For those God-Father fans out there, though, it isn't the Sicily that they think they know from the films. Yes, there are olive trees galore, more pomegranate trees than I was expecting and enough lemons for Life to get tired of them, but the Cosa Nostra are busy trying not to be imprisoned into non-existence by the Sicilian government.
Among their many not-so-legal activities, there were a LOT of solar-farms (think an entire hill covered in solar panels) that the Cosa Nostra had built, only to shell it out to other countries at stupid prices, not to mention a lot of illegal building - in every sense of the word, since a lot of the building seems to be on cliffs over motorways that then get buried under landslides thanks to both the building and some torrential rain!
Anyway, Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, making up the 'football' at the toe of mainland Italy's 'boot'. I say mainland because Sicily is actually a part of Italy, having been owned in turn by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Normans, the lords or kings of Anjou, then the crowns of Aragon, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, before being unified with Naples under the Bourbons as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
As a result, there is very little of the natural Sicily to see. A lot of the plants and animals were introduced by its conquerors, namely the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs. However, it can boast the oldest chestnut tree in the world - which is unusual considering that this Hundred Horse Chestnut has survived between 2 and 4,000 years on the eastern slope of Mount Etna - which was amazing, but we'll get to that.
One thing that is totally Sicilian is the endangered goats, which are a total mind-mess. For one thing, they are supposedly useless, giving very little milk and icky icky meat. For another, they're endangered, regardless! Also, their horns are epic in the extreme:
But this is all in Agrigento, on the southern coast closest to the coast of Northern Africa. You go up to Monreale, just outside of their capital city of Palermo on the north coast, things get even more mentally messy and cultured, when you find the answer to this question: What do you get when King William the Second (also known as the Good) decides to build a cathedral because he doesn't like the archbishop of Palermo? Apparently, a cathedral with only one painting in the entire building, and mosaics made up of - I'm absolutely not joking - 400 KILOS of GOLD!
And finally we get to the eastern coast, with the most famous of Sicily's landmarks: Mount Etna. For a volcano that went off earlier this year, it is FREEZING at the best of times, thanks to being 3,329 metres high, with a base of 140 square kilometres.
The irony is that it has a skiing resort. Think about it - you can SKI on the most ACTIVE VOLCANO IN EUROPE! And you can go up to the secondary crater (bearing in mind that there are at least 5 non-active craters around Etna's middle, and three closer to its peak. Thanks to its five-day tantrum in May this year, there was a crown of sulphur and a no-access policy to the primary crater, which is a bit counter-intuitive seeing as how even the secondary crater's been active in the past two years:
All in all, Sicily has been an amazing place to visit. I heartily recommend it to everyone, and the Sicilians will honestly not mind the extra people. They have the perfect proverb, after all:
"Unni manciannu dui, manciannu tri (there's always room for one more)'
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