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Curtis Bill Pepper

Journey to Sicily
1959-1961
by Angelo Bucarelli and John R. Pepper
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Click on image to open the virtual tour
Todi | Palazzo Comunale | Sala delle Pietre
December, 7 2024 - January, 12 2025

The accompanying pictures** are of Sicily - not the over-run tourist resorts, not the Greek ruins, nor the paved main streets of the island's cities.
They are from the heart of the land, the wind grieved mountain towns, the intimate dramas of village life, and the crime-ridden backside of its port cities - a Sicily known to only a few Italians and still fewer visitorsOverrun by a dozen different civilizations, Sicily remains today largely untouched and unknown.
The rocky stage where Plato sought to install his ideal Republic has been too primitive, too poor and too bloody for the average traveller- land of sudden death where man sits atop the smouldering humus of a thousand years of invasions.
Under the scorching glare of the Sicilian sky, anger flares fast.
Trivialities turn into blood feuds. The pendulum of murder swings back and forth with the inevitability of a heart beat while the island's politicians and the Italian government or the mainland are paralysed by compromise, corruption... and the Mafia.
Until recently, most of this has been unseen by tourists who have preferred the coastal area with its first-class hotels, its bright sun and sea, and a few choice ruins.

These pictures portray this hidden face of Sicily. The survey is not complete, yet there is sufficient here to also reveal that this is more than an island or an insular experience of a singular society.
It is, above all, a volcanic, blood-soaked, sea-washed theatre where one can see at remarkably close hand the evolution of man - of all men and women.
It is here, visible to the naked eye in an unusually dramatic form.
Variously tragic or humorous, it is always most present and real.
The pictures break down into seven groups - seven different ways of viewing Sicilian life today.
They encompass the living, inner structure of the island, the majority are poor and most often illiterate - yet always a people of great dignity with an ongoing awareness of the worth of honour and respect, cantered around the inner core of family with its extension in the society that nurtures it.
It is also, as will be seen, a story of mankind of all ages - for here the nucleus of life, as caught under the eye, can be seen from its beginning to its end.
The groups are: Ages of Man, Work of Man Above the Earth, Work of Man Below the Earth, The Living Town, The Living Land, Man Out of Time, The Mafia.
Each of these will contain personal anecdotes (with miners in a sulpher mine, or a meeting a Capomafia in his home) plus excerpts from poems, novels, film, songs (popular, cabaret and operatic), crime reports, Mafia trials, which have emerged as the voice of this land and its people across the centuries. Variously lyrical, comic, dramatic, historic, this text with its photos, will distinguish this book from other tourist manuals or coffee-table books.


Curtis Bill Pepper


** This statement was written three years before Bill Pepper passed away in 2014. It was the proposal for the book on Sicily that he planned to do...



© Toni Garbasso