Sicily Guide

The Italian government was ordered to pay $160,000 to a gay man who received a driver’s license for the disabled after he volunteered information on his sexual orientation to military authorities, the man and a gay-rights group said Monday.

Danilo Giuffrida, 27, said he told officials about his homosexuality when he took a physical after being called up in 2000 for Italy’s mandatory year of military service, which has since been abolished.

Giuffrida told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his hometown, Catania, that he had hoped to avoid service and keep working to help support his family. Giuffrida was disqualified for psychological reasons.

Read more at The Associated Press

On a sun-drenched morning last week in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a bunker-like courtroom in the Ucciardone prison was the scene of a rare challenge to the mafia. Bosses and low-ranking “soldiers” stared fixedly from their steel cages as seven shopkeepers – hidden by shaded glass – identified those who had allegedly collected extortion money from them for years.

To date, 18 Palermitans – owners of bars and pizzerias, shops and car showrooms, even a street vendor who sells olives – have picked out their tormentors, for whom extortion rackets are the key instrument to control a neighbourhood.

Read more at the TimesOnline.com

Ask a roomful of readers about Lampedusa’s “Leopard” and more often than not you’ll find a few who will put hand to heart and say it’s their favorite book, and a few others who will simply shrug — never heard of it — or ask if it has anything to do with the Visconti movie starring Burt Lancaster (yes, it does). I suppose it’s a coincidence that a roomful of travelers will poll in a similar fashion if you ask them about Sicily, the marvelous, maddening island disparaged and adored in “The Leopard”: it’s either a favorite place, or they haven’t even thought of going there.

Read more at the NYTimes.com

As an image of local Mediterranean democracy in action, it was hard to beat. Under the deep blue sky of late afternoon, and beneath the solemn gaze of 100 or more local citizens packed into a courtyard shaded by lemon trees, the new mayor and the new town council of the little Sicilian town of Salemi had just been sworn in. Squashed into dark suits and ties, the councillors stood up one after another to give speeches of immaculate boredom.

Yet the national media had flown down from Rome, not something you would expect at such a parochial event. The reason: the new mayor of Salemi (population: 11,254), is Vittorio Sgarbi: one of the oddest and most colourful figures in contemporary Italy. In turn he has been art critic, TV talk-show host, powerful functionary in the Culture Ministry, leader of his own political party, and culture tsar of Milan. Sgarbi has made personal re-invention his trade mark. This is his strangest incarnation to date.

Read more at the Independent.co.uk

Hurtling through hard-core Mafia territory -’Sicily’s chief sheriff, Falcone, was blown up just there,’ our driver says, reassuringly - we’re on a dual carriageway where Italians relish ignoring traffic lights, overtaking rules and most other road laws known to man. ‘Up there is where the Godfather was hiding all along,’ he continues, pointing. This isn’t a gangster tour, though; we’re not looking for trouble but for tomatoes - mighty fine tomatoes.

The tiny Sicilian village of Scoglitti is claimed to have the best conditions in the world for growing them. As we drive there Italian tomato expert Paolo Battistel explains: ‘It’s down to hot sun, high salinity in the soil and tradition.’ Although he’s from Verona in the less hairy north, Pizza Express has employed him as a ‘tommelier’ to seek out seasonal varieties for its menu. Think wine sommelier but a doyenne of tom toms instead.

Read more at Metro.co.uk

Enel has deposited the project design for one of the first off-shore wind farms in the Mediterranean Sea. The request for an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been delivered by Enel to the Ministry of the Environment and the Region of Sicily.

Italy’s first off-shore wind facility will foresee the installation of 115 large generators with a capacity of between 3 and 5 megawatts each in the waters of the Gulf of Gela at least 3 nautical miles off-shore, between the towns of Licata (in the province of Agrigento), Butera and Gela (both in the province of Caltanissetta).

