ABSTRACT
i like Sicily just as it is. I feel comfortable there, and love everything about it: roast swordfish, the pointless sharpness and precision of argumentation, the pitiless sun, the orange-groves with their green-black leaves shining like painted tin, the motionless sea of golden stubble from horizon to horizon and not a patch of shadow, the baroque towns, the huge tunny-fish, the cassate, the puppets, the ancient weary families in their crumbling palaces, the edgy new men who try to look as if they were Milanese (and, so long as they keep their eyes shut, manage to: but their restless, lively eyes betray them), the resigned poor people, the wary ruthless view of life, the truths only Sicilians know, the heavy flavor of the wines, the proverbs, the dignified acceptance of death. I love these things, and many more about Sicily; so much so that I even defend them against the Sicilians themselves, who are quite capable of making accusations against their island and its inhabitants serious enough to endanger any non-Sicilian Italian who repeated them—because, among other things, they are nearly all true.
