Anyone traveling to Sicily just has to read a short story or two by Andrea Camilleri. Perhaps you have heard of his many novels and his famous Inspector Montalbano! Below, you will find a description of Sicily, from one of Italy’s best! The excerpt comes from a short story about Inspector Montalbano’s first case. A short story of about 122 pages is wonderful! If the reading doesn’t make you want to travel to Sicily, perhaps the inspector will.
Sicily As Described in a Short Story
“…it was the same Sicily of arid, scorched earth, yellow and brown, where little clumps of stubborn green stuck out as if shot from a cannon, where little dicelike houses clinging to the hillsides looked as if they might slide down below at the next strong gust of wind, where even the lizards and snakes on summer afternoons seemed to lack the will to take cover inside a clump of sorghum or under a rock, inertly resigned to their destiny such as it was. And above all he loved to look at the beds of what had once been rivers and torrents- at lest that was what the road maps insisted on calling them: the Ipsas, Salsetto, Kokalos- whereas they were nothing more than a string of sun-bleached stones and dusty shards of terra-cotta. So, yes, he liked to look at the landscape, but to live in it it, day after day, was enough to drive a man crazy. Because he was a man of the sea…”
“…On certain mornings in Mascalippa, when he opened the window at daybreak and took a deep breath, instead of his lungs filling with air, he felt them emptying out, and he would gasp for breath the way he did after a long underwater plunge. No doubt the early morning air in Mascalippa was good, even special. It smelled of straw and grass, of the open country. But this was not enough for him; indeed, it practically smothered him. He needed the air of the sea. He needed to savor the smell of algae and the faint taste of salt on his lips when he licked them. He needed the long walks along the beach early in the morning, with the gentle waves of the surf caressing his feet. Being assigned to a mountain like Mascalippa was worse than serving a ten-year sentence.”
