Benvenuto in Sicilia!

"Italy without Sicily doesn’t make a picture in the soul: it’s the key to everything", noticed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more than 200 years ago. But Italy isn’t Sicily and Sicily isn’t Italy. If you had been to Italy you can’t 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 an 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 doesn’t know any middle between rich pasture and dead desert", that’s how Tomasi di Lampedusa characterised his home country in the novel "The leopard".

Why not experience this scenery, it’s inhabitants and the weather in a different way – by bike?

---
Informations based on "Merian: Sizilien", Gräfe und Unzer Verlag GmbH, Munich, 1998 (german).