Dreaming of Sicily: A Travel Memoir

Dreaming of Sicily: A Travel Memoir





To see Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the key to everything. ~~Goethe One hot day in August 1966, Betsy and her grandmother sit in a cool basement squishing ripe tomatoes that will later become Grandma's Sarsa di Pomodoro. Betsy asks her grandmother about her life growing up in the old country. Her grandmother weaves a story of profound hardship, idealistic young love and treacherous adventure that captivates the 12 year old girl, and by the end of the tale she promises her grandmother that one day she will go to Sicily 'to see where it all began.' Thirty years later, that young girl, now a woman, steps off a plane onto the tarmac of the tiny Fontanarossa Airport in Catania, Sicily, and immediately falls under the spell of her grandmother's beautiful homeland. So begins DREAMING OF SICILY ~ A Travel Memoir, written by Betsy Vincent Hoffman and illustrated with 39 original watercolor paintings by Kathleen Citrolo Gwinnett that visually compliment story. Hilarious adventures (and a few misadventures!) abound in this delightful travel memoir, what the author calls "a love poem to Sicily." After nearly two weeks of traveling throughout the island, the couple make their way to the tiny paese of Santa Elisabetta in the Province of Agrigento, the place where Betsy's paternal grandparent's were born, raised and married before their arduous journey to America. The day starts out like the opening scene of a Frank Capra screwball comedy and ends with the touching discovery of Betsy's great-aunt, the elderly Zia Nina, youngest sister to Betsy's grandfather. When the fragile and blind woman realizes that she has her brother's granddaughter before her, she breaks into tears, telling the author of her last memory of her brother before he left Sicily forever.









List Price: $ 14.95



Price: $ 14.95