Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina. " It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination.
To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
My friend told me he was going to a fancy dress party as an Italian island. I said to him, ‘Don’t be Sicily’.
In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns.
I think that my interpretation of Italian was a lot more southern than what my husband cooks. You know, I grew up in Queens and in Brooklyn, and we - really, it's more southern. It's Naples and Sicily. It's heavier. It's over-spiced. And like most Americans, I thought spaghetti and meatballs was genius.
One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.
Sicily has suffered 13 foreign dominations from which she has taken both the best and the worst. The sequence of different cultures has made Sicily a fascinating place, quite unlike any other.
Sicily is more beautiful than any woman.
Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it.
My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It's a place filled with sun, close to the beach.
The typical WW1 soldier was not an intellectual like Ernst Jünger or Wilfred Owen, but was a peasant draftee from Galicia or Bavaria or Sicily, with all the traditional religious ideas. The hothouse atmosphere of war brought everyone into a supernatural-oriented universe of ghosts and apparitions.
Three quarters of the American population literally believe in religious miracles. The numbers who believe in the devil, in resurrection, in God doing this and that - it's astonishing. These numbers aren't duplicated anywhere else in the industrial world. You'd have to maybe go to mosques in Iran or do a poll among old ladies in Sicily to get numbers like this. Yet this is the American population.
All of Sicily is a dimension of the imagination.
I hate and detest Sicily in so far as I love it, and in so far as it does not respond to the kind of love I would like to have for it.
