Sicily
2009
First Published
4.34
Average Rating
100
Number of Pages
Guy de Maupassant, the master of the nineteenth-century French short story, visited Sicily in the spring of 1885 and wrote his travel memoir as a tribute to the art, architecture, people and landscape of this Mediterranean island. He provides a vivid account of this "strange and divine museum of architecture," where Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman influences combine to produce monuments of beauty and a unique Sicilian style. In a land then little touched by modern transportation, with and without guides, he traveled by train, boat, horse and foot to reach the places he had set out to Palermo and the great cathedral of Monreale; the ancient Greek sites of Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento; Messina and the Aeolian Islands; Catania, Taormina, Syracuse. Maupassant climbs to the top of Vulcano, Mount Etna, and the fortified monastery on Monte Cuccio, and down into the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo and the sulphur mines of Casteltermini. He visits many places that had special aesthetic and poetic importance for him, like the Archaeological Museum of Syracuse and its famous statue of Venus and in Palermo both the Palatine Chapel and Wagner's room in the Hotel des Palmes where the composer wrote the final notes of his last opera, "Parsifal." Sicily is edited and translated by Robert W. Berger, an art historian who has published extensively on French art and architecture and on the history of Paris. Introduction, notes, bibliography, map, 25 engravings and photographs.
Avg Rating
4.34
Number of Ratings
32
5 STARS
47%
4 STARS
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3 STARS
13%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Guy de Maupassant
Author · 165 books
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protege of Flaubert, Maupassant's short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dénouement. He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who get crushed in it - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s.
