Diversions in Sicily

Diversions in Sicily is a travel book by Henry Festing Jones, published in 1909. Jones, who lived from 1851 to 1928, was the close friend, traveling companion, and eventual biographer of the novelist Samuel Butler, and he produced several books in his own right drawing on the years of travel and observation that he had shared with Butler across the latter decades of Butler’s life.

The book records Jones’s repeated visits to Sicily, particularly to the small towns and villages of the island’s interior where he and Butler had spent many summer holidays. Butler had developed a particular fondness for Sicily during his long argument with the orthodox classical scholarship of his day about the authorship of the Odyssey, which he believed had been written in Sicily by a Sicilian woman. The trips to Sicily had originally been research expeditions for Butler’s books on the subject, but they had also become for both men a kind of annual retreat from English life into the slower rhythms of the Sicilian countryside.

The book is not a guidebook in the conventional sense. Jones writes about particular places he had visited many times over many years, about families and individuals he had come to know personally, about local customs and festivals he had observed at first hand, and about the long conversations he and Butler had conducted with their Sicilian hosts. The book has the warm informal character of a traveler who knows his ground intimately and who is more interested in particular people and particular places than in any general account of the country.

Jones writes well, with a clear unornamented prose style that he had partly developed under Butler’s influence. His portraits of individual Sicilians are some of the most memorable parts of the book and have the kind of careful affectionate observation that the best English travel writing about Mediterranean countries was capable of in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book also has Butler’s presence running through it, since the trips and many of the observations were originally shared between the two men.

The book runs about three hundred pages and works best read in chapter sized pieces. For readers interested in late nineteenth century English travel writing on Italy and Sicily, this is one of the better examples. It pairs naturally with Butler’s own Sicilian writings.