"Italy without Sicily doesnt
make a picture in the soul: its the key to everything",
noticed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more than 200 years ago. But Italy
isnt Sicily and Sicily isnt Italy. If you were to Italy
you cant say you know now Sicily. Sicily is different.
Sicily is a modern "land" with an ancient tradition that
has remained alive, a land with lots of faces. Poverty besides wealth.
Seldom you are so close to the European origins as here
at the former boundary between eastern and the western world. The
Greek and the Romans struggled with the people of Karthago about the
possession of the island, the Arabs could achieve to form out of Sicily
a cultural landscape in broom, which finally was reconquered for the
Christian belief by the Normans.
All these sovereigns had a influence on the island,
but it never gave up its tradition and uniqueness. "Sicily, the
environment, the climate, the Sicilian scenery. These are the powers
which, probably more than all foreign rules and violations, have at
the same time formed our minds: this scenery that doesnt know
any middle between rich pasture and dead desert", thats
how Tomasi di Lampedusa characterised his home country in the novel
"The leopard".
Why not experience this scenery, its inhabitants
and the weather in another way by bike?