Sicilian language

“ The influence of this brilliant court, which united taste for science with frivolity, where serious discussions on law and philosophy alternated with the gay Provençal wisdom, and where displays of chivalry and love songs diverted the greatest statesmen of the Middle Ages after the fatigues or annoyances of politics, this preponderant influence made the Sicilian nation for a time the chief actor in the history of Italy, and their language the dominant organ of the rising literature ”

“ Carven slabs from the temple friezes—what a story they tell of the primitive and ardent culture of the early Greeks perched upon their twin hills at Selinus, beside the sounding deep! One whole hall is lined with them, arranged symmetrically in series, speaking even to-day with the voice of that mystic lore which, to understand, reveals ancient Sicily. And though individual carvings excel them in precision and beauty, as a series denoting the exact progress of Greek Sicilian art from its crudest to its most perfected form, the metopes are unsurpassed. ”

“ The Greek temples of Segeste and Girgenti and Selinus, the Roman amphitheatre of Syracuse, the Byzantine mosaics and Saracenic villas of Palermo, the Norman cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalú, and the Spanish habits which still characterise the life of Sicilian cities, testify to the successive strata of races which have been deposited upon the island. Amid its anarchy of tongues, the Latin alone has triumphed. In the time of the Greek colonists Sicily was polyglot. During the Saracenic occupation it was trilingual. It is now, and during modern history it has always been, Italian. ”

“ The absence of roads on the island enabled the different groups of its population to maintain their distinct idioms and character during a very long period. The Lombards whom the Romans transplanted to Benevento and Palermo spoke their native dialect long after it had become extinct in Lombardy. Even now there are about 50,000 Sicilians who speak this ancient Lombard tongue. At San Fratello, on a steep hill on the northern coast, this idiom is spoken with the greatest purity. Nor has the Italian wholly supplanted the vulgar Sicilian in the interior of the island. ”

“ There has never been a Sicilian nation. Perhaps that is the reason the story of the island is so hard to follow, it’s all snarled up with the history of first one, then another nation. The most obvious way of learning something about Sicily is to read what historians have to say about it; a pleasanter way is to listen to what the poets from Homer to Goethe have sung of it, paying special heed to Theocritus—he knew Sicily better than anybody else before his time or since! ”

“ No poet is more determined to deal out his compliments in a liberal, open-handed way than is the Sicilian. While the Venetians and the Tuscans are content with claiming seven distinctive beauties for the object of their affection, the Sicilian boldly asserts that his bedda possesses no less than thirty-three biddizzi. ”

“ It is an important matter. Do you wish the Sicilians, both in their public and private capacity, to be considered friends to you, or enemies? If enemies, what is to become of you? Whither will you free for refuge? On what will you depend? Just now you repudiated the greater part of the agriculturists, most honourable and wealthy men, both Sicilians and Roman citizens. Now, what will you do about the Sicilian cities? Will you say that the Sicilians are friendly to you? ”

“ At a cinematograph show, when a letter or telegram or the title of the piece is shown on the screen, a murmur goes round the hall; it is the people reading the writing out loud to assure themselves of its meaning. So the talking Sicilian is telling everything twice, once with his voice and once with his gestures and p. 168there is so much oil in his backbone that there is nothing creaky, awkward or grudging in his movements; the gestures are made with an exuberance, an intensity and a natural unconscious beauty which seem to lift the matter above the plane of ordinary life. ”

“ Real civilization in Sicily dates from neither of those races, but from Dorian and Ionic Greeks, who came perhaps as early as the founding of Rome—that is, in the seventh or eighth century B.C. The great cities of the Sicilian Greeks were Syracuse, Segesta and Girgenti, where still survive colossal remains of their genius. In military and political senses, the island for 3,000 [Pg ix] years has been overrun, plundered and torn asunder by every race known to Mediterranean waters. ”

“ Then with each word, each glance, each motion fired, You still enjoy'd, and yet you still desired, 60 Till, all dissolving, in the trance we lay, And in tumultuous raptures died away. The fair Sicilians now thy soul inflame; Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame? But ah, beware, Sicilian nymphs! nor boast That wandering heart which I so lately lost; Nor be with all those tempting words abused, Those tempting words were all to Sappho used. And you that rule Sicilia's happy plains, Have pity, Venus, on your poet's pains! ”

“ He, his sons Manfred and Enzio, his chief counsellor Pier della Vigna, and many poets and troubadours drawn thither by his fame, so far outstripped the rest of Italy that all Italian poetry, wherever written, was called Sicilian.
Sicily was the most civilized place in Europe, now that Southern France had been crushed by the Albigensian persecution. The old Greek stock kept some trace of their inheritance; the Arabs had brought their culture; the Normans had added chivalric ideas; the Crusades and commerce had enlarged the intellectual boundaries ”

“ Sicily is notoriously richer in songs than any province of the mainland; Vigo collected 5000, and the number of those since written down seems almost incredible. It has even been conjectured that Sicily was the original fountain-head of Italian popular poetry, and that it is still the source of the greater part of the songs which circulate through Italy.* 126 Songs that rhyme imperfectly in the Tuscan version have been found correct when put into Sicilian, a fact which points to the island as their first home. ”

“ As regards the date of the origin of folk-songs in Sicily, the boldest guess possibly comes nearest the truth, and this takes us back to a time before Theocritus. Cautious students rest satisfied with adducing undoubted evidence of their existence as early as the twelfth century, in the reign of William II., whose court was famed for "good speakers in rhyme of every condition." Moreover, it is certain that Sicilian songs had begun to travel orally and in writing to the Continent considerably before the invention of printing ”

