Sicily tour

April 5-18, 2003

Early Booking Price, before December 5, 2002: $3555

Regular Price, from December 5, 2002: $3850

Single Supplement $475, Deposit $600

Tour Director: Professor Peter Gravgaard

Itinerary

Day 1 (April 5, 2003)

You fly from the USA to Rome, Italy; in Rome you change plane and fly to Palermo, Sicily, to arrive on Day 2 of the tour.

Day 2 (April 6, 2003)

You arrive in Palermo where the tour director will meet you and take you to our hotel where you will spend three nights.

Day 3 (April 7, 2003)

We will be in Palermo for two days, so there is time to see things properly. The first day we will see the La Martorana Church, the San Cataldo, the Cathedral, the Royal Palace with the Cappella Palatina and the Sala di Re Ruggero, and the Giovanni degli Eremiti Church.

The real name of La Martorana is the Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio since it was built by King Roger's admiral, George of Antioch. (Let it be noticed that the Western term "admiral" originated with him and his Arabic title "Emir-al-Bahr", i.e. "ruler of the sea"). Several features of this church have been changed, the most important thing is still there, however: the magnificent mosaics created by a team of artists imported by King Roger II from Constantinople and working in Palermo from 1140 to 1155. You will see here both a mosaic showing Christ crowning King Roger and one showing the admiral prostrating himself in front of the Virgin.

The Cappella Palatina is another marvel, to be found in the Royal Palace. John Julius Norwich describes it best:

It is in this building, with more stunning effect than anywhere else in Sicily, that we see the Siculo-Norman political miracle given visual expression - a seemingly effortless fusion of all that is most brilliant in the Latin, Byzantine and Islamic traditions into a single harmonious masterpiece. (The Normans in Sicily, p.434)

Also to be found in the Royal Palace is the Sala di Ruggero with all the joie de vivre that Norman Sicily could express, let Norwich speak:

Here are scenes of the countryside and the chase, Byzantine in their formal symmetry but Sicilian in their joyful portrayal of palms and orange-trees, and all radiant with a liveliness and humour that is wholly of the west. Here once more are the date-gobbling peacocks and the myopic archers, but now they have been joined by a pair of centaurs and a host of other fauna both probable and improbable, many of them with expressions on their faces that seem almost human - leopards consumed with guilt and suspicion, other peacocks frankly shocked, lions selfconscious, and two burly stags, affronted in both senses of the word, glowering at each other in innocent unawareness of the horrid fate that awaits them in the rear. (The Normans in Sicily, p.602)

Day 4 (April 8, 2003)

Today we will continue our exploration of Palermo with visits to the Archeological Museum where you should look out for the Selinunte room. There is also fine art gallery: the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia.- Two amusing things to look out for : the Baroque art in the Oratorio del Rosario in the San Domenico church and the Museo Internazionale delle Marionette with puppet shows. In the afternoon you will have the opportunity of going shopping in Palermo.

Day 5 (April 9, 2003)

Today we leave Paler to drive to Marsala where we will stay for two nights. On our way we will stop to see the Zisa Palace at the outskirts of Palermo to see how far the regional government of Sicily has got with their ongoing restauration. The Zisa pleasure palace was begun in 1160 by King William the Bad and completed by his successor William the Good. There is an inscription at the entrance in Arabic describing what a palace like this was supposed to be like:

Here, as oft as thou shalt wish, thou shalt see the loveliest possession of this kingdom, the most splendid of the world and of the seas. The mountains, their peaks flushed with the colour of narcissus (…) Thou shalt see the great King of his century in his beautiful dwelling place, a house of joy and splendour which suits him well. This is the earthly paradise that opens to the view…

From the Zisa we drive to Monreale to visit the great Norman cathedral, - and this is the greatest of them all, together with the Martorana and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo, and the Cefalu Cathedral which you will see later on this tour. There are two bronze doors with 46 panels on the the Old and the New Testaments by Bonanno da Pisa (1186). The mosaics dominate the interior completely - there are 6340 square meters of them.

