Sicily: Three Thousand Years of Human History
This solid narrative of the Mediterranean island emphasizes how its location has subjected it to one wave of conquest after another. Benjamin (The World of Benjamin Tudela), who has lived in Sicily for the past decade, traces Sicilian history back to the indigenous Neolithic cultures, which dated from 7000 B.C. up through the first millennium B.C. The Greeks and the Carthaginians fought one another to exhaustion, leaving Sicily a prey to the Romans, who converted it into a rich granary of estates worked by (often rebellious) slaves. Muslims from Africa succeeded the Romans in the seventh century A.D., and they in turn gave way to Norman French, the best rulers the island ever had. From the famous rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Aragonese, Hapsburg and Bourbon Spaniards ruled, until Garibaldi used the island as a springboard for his unification of Italy in the 1860s. In this engaging read, Benjamin ably explains the temperament and culture of modern-day Sicilians, through the island's checkered political climate; its rugged and seismic terrain (the still-active Mt. Etna looms to the east); its poor soil and scant rainfall; as well as the mass emigration it endured in the 19th and 20th centuries.(June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.