Southern Sicily

PHOTOGRAPHY
Written By Mark Chew

All the images from this “Southern Sicily” series, are available to SWS readers as archival, art prints on heavy textured cotton rag paper, delivered anywhere in the world. Contact SWS for sizes, pricing and more information.

Images by Mark Chew

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“And anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it.”
— D. H. Lawrence

“The climate’s delicate; the air most sweet.
Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing
The common praise it bears.”
– Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale Act 111, Scene 1

I do not envy God’s paradise because I am so satisfied to live in Sicily.
―Federico II, Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Sicily

Throughout the history of the human race, no land and no people have suffered so terribly from slavery, from foreign conquests and oppression, and none have struggled so irrepressibly for emancipation as Sicily and the Sicilians. Almost from the time when Polyphemus promenaded around Etna, or when Ceres taught the Siculi the culture of grain, to our day, Sicily has been the theater of uninterrupted invasions and wars, and of unflinching resistance. The Sicilians are a mixture of almost all southern and northern races; first, of the aboriginal Sicanians, with Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, and slaves from all regions under heaven, imported into the island by traffic or war; and then of Arabs, Normans, and Italians. The Sicilians, in all these transformations and modifications, have battled, and still battle, for their freedom.
―Marx and Engels, German co-founders of Communism

All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really wish fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is, for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the enigmas of nirvana.

― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

Mark Chew
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Flotsam & Jetsam 10.07.26