Norwich rightly writes that the church "is above all a picture-gallery", and everything has been subordinated to displaying the mosaics. They are thought to have been completed between 1183 and 1190 by a team of artists from Constantinople. You should especially look for the great Christ Pantocrator - though overlooking it is not possible - and St Thomas Becket and King William the Good being crowned by Christ. Besides the mosaics you must see the cloister and the fine capitals.

From Monreale we will take you to Segesta where you will see the Greek Doric temple - in a glorious setting - and, if there is time, also the Greek theater. From here we drive to our hotel in Marsala

Day 6 (April 10, 2003)

Erice and Trapani are towns we want to visit today. Erice is an ancient holy place with a temple to the goddess Aphrodite (or Phoenician Astarte or Roman Venus). She is associated with the queen bee, surnamed Erycina, "of the heather". So Venus has a love affair with Butes, the "beekeeper". It therefore makes sense that Daedalus, the archetypal artist or artifex or artisan, should craft a golden honey-comb for her.

From Greek mythology we remember that Aphrodite married Anchises and gave birth to Aeneas, the Trojan who founded Rome. The Trojans seem also to have been the ancestors of the Elymians who had settled Erice.

On the northeastern side of the town is the sanctuary for Venus Erycina i.e. only the base remains from the temple since already Count Roger had ordered his Normans to destroy all traces. (One can only guess at what upset those Nordic puritans! This is an interesting subject, and if you are intrigued, you should look at another PLANTAGENET TOUR: the CYPRUS TOUR TO APHRODITE'S ISLAND).

From Erice we will visit Trapani to see the church of Annunziata which has a marble Madonna, perhaps by Nino Pisano. Here also you will find the Templar church of Sant Agostino which seems vaguely intriguing because in Cyprus we have established a similar connection between the Hieros Skipos (the Sacred Gardens of Aphrodite) and the Knights Templar.

From Trapani we return to Marsala.

Day 7 (April 11, 2003)

Today we will drive from Marsala to Agrigento (where we will spend two nights) On the way we will stop at the charming fishing port of Nazaro del Vallo. It had been conquered by the Arabs in 827 and was taken from them by the Normans under Count Roger in 1075. - There is a statue of Roger striking down an Arab over the entrance to the Mazara Cathedral.

From Mazara we drive to Selinunte (ancient Selinus), where you will visit the old acropolis and some nine Greek temples in different states of preservation. Selinus was attacked in 409 BC by an alliance of Segesta and Carthage who captured it in nine days and butchered or enslaved its citizens. The city was never reconstructed.

Next stop will be at Sciacca, known for traditional pottery; from here we will make a detour to see Eraclea Minoa with a name that recalls Hercules and King Minos who came here with a navy to find Daedalus who had fled Minos' kingdom of Crete. In the following battle the Sicilians defeated the Cretans.

The day's final drive goes to Agrigento and our hotel.

Day 8 (April 12, 2003)

This day is entirely devoted to visiting Agrigento's Valley of the Temples, the most important archeological site in Sicily. The early name is Akragas, and the city was founded in 581 BC. We will take you to see the important Archeology Museum and some interesting churches, the Santa Maria dei Greci and the San Biagio, but is is the temples that matter: the Temple of Demeter and Persephone (The story is that Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnaps Persephone and takes her down underground. Her mother, Demeter, forbids the corn to grow. Men die, and Zeus must force Hades to allow her return. Because she has eated seven seeds of Pomegranate, she must return to Hades three months of the year. And that accounts for winter.) The subject is dealt with in the Rock Sanctuary of Demeter and in the Sanctuary of the Chthonic Deities.

In this place we can only mention the major temples: you will visit the Temple of Juno Lacinia, the Temple of Concord, the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of Asclepius, the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Temple of Castor and Pollux. After seeing so much Antiquity you may be relieved to come up for a whiff of contemporary air, so we will end the day visiting the Piazzale Aldo Moro and the Via Atenea.

