An immigrant, Italian family is humiliated by their daughter's actions. Eastville, a town of fifteen hundred. hears all. The rumor mill spins and spins. The family holds this secret tightly to the chest of ancestors and strangers. Secrets are knots, woven with an encore. All of the four estranged children live challenging lives. Connie, a granddaughter, grows up in a chaotic home. Her future is faced with depression and paternity confusion. After twenty-seven years, the mother's whereabouts are discovered. The mother is dead but leaves a daughter. Much communication ensues. Most families have a skeleton dangling in a closet somewhere. The descendants of Pietro and Guiseppina La Placa found many doors, as they walked the hall of life, with numerous skeletons ready to rattle out. This is foremost the story of Connie Basile, third generation Sicilian, who at an early age sensed the skeletons. “Why don’t I have a grandma?” elicited mother Serafina’s answer, “She’s dead.” But was Grandma Mazie dead? “May I see your wedding picture?” was cut off with “Don’t have any.” Despite Connie’s childhood in the stately Northend Tavern among small-town characters, her anxious nail-biting became recurring bouts of adult depression. Her brother Salvatore didn’t share her sensitivity to the family dynamic. Connie and her family are devout Catholics. Connie persevered to sing, teach, marry Ed, and raise four children after being widowed young. Grandma Mazie is discovered living a new life in Albany with her first husband Joe’s brother, Paul, and she has a daughter, Dina, much to the distress of the four children she ran away from. Dina tells Mazie's first family about her marvelous loving parents. Not until a passport clerk said, “Step aside. I have a different birth certificate here,” did the buzzing of town and family gossips make sense to Connie. She finds out she was adopted at the age of 4 by Constantino, her current father, from her mother’s first husband, Vincenzo. Outside the hall of secrets are glorious family celebrations with song, vino and homemade Italian food. Connie’s great aunts, accomplished seamstresses, and her uncles, close in age, adore her. She has many cousins. Eventually, Connie discovers a kindred soul in a half-sister, Sally, Vincenzo’s daughter. Overall, Sicilian Secrets is a story of Connie's triumphs.

A blending of art and cultural criticism, travel writing, and personal narrative, Sicilian Odyssey is Francine Prose's imaginative consideration of the diverse cultural legacies found juxtaposed and entangled on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. She writes of the intensity of Sicily, the "commitment to the extreme," where the history is more colorful, the sun hotter, the cooking earthier, the violence more horrific, the carnival more raucous, the politics more Byzantine than other places on Earth, and how much the island can teach us about the triumph of beauty over violence and life over death. Prose examines architectural sites and objects and looks at the ways in which myth and actuality converge. Exploring the intact and beautiful Greek amphitheaters at Siracusa and Taormina, the cathedral at Monreale, the Roman mosaics at Piazza Armerina, and some of the masterpieces of the Baroque scattered throughout the island, Prose focuses her keen insight to imagine them in their own time, to examine the evolution and decline of the cultures that produced them, and to deconstruct powerful responses each evokes in her. Illuminated by the author's own photographs, Sicilian Odyssey brings exotic and enigmatic Sicily to life through the prism of its past.

Is there life after death? A Hidden Sicilian History: Second Edition presents an intriguing and easy-to-read historical novel that starts with the investigation of a mysterious death. While doing research in the public library in Enna, Sicily, a young man notices an ancient scroll has drifted from a shelf onto the floor. It appears to have slipped from a gap between two volumes about the Spanish Inquisition. Though he expects it to be related to life in Sicily at the time of Spanish rule, instead the handwritten scroll reports a singular drama that was performed on the stage of the deconsecrated Church of Santa Croce in Enna some time ago. The young man decides to translate the fascinating lost manuscript from Italian into English and publish it. Historical facts flow freely from the document, as well as its descriptions of traditional feasts and processions, the way to remove hexes and roundworms from children, and life in Enna’s public whorehouse. It also touches on other societies bound together by a common thread: the yearning to understand the meaning of life. The novel’s theme becomes a journey into the innermost recesses of the soul.

Goethe's account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"A wondrously joyous account of travel as it should be." –Publishers Weekly A travel narrative that focuses on Sicily's little-known regions, from the author of Seeking Sicily and Hidden Tuscany. From Palermo to Castiglione di Sicilia to Alimena, Sicily holds great secrets from the past and unspoken promises. Tradition, in the form of festivals, the written word, photographs, and song, reverberates through village walls. Now, slowly shaking itself free of the Mafia, Sicily is opening itself up to visitors in ways it never has before. Sicilian Splendors explores the history, politics, food, Mafia, and people which John Keahey encounters throughout his travels during his return to Sicily. Through conversing with natives and immersing himself in culture, Keahey illustrates a brand new Sicily no one has ever talked about before. Villagers, eager to welcome tourism and impart awareness of their cultural background, greet Keahey for meals and drink and walk him through their winding streets. They share stories of well-known writers, such as Maria Messina, who have found inspiration in Sicily’s villages. Keahey’s never-ending curiosity as a traveler shines light on Sicily’s mythical mysteries and portrays the island not only through his eyes but also through Sicily’s heart. This picturesque travel memoir navigates Sicily today and seeks to understand Sicily’s past. In lyrical prose and vivid dialect, Keahey paints images of the island’s villages, people, and culture with careful strokes and a meticulously even hand. Keahey not only serves as a guide through the marvel of Sicily’s identity, but he also looks deeply into Sicily’s soul.

Giuliano's story begins with the allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, a time of great turmoil allegiances. One of World War II's most bizarre episodes was Operation Underworld. This was a secret alliance formed between American army intelligence officers and the Mafia kingpin, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, so that the New York docks would be free of sabotage. In exchange, the Sicilian Mafia leaders would assist the Allied landings by providing intelligence information on Sicily. Luciano was released from prison and deported to Sicily. As agreed, American forces placed certain Mafia members who were loyal to Luciano in positions of power. Anyone who resisted the regime was either killed or imprisoned. The situation was desperate and it seemed that there was no one strong enough to stand against the evil that was engulfing the land. For some time, Giuliano had been waging his own war against the corruption by smuggling food into the area to feed his family and help the town's people of Montelebro. The police confiscated Salvatore's gram and tried to arrest him. He resisted and was shot twice in the back but killed an officer before he escaped into the hills. Now a hunted man, villagers flocked to the hills around Montelebro to join him. Salvatore Giuliano's resistance movement soon became a symbol of Sicily's desire to escape from the dominance of Italy and establish self-government. Political parties seeking autonomy for the island eagerly supported his cause, while politicians who opposed him devised a plot they felt would finally eliminate him.