Sicilian Odyssey by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose [Prose, Francine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780792265351
Publisher: National Geographic
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

From the start, the prospect of going to Mozia makes me a little edgy—the idea of sailing across a lagoon to an island on which no one lives, an island that was once the outpost of a highly developed and cruel civilization, but where there are now only its ruins and a small museum in the former home of Joseph Whitaker, one of the Englishmen who came to Sicily and sensibly intuited that a fortune could be made by exporting Marsala wine.

In winter, the museum (and, by extension, the island) closes at one in the afternoon. I can’t help thinking that, unlikely as it seems…what if the fisherman who ferries us out there gets distracted and forgets about us, and we’re stuck out there all night? What if we’re stranded, exposed to the elements, alone with the spirits of the Phoenician traders who first came to Mozia in the eighth century B.C. and who lived in harmony with their Greek neighbors until the Carthaginian wars, when Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, using catapults, missiles, and battering rams—state-of-the-art tools of fourth-century warfare—destroyed the settlement and much of its population?

I phone ahead from Trapani and the woman who answers at the museum gives me directions for finding the ferry port, roughly halfway between Trapani and Marsala. The signs directing us to Mozia and the port—just a parking lot, really, beside a small building, with a solitary fishing boat waiting at the dock—are reassuring. It’s not exactly unexplored wilderness, uncharted territory. Going to Mozia—and back—is something people do. All the time.

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