoken Italic language in Italy, followed closely by Neapolitan. Sicily has several Albanian communities founded in the fifteenth century, where Arberesh, the medieval Tosk dialect of Albanian, is spoken; this was the mother tongue of Francesco Crispi, Italy’s first Sicilian prime minister.

An attack against Sicily will be launched in 1943 with the target date as the period of the favorable July moon.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

To have seen Italy without seeing Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything. —GOETHE, ITALIAN JOURNEY

did it because we could not bear the shame of being less than the man beside us,” John Muirhead wrote. “We fought because he fought; we died because he

have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily. The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they

Where the wages are smallest and the conditions hardest, there emigration has reached the highest mark. In other words, it is precisely from those parts of Italy where there are the greatest poverty, crime, and ignorance that the largest number of emigrants from Italy go out to America, and, I might add, the smallest number return. Of the 511,935 emigrants who came to North and South America from Italy in 1906, 380,615 came from Sicily and the southern provinces.

The results were convincing. During two summer months of 1943 in Sicily, the US Army had 21,482 hospital admissions for malaria compared to 17,375 battle casualties (wounded and dead). A public health poster had it right: “The malaria mosquito knocks out more men than the enemy.” Field testing of DDT began in Italy in August 1943; by 1945 new cases of malaria had declined by more than 80 percent, and DDT was also in use, in an indiscriminate but highly effective fashion, to stop the typhus epidemic in Naples.

The deities of the great city were summoned to Rome, and Carthage was ‘devoted’ to the gods of the underworld. This infernal dedication of the city had remote precedent in the treatment of some towns in Italy, including Veii, but it had no precedent outside Italy. The city walls were dismantled, roofs removed, making the buildings unusable, and the population sold into slavery. Spoil that the Carthaginians had removed from Akragas in Sicily in 405 BC was restored to its rightful owners. There is a widespread modern story that in addition salt was ploughed into Carthage’s soil to make it infertile, but that story was simply invented by a historian writing in 1930.

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.