The two most famous citizens of Agrigento are Empedocles and Pirandello. The ancient philosopher Empedocles was a healer, a poet, an engineer, a politician and, according to his poem, the Purifications, a god. (Ernest Renan called him a Newton combined with a Cagliostro). Agrigento's other claim to fame is Luigi Pirandello who was Italy's greatest playwright in the twentieth century: he wrote the play "Six Characters in Search of an Author".

Day 9 (April 13, 2003)

Today we drive from Agrigento to Enna in the center of Sicily, then to Piazza Armerina, and then to Syracuse where we will stay for three nights. Enna is almost in the center of of the island of Sicily, this is the strategical place to conquer and to hold for an attacker so this is where in 1061 the Norman army of about seven hundred under the command of Robert Guiscard and his brother, Roger, met a Saracen army of perhaps fifteen thousand men, attacked them AND WON. To quote John Julius Norwich, The Normans in Sicily, p.144:

And yet the battle of Enna was an overwhelming victory for the Normans. Geography, as well as numbers, was against them; they had no strong places into which they could retire for rest or consolidation, no well-stocked magazines of arms or supplies. But courage and, above all, discipline - these they had in plenty, and of a kind the Saracens had never before encountered. To them they added a new and powerful religious fervour to drive them forward when, newly confessed and shriven and with Robert's huge voice still thundering in their ears, they charged into battle. And so the first major engagement, on Sicilian soil or anywhere else, fought between properly constituted armies of Normans and Saracens ended in a rout.

At Enna we will see the Castello di Lombardia which was built by Frederick II and also (in the public garden) another tower: the Torre di Federico II, called the "Tower of the Winds".Concerning this tower the authors of the Cadogan Guide to Sicily, Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls write:

Forty years ago a Sicilian historian, Umberto Massocco, propounded a theory that this spot was the centre of a giant geomantic construction, covering the whole of Sicily created before the arrival of the Greeks. Like the leys of Britain (which Massocco appears not to have known about), there is a network of alignments of holy places and landmarks, meeting at right angles and running the length of the island; the long axes are oriented towards the midsummer sunrise. Massocco, with the aid of aerial surveying and the writings of Diodorus Siculus, discovered that many of the oldest sites on the island - Mount Erice, Segesta, Selinunte, Ortygia Island and Eraclea Minoa among them - fall along these alignments. He called the work the TEMPLUM COELESTI, an attempt to make the whole of the island into one great geometrical temple.(Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls, The Cadogan Guide to Sicily).

If Ley-Lines in England should interest you, please have a look at our PLANTAGENET TOUR, THE ARTHUR TOUR TO MYSTERIOUS SOUTHWEST ENGLAND (August 3-15, 2002).

From Piazza we drive to Syracuse.

Day 10 (April 14, 2003)

We will spend this day seeing Syracuse. The city was founded in 735 BC by settlers from Corinth in Greece who took over from the native Sikels. In time it grew to become the largest city on Sicily, so important that Athens grew jealous and sent an invasion force under Alcibiades and Nicias to attack Syracuse in 415 BC. The decisive battle took place in 414: the Syracusans caught the great Athenian navy inside the harbor and destroyed it ; the Athenian forces retired over land south, but were defeated. The prisoners were left to rot in the stonequarries. Having defeated Athens, the most prestigious city of ancient Greece, Syracuse became the center of its own empire and knew a golden age: the philosopher Plato was invited to teach the young Dionysius II, Theocritus wrote his Idyls, Archimedes taught in Syracuse and defended the city against the Romans in 212.

Syracuse became Roman; Rome declined, the Vandals and the Osrogoths took over. Belisarius of Byzabtium conquered the city and from 878 to 1038 it was the Saracens who ruled Sicily. Then came the turn of the Normans, and in 1105 Count Roger incorporated Arab Sicily in his county.

