Fortified with a small tower, marked in solitude by two tufts of palms standing out of the inside courtyard exceeding the roof, some beautiful, of Arabic kind: such are the houses where landholders resort, only for short periods, for the vintage or the sowing. Many don't bring the families with them anymore. From the simple dinettes, among unpretentious 19th-century furniture, between servants or peasants turned into servants, seems to be emanating a patriarchal affability like there was one in Veneto half a century ago. One senses though that the Idyll is treacherous... There's a great ambiguity that could be defined double sincerity, caused by belonging to two masters¹ at the same time: You witness the ritual effusions between the peasant and the master, like they were father and son. Right after that, the master drops his voice so that the peasant does not hear what he has to tell you.
If you pass in the morning, the peasants meet you joyously; one thinks: "here people leaves like in the ancient times." But if you pass at night, in the hours of bad encounters, nobody recognizes you anymore; women look down or sideways and they cover their faces to say that they haven't seen anyone if they were to be called upon to testify. Beneath the patriarchal vest are invincible silences.

(...) This part of Sicily is all a swinging between morose moods and human sufferings and sublime landscapes. Between arabic houses, former feuds, stony grounds and villages of Mafia solitary stands the greek temple of Segesta. With the surrounding nature it makes one of the highest landscapes humanity have. (...)

Sicily, like Greece, puts in chain who wants to watch at it from its human side, and brings instead a great lightness of spirit to whom is content to watch its beauty.

_{1. Two masters: Tradition and Mafia}

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

Compared to today's, 1953 italian Mafia was a joke. Piovene even imagined, in the optimism of the post-war dreams, that the Mafia was about to disappear, substituted by a more modern partitioning of people: "the deathblow will be the diffusion of political opinions in Sicily. When all Sicilians will be divided according to political beliefs and not according to Mafia groups, the bonds between politics and Mafia will be severed."
Instead, starting right in those years was of course the contrary process, so that politics could turn themselves entirely into mafia to survive and prosper in the falling country.

-- In picture, above: Ralph Steadman, Tempio di Segesta, thanks to the wondrous blog "Il giornale nuovo"