Sicily

Abstract

Sicily’s central position in the Mediterranean, its ecological and biological diversity, and its thousands of years of contact with major agricultural civilizations and their knowledge of plant species, animals, and techniques, as well as their customs and social organizations, have resulted in a variety of agrarian and agroforestal landscapes, often with opposite characteristics. There is indeed a marked contrast between Sicily’s mountains, inland hills, and coastal areas, between latifundium agriculture and the Mediterranean garden, between the bare earth of fallow fields and tree-covered areas; a contrast that is not limited to environmental and productive aspects, but also extends to the intellectual perception of the island’s landscapes. Friedrich Schiller wrote of “the wondrous struggle between fertility and destruction in the meadows of Sicily” (On the Sublime). In his account of his Italian tour, Wolfgang Goethe uses an oxymoron—“a desert of fecundity”—to characterize the wheat fields and pastures of the island’s inland hills. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa speaks of a “landscape that knows no middle course between lascivious softness and devilish harshness”.