Elisée Reclus's 1865 Sicily, seen anew
A travel account the anarchist geographer wrote after crossing Sicily in the spring of 1865, first published in the magazine Le Tour du monde in 1866, is getting fresh attention, Le Temps reports.
In 1865, the French geographer and anarchist thinker Elisée Reclus travelled through Sicily while Etna was erupting and the island was adjusting to its annexation by the Kingdom of Italy, five years after Garibaldi's landing. The account he wrote, first published in the magazine Le Tour du monde in 1866, is the subject of a piece in Le Temps.
According to Le Temps, Reclus writes as a precursor of social geography, alert equally to the volcano's explosions and to the island's political upheavals. He is struck by Palermo's charm and its contradictions: "Qu'il serait facile d'être heureux à Palerme!" he exclaims, before noting that few cities in Europe seem to have as much progress still to make to take part in the movement of contemporary civilisation.
The text, as summarised by Le Temps, also records Reclus's surprise at how little women appear in public space, and his harsh view of idle rentiers who spend their days in circles along the Via Toledo without reading so much as a line of a newspaper. He notes the grip of the "maffia (sic)", whose members he describes as bound together to live by deception, fraud and theft of every kind.
Le Temps does not give further detail on the current edition beyond situating the text's origin in Le Tour du monde in 1866.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
