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Rating: 
Summary: Another View of Sicilia
Review: This gal is really down to earth. She's also more like the typical voyager;
gets lost, makes poor decisions, finds all the hotel rooms booked.
Despite her bad luck or bad planning, she manages to get some
really good perspectives of Sicilia and meets some really nice
people. This is yet another wonderful book, that as you turn
the pages you are getting secret little glimpses of this strange
and elusive country.
She discovers it's relatively easy to meet and speak to Sicilian
men, but much harder to connect to the women, who in fact, live
differently from other Italian women.
A lot of her misconnections really did remind me of my own travels,
(what would have happened if she stayed one more day
in this town, or even just a few minutes more in that church
where the caretaker was going to show her that older statue?)I was ready to book my own flight and follow her footsteps for
the answer! There are just a few books on the market right now that deal with
the Black Madonnas found in Italy. In the last 100 years
most of them have disappeared or have been painted white
and the replacements are always virginal pure Marys. There
are some interesting remnants of a very different religion
in Sicilia, and Susanna managed to uncover just a little bit
of it for us.
This author discusses her attempts to find evidence of a previous and yet extant culture in a nice clear
voice rich with color and interesting personal adventures.
Rating: 
Summary: One of few books on modern Sicily
Review: This is a very difficult book for me to review. For starters, the book is really rich and informative, and fascinating. If you're looking for a book on Sicily, then I recommend reading this one. However, I had an INCREDIBLY hard time *reading* this book, because I found the author so utterly disagreeable and her conduct so completely reprehensible. Opening with a letter to her dead grandmother, the book immediately launches into discourteous behaviour from males towards females, and holds fast to that theme for dear life throughout the book. Caperna Lloyd is quite obviously a mid-life crisis conversion to Goddess worship who descends upon Sicily with her own hell-bent agenda to see proof, no matter how unlikely, that all present-day Sicilians are actually Pagan Goddess Worshippers "in the broom closet", as it were, and Catholic in name only, and this book is an attempt to prove it to the world. Almost every interaction she has with the natives either revolves around the men being misogynistic sexual predators or how the customs are, according to her, "all wrong" for these Pagans in denial (or whatever it is that she thinks they are.) Never once does she take responsibility for her own actions, such as: o - her insistence, bordering upon demands that she be allowed to be a carrier of the floats in the annual Easter parade, which for several hundred years has been a men's ritual. She has this as a mission because it somehow proves to herself that she is better than anyone else if she succeeds in doing so...she effectively portrays her invasion to be a victory of Goddess Worship over Christianity and the patriarchy. The fact that the reasoning behind the tradition of men carrying doesn't make sense to her, or being distasteful to her should not detract from the validity and beauty of the tradition..but to Caperna Lloyd, it does o - her complete inability to communicate effectively in English to people who only speak a language she didn't bother to learn, (in their native land, no less) o - her arbitrarily deciding to jaunt across the island where she knows no one, to hike, in a dress and high heels, across the rocky terrain in the middle of the afternoon, leaving her with less than enough time to get back to her origination point, and also leaving her with not enough money to pay for a hotel, so she is forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, of which she is unappreciative and sees an attack around every corner, o - another jaunt across the island, determined to see Pagan Goddess Statues inside the Churches, but neglects to give herself enough time to accomplish this task and then is frustrated with the caretaker for not bending to her unannounced schedule o - her unreasonable disdain of the keeper of the gate key to Grotta del Genovese, the cave that houses the pictures of The Goddess in The Grotto, who seeks to protect the paintings from deterioration and thus refuses to allow her to take photographs. As someone who is a professional photographer, she should realize the man is only trying to protect the artifact for future generations, but Caperna Lloyd's selfishness and mission will allow her to recognize none of that and she forces the man to allow her to take the pictures, future generations and historical reference notwithstanding. Perhaps, however, the most telling piece of evidence in her helter-skelter, badly planned and poorly thought out adventures is the fact that when she gets back to her hotel room, after having insisted upon taking the pictures of the cave paintings, she discovers that she had no film in her camera. Mind you....this woman is a professional photographer. Quite frankly, her behaviour on the island, from her own telling, absolutely mortified me, and it worries me that more Americans may behave this way, making those of us that follow unwelcome. However, if you can get past her personal agenda, feminazi politics and discourtesy, it's a good book.
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