Eyewitness travel guides are packed with color photos and detailed maps and descriptions. Although heavy to carry around, they are great for planning your travels.
Sicily Eyewitness Travel guide is one of the best guidebooks I have come across. More >>
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">A friend gave me a book, Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, a couple of weeks ago and I have to say that I am really enjoying it…
‘Sicily struck me
then as the most fascinating place I had ever visited. I didn’t change that opinion over the intervening years, no matter where I travelled. I meant to go back. Time and again I made plans. Time and again I was thwarted.’At the age of twenty-six Matthew Fort first visited the island of Sicily. He and his brother arrived in 1973 expecting sun, sea and good food, but they were totally unprepared for the lifelong effect of this most extraordinary of islands. Thirty years later, older and a bit wiser - but no less greedy - Matthew finally returns. Travelling round the island on his scooter, Monica, he samples exquisite antipasti in rundown villages, delicate pastries in towns that clung to the edge of vertical hillsides, and goes fishing for anchovies beneath a star-scattered sky. Once again this enigmatic island casts its spell, and Matthew rediscovers its beauty, the intensity of its flavours, and finds himself digging into the darkness of Sicily’s past as well as
some mysteries of his own.
Michelle Di Bartolo told her mother at the tender age of 14 she wasn’t going to school any more, she was going to be a writer
”We fought back and forth with her saying she wasn’t going and me insisting she did. Eventually she went back to school,” says Di Bartolo’s mother, Rosita.
Eighteen years later, Di Bartolo has realized her dream, with her first book, The Sicilian Kitchen due out next month.
Read more at News.com.au
BooksBooksAsk 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
BooksBooksThe British writer and journalist Matthew Fort has just published a new book, Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, a follow-up to the bestselling Eating Up Italy. In the latter he made an eno-gastronomic journey from Villa San Giovanni in Calabria to Turin in Piedmont on a Vespa called Bud: ‘design icon, landmark of Italian culture, sound, sensible and slowish’. This time, he motors round Sicily on a Vespa called Monica. The result is another comic and culinary masterpiece. Here he speaks about this and more besides in an exclusive interview with Slow Food roving reporter Victoria Blackshaw.
Read more at SlowFood.com
Books TravelBooks Travel
Rich with seafood, citrus, olives, and almond sweets, the cuisine of the sun-drenched island of Sicily reflects the influence of Greeks, Norman French, Tunisians, and Italians, among others. Unlike guidebooks that sweep Sicily into an overview of Italy, this latest addition to the award-winning Eat Smart series focuses solely on the cuisine of Sicily. Eat Smart in Sicily provides an historical overview of the peoples who have lived there and their contributions to Sicilian cuisine, with attention given to the fare distinct to the villages and urban centers of Sicily’s four regions. A helpful guide to Sicilian menus, with English translations of Italian (or Sicilian) words, makes ordering food in Sicily an easy and immediately rewarding experience. Highlighting regional recipe mainstays, Joan Peterson and Marcella Croce provide tips to shopping for traditional ingredients in Sicily and at home. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of foods, kitchen utensils, and cooking methods to prepare authentic Sicilian specialties at home or abroad.
Joan Peterson is an experienced world traveler and the author of the EAT SMART guides to the food of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Poland, Sicily, and Turkey. Each book has been designed for travelers and food lovers like her who want to navigate menu and market with confidence.
Marcella Croce was born in Palermo, Sicily, and is a journalist and author. For almost twenty years she has been a teacher and coordinator of Elderhostel Programs in Sicily organized by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Eat Smart in Sicily
How to Decipher the Menu, Know the Market
Foods, & Embark on a Tasting Adventure
Joan Peterson and Marcella Croce
Illustrated by Susan Chwae
Published by Ginkgo Press
Distributed by the University of Wisconsin Press
Publication Date: June 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9776801-1-5 Paper, $13.95
160 pages
For more information on the Eat Smart series, visit:
http://www.ginkgopress.com/
Behind Closed Doors portrays the habits and gestures, the words spoken and those left unsaid, of individuals caught between the traditions they respect and a desire to ease the social restrictions in their lives. Messina’s stories reveal a world in which women are shuttered in their houses, virtual servants to their families, and working men immigrate to the United States in fortune-seeking droves. It is also a world of unstated privileges in which habits and implied commands perpetuate women’s servitude.
A cultural album that captures the lives of peasant, working-class, and middle-class women, this volume will appeal to millions of Italian descendants and readers everywhere fascinated by Italian history.
Behind Closed Doors Books Maria Messina TravelBehind Closed Doors Books Maria Messina Travel
Southern Italian cooking is finally getting the attention long deserved. A veteran food writer with cookbooks on other Mediterranean cuisines, Nancy Harmon Jenkins in her latest, Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of Southern Italian Cooking
Read more at Hoston Chronicle
Buy Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of Southern Italian Cooking
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Cucina del Sole: A Celebration of Southern Italian Cooking
A new book, John Dickie’s Delizia reveals some of the Italian cuisine’s secrets that not even Italians know… For instance, do you know that Marco Polo did not bring back pasta to Italy and ‘pasta secca was present in Sicily at least a century before Marco Polo was born’? Also, when Catherine de Medici married the future Henry II in 1533, she did not take her cooks with her and teach the French to cook. (The influence has always gone the other way; ‘in the 18th and 19th centuries, the nobility of southern Italy and Sicily employed a monsu’ - a monsieur or French-trained cook.)
Read more at The Guardian Unlimited
Technorati Tags [ sicily food | sicily | delizia | john dickie | italian cooking and eating ]
delizia italian cooking and eating john dickie sicilydelizia italian cooking and eating john dickie sicily
Michael Roberts’ “Shot in Sicily” new book goes on sale at the Armani stores today. I have to admit that the title made me extremely curious. I know that there are certain Sicilian traits and behaviors that really attract foreigners. It is like a stigma for us Sicilians: no matter what we do, we will always be seen in a certain way. I cannot comment much on the book since I have not seen it, but the ambiguity of the title and the clarity of the cover say a lot… Will the book portrait the usual stereotypical Sicily? We’ll see.
More on the book:
Spanning two decades, the 186-page book, published by Edition 7L, traces the stylist and photographer’s shifting vision of a sensual and ambiguous country via 50 color and 127 black and white photographs, with an occasional nod to Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s late nineteenth-century images of the Sicilian town of Taormina and the films of Visconti and Bolognini. In lieu of capturing images of the fashion set, Roberts turned his camera on such visually stunning still life as crumbling temples, traditional Easter parades, and the theater of daily life. The $55 monograph is designed by Roberts and features an epilogue by Manolo Blahnik and text by Amanda Harlech.
Technorati Tags [ sicily | michael roberts | shot in sicily | armani stores | manolo blahnik | amanda harlech ]
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