Read more at YourProjectNews.com

Eni SpA has made “a new, significant” natural gas discovery off the coast of Sicily, the Italian gas and oil company said Tuesday.

The find was made in the Cassiopea 1 field in the Sicilian Strait 22 kilometers (14 miles) off Agrigento. The field is 60-percent owned by Eni and 40-percent by Edison.

Read more at IHT.com

I am not generally a fan of Michelin-starred restaurants.

It’s not that I have a problem with the guide per se, more that satisfying the demands of a guidebook originally designed to tell haute-bourgeoisie French motor-ists where to find Parisian-style fine dining seems to do strange things to chefs, making them complicit in a production-line approach that, however upmarket, has more in common with the box-ticking of Pizza Hut or Starbucks than with good cooking.

Read more at Time Online

Italian researchers say a rostrum, used by ancient Romans to ram enemy ships, was found off the coast of Sicily.

The rare bronze appendage may have been used in the final naval battle of the First Punic War, ANSA reported Tuesday. The rostrum was recovered about 230 feet below the surface by divers aided by remotely operated vehicles.

Read more at UPI.com

After 800 days, the restauration works for the Palatine Chapel in Palermo have been completed. now the public can enjoy its view.

The Palatine Chapel is the royal chapel of the Norman kings of Sicily situated on the ground floor at the center of the Palazzo Reale in Palermo. The chapel was commissioned by Roger II of Sicily in 1132. It took eight years to build and many more to decorate with mosaics and fine art. The sanctuary, dedicated to Saint Peter, is reminiscent of a domed basilica. It has three apses, as is usual in Byzantine architecture, with six pointed arches (three on each side of the central nave) resting on recycled classical columns.

This tale could happen in Italy. From the complexities of forbidden love to “the havoc wreaked by Sicily’s eternally bewildering culture,” Marlena De Blasi fans won’t be disappointed with her latest memoir, based on a mesmerizing true story set in Sicily’s remote mountainous region. To protect the still-living protagonists and their way of life, De Blasi has changed names and placed the narrative at a geographic distance from where their haunting love story in fact unfolded.

Read more at the Providence Journal

“The glory Sicily had with the Greek colonies of two thousand five hundred years ago was the high point of Sicilian history,” said the museum display in the “Paolo Orsi” Museum in Syracuse, Sicily. “Modern Sicily is a shadow of the greatness it had under the Greeks.” This fact written by persons who were not Greek totally astonished me during the 2005 Arba Sicula (Sicilian dawn) Tour. It continued to mesmerize me during my return visit in the 2008 Arba Sicula tour.

The “Paolo Orsi” Regional Archaeological Museum of Syracuse, Sicily is one of the foremost institutions in Europe. It was built in the park of the Villa Landolina. It is dedicated to Paolo Orsi, an archaeologist and expert in Hellenic and pre-Hellenic civilizations. The building is nine thousand square meters of exhibition space on two floors. Eighteen thousand archaeological finds are displayed from the city of Syracuse and eastern regions of Sicily.

Read more at HellenicNews.com

The Sicilians who come to Malta visit Valletta and Gozo, Sliema and St Julian’s but do not know about the proto-Christian catacombs of Rabat.

Similarly, the Maltese who go to Sicily visit Syracuse and Catania, Taormina and Giardini Naxos but hardly know about the archaeological site of Pantalica or about the Baroque towns their forefathers had helped build.

Read more at Independent.com

No, this is not the Corleone of movie fame, but the town of Corleone on the island of Sicily, in the Mediterranean Sea at the toe of Italy.

Like many regions with a long history of wine production, Sicily is experiencing a renaissance under the guidance of dynamic producers such as the Pollara family, which is making exciting and intriguing wines.

Price $14.99

Read more at DallasNews.com

The Ragusa province is trying to utilize fishing and tourism together to promote its territory. The president of the province is convinced that these two activities work well together and supports the project “Azzurro Mediterraneo”. For more information, local ports are open to the public 24/7.