The Stone Boudoir: In Search of the Hidden Villages of Sicily Book

There is so much fine writing available today in the field of travel writing that readers are almost spoiled for choice. But with Theresa Maggio's The Stone Boudoir, we are presented with something that is rich and evocative indeed. This luminescent account of the undiscovered hill towns and villages of Sicily has all the idiosyncratic charm of Francis Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, with which it shares similarly subtle and allusive prose. Theresa Maggio had long been in thrall to her family's stories of their Sicilian homeland, and took the decision to return to their ancestral village of Santa Margherita Belice. As she began to explore the fast vanishing world her family had left behind, she found herself, unexpectedly, in the middle of a life-changing experience. For her, the odyssey became not just a journey to a beautiful island, but a fundamental search to reveal secrets of her family origins. Maggio travelled to some of the most secluded and isolated villages in the shadow of Mount Etna. Many of these villages lay in ruins after the massive earthquake of 1968, and time had stood still. She encountered an ancient way of life almost untouched by modern society, where religious processions took over the villages for days on end, and where almonds were allowed to grow like weeds by the roadside. We turn to books such as this to transport us into regions that we may never see for ourselves, and after reading The Stone Boudoir, we may feel that we have experienced the hidden villages of Sicily quite as intensely as if we had been there ourselves. --Barry ForshawRead More