The Sicilians Passion

It was just plain old physical attraction. That didn’t mean it was any “big love” or anything, did it? Kate was just mistress to a very passionate Sicilian man, Giovanni Calverri. And sex was all it was ever supposed to be. Until the day when everything changed. When fate forced them to put their steamy arrangement on hold—and think about what they really had together…

Danilo Dolci is the renowned "Gandhi of Sicily." Since 1952 he has conducted a nonviolent crusade against the misery and violence of Western Sicily. A Passion for Sicilians portrays his struggles against official apathy and Mafia pressure, his long series of hunger strikes to arouse the public conscience, and his calls for measures to eradicate poverty. The book also brings to life the people of Partinico, the fascinating neighbors Mangione knew on Via Emma. We meet a Mafia killer, the Cardinal of Sicily, a Sicilian princess who defies the law as she spreads the gospel of family planning, and the denizens of Palermo's infamous slums. Written in a highly engrossing style, this book is an exciting rendition of an old world groping toward new values. Jerre Mangione is professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. During his sojurn in Italy in 1965, he was a member of Dolci's staff and one of his closest confidants. Mangione is the author of nine other books.

A US freelance travel writer descended from Sicilian immigrants chronicles her intimate encounter with the languishing lifestyle of fishermen engaged in the mattanza ritual trapping of bluefin tuna on an island off the coast of Sicily. This memoir-cum- travelogue and natural history includes thumbnail bandw photos. c. Book News Inc.

His forbidden innocent...and the consequence of their surrender! Aurora Messina is everything cynical hotel tycoon Nico Caruso shouldn’t want. Impetuous and far too innocent, she’s trouble – and temptation! – personified. But even Nico’s famous control isn’t a match for their combustible chemistry...then Nico discovers their encounter has left her pregnant! He’s never wanted a family – he still bears the scars of his own childhood. But will Aurora’s revelation give this proud Sicilian a reason to risk everything?

July 12, 1979: The fearsome Bonanno family boss, Carmine Galante, is gunned down in a gruesome ambush at a Brooklyn restaurant. The hit launches an FBI investigation that soon becomes the largest in the bureau's history, as agents uncover a trail leading to a clandestine arm of the Sicilian Mafia. Evidence points to an all but unknown criminal franchise at work in the U.S. within the strife-torn Cosa Nostra. The mystery deepens. Surveillance photos snapped secretly from FBI vans and lookouts in Queens and Brooklyn show a cast of characters the bureau's mob experts cannot identify. What is in the cartons these Sicilians are loading into the trunks of their Mercedes? Who is trying to spirit $60 million out of the country and why? And where is the mountain of money coming from? The FBI has stumbled across a billion-dollar drug pipeline that is funneling tons of Turkish morphoine base to Sicilian labs and heroin into the United States through pizza parlors, cafes, and boutiques. Where the French Connection ends, the Pizza Connection begins. This is the dramatic inside story of that historic case and the struggle of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs Service, and New York Police Department to deal the Mafia a crippling blow. The early 1980s are a crucial time for the FBI. It is emerging from the debacles of J. Edgar Hoover's administration, which long refused to acknowledge traditional organized crime, and is about to take on a new assignment policing anti-drug laws alongside the DEA. The exploding case is assigned to an unlikely pair of agents: the intense, Sicilian-born Carmine Russo and the laid-back Charlie Rooney. Together with an expanding army of investigators in the U.S. and abroad, they follow a trail that leads from sidewalk pizzerias and pay phones in Long Island, New Jersey, and rural Illinois, to bank vaults and hideouts in Miami, the Bahamas, Zurich, Palermo, Rio, Madrid, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations and surveillance photos reveal a deadly, shadowy world of coded messages, midnight dropoffs of heroin packed in paper bags and shirt boxes, and vast fortunes laundered through some of America's biggest brokerage firms. But the crimelords Russo and Rooney stalk are not their only nemesis; they must also fend off jealous and impatient bureaucrats, and more than once crooked cops come close to blowing the case.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “At villa Donnafugata, long ago is never very far away,” writes bestselling author Marlena de Blasi of the magnificent if somewhat ruined castle in the mountains of Sicily that she finds, accidentally, one summer while traveling with her husband, Fernando. There de Blasi is befriended by Tosca, the patroness of the villa, an elegant and beautiful woman-of-a-certain-age who recounts her lifelong love story with the last prince of Sicily descended from the French nobles of Anjou. Sicily is a land of contrasts: grandeur and poverty, beauty and sufferance, illusion and candor. In a luminous and tantalizing voice, That Summer in Sicily re-creates Tosca’s life, from her impoverished childhood to her fairy-tale adoption and initiation into the glittering life of the prince’s palace, to the dawning and recognition of mutual love. But when Prince Leo attempts to better the lives of his peasants, his defiance of the local Mafia’s grim will to maintain the historical imbalance between the haves and the have-nots costs him dearly. The present-day narrative finds Tosca sharing her considerable inherited wealth with a harmonious society composed of many of the women–now widowed–who once worked the prince’s land alongside their husbands. How the Sicilian widows go about their tasks, care for one another, and celebrate the rituals of a humble, well-lived life is the heart of this book. Showcasing the same writerly gifts that made bestsellers of A Thousand Days in Venice and A Thousand Days in Tuscany, That Summer in Sicily, and de Blasi’ s marvelous storytelling, remind us that in order to live a rich life, one must embrace both life’s sorrow and its beauty. Here is an epic drama that takes readers from Sicily’s remote mountains to chaotic post-war Palermo, from the intricacies of forbidden love to the havoc wreaked by Sicily’s eternally bewildering culture.

