Sicily Border Land

In 1787, during his first trip to Italy, Goethe wrote that “without seeing Sicily one cannot get an idea of Italy. It is in Sicily that the key to everything is found.

It looks like Jordan, instead it’s the surroundings of Agrigento. It looks like Tunis, but it is Mazara del Vallo. It looks like Marrackech: it’s the Catania market.

Seen from certain latitudes, Sicily does not seem even in Italy. Unless, once again, the avant-garde, a border, a large pond where the Romans overlapped the Phoenicians, the Byzantine art to the Greek one, the Renaissance art to the Catalan Gothic reveal themselves. the Spaniards mixed with the Normans, the Tunisians with the Trapani. Who knows if this is the society of the future, here in Sicily with its feet planted in the past.