Italy · Memoir
On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal
Sicily is best taken slowly, and Simeti gives it a year. An American who made the island her home, she writes from the unusual position of being both foreigner and resident, moving between Palermo and an old family farm in the countryside. Seasons give the book its rhythm. Harvests arrive, religious festivals return, weather changes the landscape, and traces of Greek, Arab and Norman Sicily keep surfacing in ordinary life. The myth of Persephone sits naturally over it all, an old story still useful for understanding an island ordered by departure and return.
Religion; Family