Sicily, Mt Etna & Aeolian Islands - October 10-17, 2009

August Heat is the tenth in teh series of crime novels by Andrea Camilleri featuring the idiosyncratic Inspector Montalbano. This latest book demonstrates once again why the author is held in such high esteem and why Montalbano is one of the treasures of the modern crime genre.

The setting is, as always, the picturesque landscape of rural Sicily and the daily life of the region is portryaed in the description of the customs and eccentricities of this intriguing island.

A combination of the scenery and the hero's (and presumably the author's) passion for Sicilian cuisine, mouth-wateringly described, present an irresistible invitation to visit and savor the experience at first hand.

Zen has been exiled to Sicily under the guise of acting as a sort of watchdog, observing a recently reestablished anti-Mafia taskforce. By the nature of the locale--Sicily makes its own rules--the fact that the work of this commission will inevitably be compromised seems clear. But where the cracks in the system will reveal themselves is harder to figure out until, of course, it's too late. Distracted by his dying mother back in Rome and by the island's perverse feuds and even stranger loyalties, and paying not quite enough attention to the professional travails of his beautiful adopted daughter, Carla, a computer specialist, Zen travels his usual idiosyncratic route to a crime's resolution. As always, he is most intrigued by the ambiguities of the situation--and is doomed to be the sacrificial scapegoat.

Set in Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification is coming violently into being, but it transcends the historical-novel classification. E.M. Forster called it, instead, "a novel which happens to take place in history." Lampedusa's Sicily is a land where each social gesture is freighted with nuance, threat, and nostalgia, and his skeptical protagonist, Don Fabrizio, is uniquely placed to witness all and alter absolutely nothing. Like his creator, the prince is an aristocrat and an astronomer, a man "watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it What renders The Leopard so beautiful, and so despairing, is Lampedusa's grasp of human frailty and his vision of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." Though the author had long had the book in mind, he didn't begin writing it until he was in his late 50s. He died at 60, soon after it was rejected as unpublishable.

A novelist, polemicist, occasional politician and perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize, Leonardo Sciascia died in 1989.  He left behind a formidable array of books, all of which revolve arround the hallucinatory realities of Sicilian life. But the stories collected in The Wine Dark Sea may be the best introduction to his work.  They offer a kind of capsule-history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country's events from their exhilarating and terrible underside.

An excellent account of two Sicilian prosecutors whose investigation of the Mafia led to the top levels of the Italian government and eventually, to their own murders. Throughout the 1980s, Falcone and Borsellino brought down more heat on the "men of honor" than anyone since Mussolini's handpicked "Iron Prefect." The two not only sent hundreds of gangsters to jail, they also exposed Mafia corruption of national political leaders that led to the indictments of two of Italy's best-known politicians, Bettino Craxi and Guilio Adreotti. The success of their investigations brought on reprisals by corrupt politicians designed to weaken police and prosecutors alike and ultimately led to their deaths. Falcone and Borsellino were assassinated by bombs in 1992, but their work brought to light revelations that are rattling the current Berlusconi administration. Stille has crafted an excellent book, deftly weaving complex threads of information about Italian, Sicilian, and Mafia history, Italian politics, and Italian jurisprudence into a highly readable narrative.

A journey into the heart of Sicily, using art, food, history and literature to shed light on southern Italy's legacy of political corruption and violent crime. The book takes as its starting point the ongoing trial of seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

A few months after the trauma of 9-11, Prose embarked with her husband on a trip to Sicily "partly to discover what this island has learned and can teach us about the triumph of beauty over violence, of life over death." She colorfully invokes the profuse legends and myths linked with Sicily (Homer’s "Island of the Sun" where Odysseus washed ashore) as a classical backdrop to her own odyssey, which at times in fact assumes the character of a trip back to a timeless, pre-modern way of life. Prose is especially effective at threading into her narrative fascinating items of reference—artistic, historical, and sociopolitical—without appearing didactic. She packs an extraordinary amount of information into her account: art historical observations (including a trenchant interpretation of Caravaggio’s disturbing "The Burial of St. Lucy"), the spectacle of religious ecstatic, accounts of culinary traditions, political intrigue, and memorable character sketches of people engaged in everyday habits, with the novelist’s touch for the telling detail. Throughout, Prose is keen to capture Sicily’s vacillating moods—its cheerful colors as well as its melancholy strain—as a place that "has seen countless cycles of violence and peace, of poverty and prosperity, of horror and beauty"—and yet embodies humanity’s will to survive.

Sicily, a place of recurring interest to prolific British author Lewis, is the setting of this mixture of straightforward travel narrative and social commentary. As Lewis visits different towns on the island, he compares modern-day Sicily with his World War II memories, noting the changes that have taken place over the last few decades. Along the way, he not only encourages readers to visit and experience Sicily but also creates vacation destinations out of many small towns on the island through his colorful anecdotes. He devotes a great deal of space to the Mafia and its influence on Sicily's daily life and includes chilling stories of a 1947 massacre. There are also reflections on the effects of recent African immigration and the island's changing sexual mores. The author eventually concludes that despite the addition of numerous hotels and cafés and the cleaning and modernization of urban areas, Sicilian culture and traditions have changed little since his first visit.

Anecdotal tales form the author's life in Taorimina.