Midnight in Sicily: on Art, Food, History, Travel and La Cosa Nostra
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Midnight in Sicily: on Art, Food, History, Travel and La Cosa Nostra
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I lived in Sicily. Robb's descriptions of the marketplaces, the dusty heat that is Sicily are spot on. The Sicilians I lived with simply accepted the Mafia as a business...nothing more. But it is MUCH more.
Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb | Goodreads
Caronia, a little known town in one of the great forests of the Nebrodi National Park, a small part of the town, got some news coverage in 2003 for a series of unexplained electrical fires. Electrical appliances exploded and caught fire for no apparent reason. I’m sure the fact that the train line passes so close to the town must have something to do with it, all of that static electricity must affect the town. If you have an existing knowledge of the Sicilian Mafia and of general Italian history since 1945 then this book is a treat, adding as it does a context for those incredibly turbulent decades through to, well, through to the present. Rocca di Capraleone is an ugly, mostly industrial city near the coast famous for being the birthplace of Maria Grazia Cucinotta, a well known Italian model and actress. Not Messina, as she often tells the press; I wonder why she would lie about this? I guess because Rocca isn’t as beautiful or romantic as Messina. Midnight in Sicily is a fantastic and frustrating book, written by Peter Robb an Australian with a deep abiding love for the Mezzogiorno and its people.
I had thought of leaving this out on the grounds that it tells us more about Goethe than Italy. But it is one of the first accounts – and the most beautiful – of how the chaotic, impulsive, sensual south seduces we ratiocinating northerners, making Goethe, the creative outsider, “feel at home in the world, neither a stranger nor an exile”. Only partly about Sicily; more an exploration of the corrupt dynamics of Christian Democracy enlivened by digressions into the art, literature and gastronomy of the Mezzogiorno. Ideally read in conjunction with Paul Ginsborg’s masterly History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988.
MIDNIGHT IN SICILY | Kirkus Reviews
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.” This book is a pretty comprehensive account of the development, changing nature and widespread influence of the main groups of organized criminality in Italy (Mafia with origins in Sicily, and Camorra in Naples) after WWII. Much of the history is taken from firsthand accounts and documentation, some of it used in famous Mafia trials. Fiumara d’Arte is an outdoor sculpture park located out in the hills of Castel di Tusa after Cefalu’. Less popular and humorous than his best-selling Italian Neighbours, Parks’s sequel does more than any book I know to explain how Italians become Italians. The title is inaccurate: it is not about schooling, and ought really to have been called An Italian Upbringing. Wonderfully perceptive on relations between and within the generations: “When a mother calls out Amore without further specification, she is calling for her son.” The entwining of the Roman Catholic church and the Mafia is as bizarre, evil, and corrupt as it comes..and I'm a Roman Catholic.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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