“ Thus was it the destiny of the Arabians, in the east as well as in the west of Europe, to communicate to the Latin nations their arts, their science, and their poetry.
From the history of Sicily, we may deduce the effects produced by Arabian influence on the Italian, or as it was then considered, the Sicilian poetry, with no less certainty than that with which we trace its connection, in the county of Barcelona and in the kingdom of Castile, with the first efforts of the Provençal and Spanish poets. ”

“ But I do not think p. 97it will quite do for me to be a Sicilian. I cannot talk dialect and I cannot gesticulate. And then, am I not too well dressed?”
“That will not matter; you shall be an aristocratic Sicilian, they are often quite well dressed. And as for the dialect and the gesticulation, it is now the fashion among the upper classes to speak Tuscan and not to gesticulate. It is considered more—I cannot remember the word, I saw it in the Giornale di Sicilia, it is an English word.” ”

“ He was very handsome, with a glowing, sun-warmed beauty, like one of his own Sicilian fruits. He was but twenty-three years of age; his heart was warm, and his head was hot. He said to her:
'Maiden, where I come from the land is beautiful as the sea is; the shores laugh; the hills are rich as a mother's breasts for her first-born; men and women live on fruit and wine, and song and love; yet not in my own Sicilia did ever I see so handsome a maiden as art thou!'
And this he said in his own soft amatory Sicilian tongue, which is like the flow of honey from the lip of a ewer of gold. ”

“ By their gestures I mean something about which in England, in France and even in Northern Italy, nothing is known. It is true that we Northerners can and do communicate with one another in gesture, but in England we mostly omit gesture and use speech, while in France and Northern Italy the gesture is only slight. A Sicilian sometimes omits words, but if he omits gestures it is only by exercising great self-control. When he is talking naturally, every muscle of his body is at work helping him to express his meaning. ”

“ We have little, but we have honour. The man to whom this knife belonged has neither, and against him, and such as he, we warn women like yourself, who are young, beautiful, and honest. These words are not written to the incomparable artist, the matchless singer, the wonder of Sicily, and the pride of the nation. They are addressed to you—simply as Aliandra Basili, an honourable Sicilian maiden, the daughter of an honest Sicilian notary. It is known to us all that you have put your faith and trust in Tebaldo Pagliuca. ”

“ What might have been the destiny of Italian literature, if the Suabian House had maintained its hold on the Two Sicilies, and this process of fusion had been completed at Naples or Palermo, cannot even be surmised.
Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provençal poetry is vague, owing to lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the "courtly makers" yielded to the singers of the people. ”

“ The house of Anjou made Naples their capital, and treated Sicily as a conquered province. After Benevento the literary centre of Italy shifted from Palermo and the royal court of the south to Bologna and the republican cities of Tuscany. Guittone d’Arezzo (Purg. xxvi. 124-126) founded a school of Tuscan poets, extending the field of Italian lyrical poetry to political and ethical themes as well as love (which had been the sole subject of the Sicilian School) . ”

“ Sicilians vie with Cantonese as the most migrating people in the world. Sicily, like Canton, is overpopulated and poverty-ridden. Another, more important factor, appears to be that at every change of government, Mafistas were forced into flight and exile in droves. They settled and colonized all over the earth. There are huge Sicilian colonies spread around Europe, in England, South America, North Africa, the Orient and the United States. ”

“ A generation later, another Englishman, the humanist John of Salisbury, studies philosophy with a Greek interpreter in Apulia and drinks the heavy wines of the Sicilian chancellor; while still others profit by translations of Greek philosophical and mathematical works from the Italian libraries. The distinctive element in southern learning lay, however, not on the Latin side, but in its immediate contact with Greek and Arabic scholarship, and the chief meeting-point of these various currents of culture was the royal court at Palermo, direct heir to the civilization of Saracen Sicily. ”

“ The tendency is marked in all primitive peoples—a large part of the Sicilians are still primitive—to tell an inquirer the thing they suppose he most wishes to know; and the Saracenic blood in the Sicilian has doubtless left him a certain heritage of poetic imagination and exaggeration for the most utter commonplaces of life. At any rate, this inclination is found throughout the island, and it does not, except to the flustered tourist-in-a-hurry, seem a peculiar drawback or fault. Indeed, it rather adds to the fascination of the people, who appear to fit perfectly into their environs. ”

“ On the other hand, Sicily has been more than once made the road to African conquest and settlement, bath by Sicilian princes and by the Roman masters of Sicily. The connexion with Greece, the most memorable of all, has consisted in the settlement of many colonies from old Greece, which gave the island the most brilliant part of its history, and which made the greater part practically Greek. This Greek element was strengthened at a later time by the long connexion of Sicily with the Eastern, the Greek-speaking, division of the Roman empire. ”

“ It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they may ever have had in professional justice. ”

“ The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to Nocera, in the south of Italy. Saracen, however, though it means Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in Sicily ”

“ One feature of the Sicilian landscape greatly struck the Ingletons.
"There are no cottages scattered about like we have in England," remarked Lilias. "Do the people who work in the fields all live in these little towns on the tops of hills? Why don't they have their homes close to their work?"
"It's an old Sicilian custom," explained Signor Trapani. ”