On Persephone's Island chronicles a year in the life of the island: its seasons and its sacred festivals, its almonds and oranges, its demanding family life, its casual assassinations and village feasts, its weather and its people. American Mary Taylor Simeti arrived in Sicily after college to work as a volunteer on Danilo Dolci's remarkable social welfare programme, but went on to marry and make her life here. About the Author:īook Description Paperback. She eventually discovers a correlation between her own situation and the story of Persephone, who alternately inhabited the worlds of light and darkness. She focuses particularly on the Greek goddesses Persephone and Demeter, who held Sicily under their protection. And she makes pessimistic observations about the complexity of changing times in a society where the persistent reliance on feudal relationships and agriculture is finally crumbling.Īn academic manqué, Simeti researches and ruminates on the mythological underpinnings of the many holidays and festivals that punctuate the rhythm of Sicilian life. Simeti intersperses rich helpings of Sicilian history and culture with mundane events and insight into what motivates the peasants essential to the survival of the family farm.
Despite her natural diffidence, she shares personal insights that make On Persephone's Island as compelling as her prose. Simeti feels the isolation of being an expatriate and outsider, although she claims to welcome this perspective when faced with frustration and disgust at the pervading political corruption and corrosive effects of the Mafia on everyday life. Her narrative alternates between Palermo, where her children attend school and her husband Toninno is a professor of agricultural economy, and Bosco, in eastern Sicily, where she shoulders demanding responsibilities on the working farm that has belonged to her husband's family for three generations. The book recounts the events of 1983, the year Simeti turned 42. On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal is the ambivalent love story of an intelligent, complex, and self-reflective woman. Freshly graduated from Radcliffe College after growing up in a distinguished and privileged New York City family, the last thing she expected was to fall in love and marry a Sicilian. Mary Taylor Simeti arrived in Sicily in 1962 to do volunteer work.
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