First in the trilogy of three Sicilians of aristocratic birth who seek passion—at any price. From the USA Today–bestselling author. For Sicilian billionaire Cesare Gambrelli, the death of his sister was the fault of reckless Simon Ingram. The feud between the two families could only be settled by vengeance! It was Ingram’s sister Robin who would pay the price. Cesare’s plan of revenge demanded marriage and motherhood. It was the last part Cesare savored—with passionate pleasure . . .

The Sicilians is crime fiction -- a bracing take on a mafia saga, with a fresh and innovative storyline, and a cracker of a climax. Book one outlines the adventures of a group of Sicilians in the Western Sicilian village-towns of the Belice Valley -- some are members of the Cosa Nostra brotherhood and others are ordinary people whose lives are controlled by them. Each has their own power struggles and agendas. Book two has all the ingredients of a best seller. It can be read stand alone and is where the book shines. It finds the key characters in transit to Sydney, Australia where the action culminates, with the addition of dirty cops, stand-over men and new murderers.

'The only remarkable thing people can tell of their doings these days is that they have stayed at home', declared George Eliot in 1869. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain travel became the rage. The middle classes and the aristocracy seemed in a constant flux of arrival and departure, their luggage festooned with foreign labels. The revolution in transport made this possible. The Mediterranean Passion describes how the British travelled to the South and where they went. Drawing on what these travellers wrote, and what was written for them, it enriches our understanding of the Victorians and Edwardians by exploring the medical, religious, sexual and aesthetic dimensions of their journeys and illuminates an important but neglected aspect of British social and cultural history. '... combines scholarship with charm ... It could easily be taken to the Mediterranean on a holiday and read with pleasure on a sunny beach or in the shade of a church.' Asa Briggs, Financial Times 'I was impressed not merely by the range of his erudition - historical, cultural, literary, topographical, medical et al. - and by the depth of his enquiries into his subject but by the subtlety and refinement of his prose. He deals with very elusive, complex and culturally contradictory matters, upon which few, if any, could arrive at persuasive generalisations; yet he does so throughout the book, while his conclusion is a marvel of judgment, excelling even what his preceded.' David Selbourne (author of The Principle of Duty) The Mediterranean Passion was the joint winner of the 1987 Wolfson Literary Award for History.