Map of Sicily showing our route (click on the image to enlarge it!)

Twice I had planned a trip to Sicily, following a conference in Erice and five years ago a trip for Barbara. The first did not materialized, the second we abandoned in favor of southern Spain. With Cornelius, Anne-Cecile and Ulysse in Rome since January, 2003 seemed the perfect year to try again. They are both working very hard, Cornelius is setting up a research group investigating the psycho-neurology of genetically altered mice in Monterotondo, RM and Anne-Cecile works on the pathology of similar mice in Ivrea, TO. We decided to stay only a few days with them, rent a car, and drive south exploring Southern Italy and Sicily for four full weeks. I had never traveled farther south than Paestum in my life — and that had been in 1953....

An additional incentive was a new digital Canon G3 camera, which I had just bought. For the first time in many years this marvelous toy allowed me to try my eyes again at photographing, which I had practically abandoned, because I had got tired of the weight of my faithful, regular Canon and the clutter of its heavy lenses.

Here are the photographic results of this journey — carefully edited, enough good photographs to put them on my website for a while.

I cannot say that I was taken off my feet by Sicily and its inhabitants — the Greeks are closer to my heart. Nevertheless, we saw all the places I had longed to see, the Greek temples and the Norman cathedrals, and then some more, the rarely visited countryside of central Sicily, a landscape which reminded us of the bare and abstract countryside of southern Spain. I like "minimal" landscapes...

Pacific Palisades, November 2003