The oldest part of Syracuse is the Ortygia Island which we will visit; here you will see the cathedral which was once the Temple of Athena. We will also see the Fountain of Arethusa - which, according to Greek myth is connected UNDER the Mediterranean with the river Alpheus in Arcadia, Greece. (The river god, Alphaeus, pursued the nymph Arethusa; she begged the goddess Artemis for help and was turned into a fountain which flowed to Suracuse under the sea ; the two waters, River-Alphaeus and Fountain-Arethusa, rose in Ortygia where they mixed.

This theme of the underground river appealed to writers in the Renaissance and later: it appeared in Coleridge's Kubla Khan: "where Alph the sacred river ran".

We will also see Castello Maniace - George Maniakes was the Byzantine general who helped taking Syracuse from the Arabs. It is interesting to visit the ruins of the Euryalos Castle on the Epipolae Ridge - these defense works had been constructed by Dionysius after the Athenian expedition had been defeated.

We end the day with a visit to the Archeological Museum.

Day 11 (April 15, 2003)

The south eastern corner of Sicily is too often overlooked, this is a pity for the cities of Noto and Ragusa are Baroque peals waiting to be discovered - we will make an excursion today with that purpose.

Day 12 (April 16, 2003)

We drive north from Syracuse to Taormina where we will visit the Greek theater in a beautiful location. From here we travel to Capo d'Orlando where we will spend the night.

Day 13 (April 17, 2003)

Today we drive from Capo d'Orlando to Palermo for the last night of the tour. On the way we will stop at San Marco d'Alunzo and at Cefalu. The first Norman castle in Sicily was built in 1061 at San Marco d'Alunzo by Robert Guiscard. and seems to have become a personal residence for his brother, Roger. We want to see the castle and the church of Badia Grance di SS Salvatore founded by Queen Margaret, the wife of King William I.

In Cefalu we will visit the great cathedral which King Roger II of Sicily ordered to be built in 1131. Compared to the other great Norman cathedrals which you have seen so far, the Cappella Palatina and La Martorana in Palermo and the cathedral in Monreale, this cathedral, The Christ the Saviour of Cefalu, may well be the finest. There seems to be a consensus among the critics that this Christ the Pantocrator is the greatest. I will quote Vincent Cronin, The Golden Honeycomb:

For there is no questioning of the fact that these mosaics are among the supreme examples of Christian art. In scale as in conception, in line as in colour,which, thanks to the excellence of the materials employed, remains undimmed, the Pantocrator at Cefalu is unsurpassed by any other representation of Christ. Moreover, since this figure was created in the tradition preserved from apostolic times by the mosaic-working hermits of Mt Athos, it may be taken as an authentic portrait of the Saviour, Like the inscriptions, written partly in Greek, partly in Latin, the mosaics are the fruit of the fusion between Eastern and Western Christendom, resultant upon that curious historical process whereby the Normans surged down from Hauteville to act as the fertilizing insect between two cultural flowers. The humanism and the compassion of the West are in this figure linked to Near Eastern majesty, austerity and unlimited power.

From Cefalu we drive to our hotel in Palermo. This evening we will have our FAREWELL DINNER.

Day 14 (April 18, 2003)

It is the last day of the Sicily tour. We will take you to the Palermo Airport so that you can take the plane to Rome, from where you will fly back to the USA.

BON VOYAGE - get home well.

Bibliography

Anthony Blunt, Sicilian Baroque, 1968
Luigi Bernabo Brea, Sicily Before the Greeks, 1957
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, 1980
Rodney Campbell, The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the US Navy, 1977
Vincent Cronin, The Golden Honeycomb, 1954
Otto Demus, The Mosaics of Norman Sicily, 1950
Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls, Sicily, Cadogan Guides, 2002
Moses Finley, A History of Sicily, 1984
Giuseppe Tomaso di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Umberto Massocco, Templum Coelesti
John Julius Norwich, The Normans in Sicily, Penguin, 1992
Leonardo Sciascia, Candido
Giovanni Verga, Maestro Don Gesualdo