A loving take on an extraordinary island, based on Norman Lewis's sixty-year fascination with all things Sicilian. Dedicated to a Sicilian journalist killed by a Mafia bomb, Lewis rarely lets us forget the presence of organized crime. We benefit from his friendships with policemen, journalists, and common people. Moreover, he writes beautifully of landscape and language, of his memories of his first father-in-law (professional gambler, descendant of princes and member of the Unione Siciliana), of Sicily's changing sexual mores, of the effects of African immigration, of Palermo and its ruined palaces - and of strange superstitions, witches, bandits, and murder.