Diversions in Sicily by Henry Festing Jones, book cover
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Diversions in Sicily

Pages
183

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  1. 00 - Dedication

    5:22

  2. 01 - Chapter I, The Brigadier and the Lottery

    26:42

  3. 02 - Chapter II, Peppino

    15:05

  4. 03 - Chapter III, The Professor

    12:36

  5. 04 - Chapter IV, The Wine-Ship

    25:25

  6. 05 - Chapter V, Michele and the Princess of Bizerta

    20:05

  7. 06 - Chapter VI, Ferrau and Angelica

    17:52

  8. 07 - Chapter VII, The Death of Bradamante

    19:29

  9. 08 - Chapter VIII, Monte San Giuliano

    21:45

  10. 09 - Chapter IX, The Madonna and the Personaggi

    20:48

  11. 10 - Chapter X, The Universal Deluge

    17:37

  12. 11 - Chapter XI, The Return

    7:10

  13. 12 - Chapter XII, Faith and Superstition

    24:51

  14. 13 - Chapter XIII, The Prodigal Son and the Arts

    22:38

  15. 14 - Chapter XIV, Samson

    22:34

  16. 15 - Chapter XV, The Conversion of the Emperor Constantine

    27:23

  17. 16 - Chapter XVI, A Great Actor

    12:25

  18. 17 - Chapter XVII, Supper with the Players

    16:36

  19. 18 - Chapter XVIII, A Young Critic

    14:58

  20. 19 - Chapter XIX, Brancaccia

    17:05

Diversions in Sicily (1909) is a public domain work.

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About this book

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.

About the author

Henry Festing Jones

Henry Festing Jones was an English writer, editor, and the friend and biographer of Samuel Butler. His Sicilian travel books include Diversions in Sicily and Castellinaria, and Other Sicilian Diversions, also catalogued in shortened form as Castellinaria. Both works draw on journeys, conversations, local customs, and observations of Sicilian places.

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Book facts

Pages
183
Language
English
Formats
PDF, EPUB, MOBI, Read online, Audiobook
Audio read by
R. S. Steinberg