Here are 79 books that Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions fans have personally recommended if you like
Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions.
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I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.
I could almost immediately smell the gorgeous scent of citrus wafting from the pages of this beautiful book through the magic of Helena Atlee’s precisely detailed writing.
Who would have thought that the story of Italy’s varied and numerous citrus plantations would take me on a journey all across the country, from Sicily’s west coast to the fragrant lemon gardens of Lake Garda, and in time from when the Arabs introduced bitter oranges up to the workings of the citrus industry today.
I love this book because it simply tells the fragrant story of how fruit, in various manifestations, has come to be cultivated all around the country and to represent something of the soul and the spirit of the Italian people.
The Land Where Lemons Grow is the sweeping story of Italy's cultural history told through the history of its citrus crops. From the early migration of citrus from the foothills of the Himalayas to Italy's shores to the persistent role of unique crops such as bergamot (and its place in the perfume and cosmetics industries) and the vital role played by Calabria's unique Diamante citrons in the Jewish celebration of Sukkoth, author Helena Attlee brings the fascinating history and its gustatory delights to life.
Whether the Battle of Oranges in Ivrea, the gardens of Tuscany, or the story of the…
Jeremy Black is a prolific lecturer and writer, the author of over 100 books. Many concern aspects of eighteenth-century British, European, and American political, diplomatic and military history but he has also published on the history of the press, cartography, warfare, culture, and on the nature and uses of history itself.
Holland is a talented scholar who has honed his skill in providing excellent campaign-level accounts of the war. Thus, among much else, his books include Fortress Malta (2003), The Battle of Britain (2010), Burma ’44 (2016), Normandy ’44 (2019), and this excellent study of the Anglo-American invasion of Sicily in 1943. Holland is particularly good at capturing the grittiness of war, and at adding the perspective of individual combatants without being trapped by it. Reads very well and provides a superb campaign-level account that is also tactically adroit.
'James Holland is the best of the new generation of WW2 historians.' Sebastian Faulks 'Holland's skill lies in bringing these warriors to life with vivid prose.' The Times Shortlisted for the 2021 British Army Military Book of the Year _________________________________________________ This is the story of the biggest seaborne landing in history.
Codenamed Operation HUSKY, the assault on Sicily on 10 July 1943 remains the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted. That day, over 160,000 Allied troops were dropped from the sky or came ashore to begin the fight for Europe.
The subsequent thirty-eight-day Battle for Sicily was one of the most…
I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.
I love travel, wine, and learning more about the people who create wine. This book ticks all these boxes.
It takes me all across Sicily, one of Italy’s most exciting and dynamic wine regions. In the course of these travels, I get to meet the people who have transformed Sicilian wine from pedestrian to world-class.
Camuto is a masterful storyteller. His descriptions of encounters with winemakers, what they look like, and the meals they share together are as interesting as the up-to-the-minute information he imparts about the wines they are now bringing to the world. This is a must-read for lovers of Sicily and all lovers of Italian wine.
Inspired by a deep passion for wine, an Italian heritage, and a desire for a land somewhat wilder than his home in southern France, Robert V. Camuto set out to explore Sicily's emerging wine scene. What he discovered during more than a year of traveling the region, however, was far more than a fascinating wine frontier. Chronicling his journey through Palermo to Marsala, and across the rugged interior of Sicily to the heights of Mount Etna, Camuto captures the personalities and flavors and the traditions and natural riches that have made Italy's largest and oldest wine region the world traveler's…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s watching Alfred Hitchcock movies and reading Dashiell Hammett—I’m from San Francisco. Then opera got hold of me. So, I dropped out of my PhD program, left Dante’s Inferno behind, and moved to Paris to live a modern-day La Bohème. Because I’m half-Italian, I decided I had to divide my life between Paris and Italy. Mystery, murder, romance, longing, and betrayal were what fueled my passions and still do. To earn a living, I became a travel, food, and arts reporter. These interests and the locales of my life come together in my own crime and mystery novels.
A double homicide in Sicily. Innocent, eccentric, small-town characters. The Mafia, the church, and a stifling, frightening nightmare world portrayed with humor, humanity, and a diamond-tipped eye for detail: that’s Leonardo Sciascia’s 1960s detective novel classic, To Each His Own (A ciascuno il suo). The writing is clean, clear, nervy, and seductive—some of the best crime writing, period. It even survives translation. This book is at least as good as The Godfather and better than anything by Andrea Camilleri. As you turn the pages, you’re not only transported to off-the-beaten-track, real-deal Sicily. You feel the grit. You smell it. You enter the heads and hearts of Sicilians. Written over 50 years ago, To Each His Own needs no refreshing. That world never changes.
This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done you will die. But what has Manno the pharmacist done? Nothing that he can think of. The next day he and his hunting companion are both dead.The police investigation is inconclusive. However, a modest high school teacher with a literary bent has noticed a clue that, he believes, will allow him to trace the killer. Patiently, methodically, he begins to untangle a web of erotic intrigue and political calculation. But the results of his amateur sleuthing are unexpected—and tragic. To Each His Own is one of the masterworks…
I’ve been a traveler and a dreamer ever since I was a little girl. I used to write to the tourism bureaus of different countries and tape pictures of faraway places onto the walls of my bedroom. It’s no surprise I ended up living in Europe, my home base for excursions all over the world. My historical fiction always features places that mean a lot to me, whether it’s Germany (where I live now), or Sicily – where my mother’s family came from. Digging into my Sicilian heritage and the culture and life of the island for my third novel was like discovering a new home.
I have very romantic notions of Sicily, and I look to the Inspector Montalbano series of detective novels to show me the grit and corruption that Sicily is actually known for.
This is the first novel in the series and introduces Montalbano as an honest cop in a dishonest world, a Sicilian town where everyone hustles for work and murders are common. Even if everybody is corrupt in their own ways, they’re still very human, and Montalbano’s tolerance of human failings makes him one of the great detectives to read.
The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano. This edition with a stunning redesigned cover.
The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes…
I've been thinking and writing about food ever since I spent a year in the Soviet Union many decades ago and discovered that food is a wonderfully immediate way to enter into another culture. My first cookbook led to a stint as a spokesperson for Stolichnaya vodka when it was first introduced to the US—a fascinating exercise in cross-cultural communication during the Cold War. In 2001 I founded Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which deepened my interest in culinary cultures around the world. Cookbooks aren't just about recipes. For me, the best ones include personal stories and history that transport you to other realms.
This book immediately swept me up in its glorious evocation of Sicily: the island's ancient history, the ways of its people, and above all the flavors of the sun-kissed land. In gorgeous prose, American-born Mary Taylor Simeti combines the illuminating insights of an outside observer with a passion for her adopted homeland. The recipes range from the cucina povera that sustained most of Sicily's inhabitants over the centuries to the ornate court cuisine that developed in the 16th century. We also journey to Sicily's convents, where the nuns became famous for their wondrous confections with fanciful names like "Virgins' Breasts" and "Chancellor's Buttocks."
This gem is more than just a cookbook. Walk through history with Pomp and Sustenance author Mary Taylor Simeti as she shares the secrets and eccentricities of Sicilian cuisine. Straddling the East and West, Christian and Muslim, land and sea, this Mediterranean island is a place of unique convergence. Nowhere is cultural convergence more evident than in Sicily’s regional culinary traditions and food culture. Simeti narrates this centuries-long journey, with wit and humor, making this historical cookbook a joy to own and use. More than just history, Pomp and Sustenance is filled with wonderful recipes. impressive in their style, scope,…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
Dr. Gaetano Cipolla is the retired head of the Foreign Language Department at St. John’s University, New York. He has spent his academic career researching and writing about the Sicilian culture and its people in order to counteract the stereotypical image of Sicilians and Italians as primarily spaghetti eaters and mafia. Dr. Cipolla understands the many dialects of the Sicilian language and, through his writings, has reclaimed the literary greatness of forgotten Sicilian writers by translating their poetry and other works. To overcome the pending extinction of Sicilian, he has written and developed a two-part course that teaches the language. His course is steadily being adopted in a number of universities.
This is revised and expanded edition of Sicilian: Studies on the Sicilian Ethos. It contains 4 new chapters and a new index of names. Eight chapters are devoted to the characteristics of Sicilians, their history, and their culture. The other 8 are devoted to the literature produced by writers and poets of Sicily, including Veneziano, Meli, Martoglio, Pirandello and Camilleri.
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
Ettore Grillo is a retired criminal attorney from Enna, Sicily, who spends his time writing and traveling. This is the second edition of his first book. I am drawn to historical fiction and creative fiction writing. They are wonderfully entertaining ways to learn about cultures and history within the story’s setting and plot. Grillo teaches about life in Enna, Sicily including the feasts, the traditions, and the people who are held together by customs while trying to solve a family mystery.
Is there life after death? A Hidden Sicilian History: Second Edition presents an intriguing and easy-to-read historical novel that starts with the investigation of a mysterious death.
While doing research in the public library in Enna, Sicily, a young man notices an ancient scroll has drifted from a shelf onto the floor. It appears to have slipped from a gap between two volumes about the Spanish Inquisition.
Though he expects it to be related to life in Sicily at the time of Spanish rule, instead the handwritten scroll reports a singular drama that was performed on the stage of the…
I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.
Mark Hehl gathered a bunch of Sicilian American writers to contribute pieces about their remembrances of their grandparents, those 1st or 2nd waves of immigrants that came to this country. American readers can relate better to the settings of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, and New Orleans than to the small Sicilian villages like Bisacquino, Sant’Anna, Chiusa Sclafani, the towns from which many immigrants embarked, and the towns from which these customs were carried into American cities.
The volume is a collaborative effort by twenty-eight talented writers to describe their Sicilian culture while living in the United States. Each contributor offers interesting personal insights in what it meant for him/her to grow up in a Sicilian environment while navigating through the difficulties posed by the encounter with the American way of life.
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can…
Very little has been written in English about Sicilian women. Most of the studies written in English about the women of southern Italy are the work of foreigners who discovered our region in adulthood. While some non-Italian colleagues have produced fine work, my books reflect the perspective of a scholar who, being Sicilian, has been familiar with the region and its people all her life. This is seen in my knowledge of the Sicilian language, from which I've translated texts, and even the medieval cuisine mentioned in my books. Viva la Sicilia!
Memoirs authored in recent years tend to get excessively personal, even intimate, and a number have been written by foreign women who end up living in Sicily.
Theresa Maggio is a bit different because she is the granddaughter of Sicilians, so she already has a keen sense of the culture. She ends up with a fisherman who leads the Mattanza, a method of capturing large tuna in huge nets. Alas, the Mattanza is no longer practiced, but this is an interesting story. There's also a sequel with a focus on visiting small towns.
A magnificent journey inside the world of a Sicilian fishing community and its thousand-year-old rituals. Every spring for untold centuries, great schools of giant bluefin tuna have swum through the Strait of Gibraltar to spawn in the Mediterranean Sea. And there, for untold centuries, men have been waiting for them. In this stunning debut, Theresa Maggio brings us inside the insular world of the tonnara-the ritual trapping and killing of bluefin enacted by fishermen since the Stone Age. In a single, bloody spectacle-called the mattanza-the fishermen harvest the bluefin, lifting them by hand from the Chamber of Death, the last…
