Explore the real-world places that appear in The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Catania, Mount Etna, Rural Village of the Interior, Benedictine Convent, Aristocratic Villa — the Brandiforti Estate and 8 more.
Eastern Sicily — Modesta's city of transformation and intellectual awakening
Catania represents the urban world that pulls Modesta out of poverty and rural obscurity. The city's intellectual and political ferment — fascism rising, aristocratic traditions crumbling — shapes her understanding of power, class, and desire. Modesta navigates Catania's social hierarchies with ruthless grace, using beauty and intelligence to move through spaces normally closed to women of her origins.
Catania is Sicily's second largest city, founded by Greek colonists around 729 BC at the foot of Mount Etna. It was rebuilt after the catastrophic 1693 earthquake in ornate Sicilian Baroque style, giving it the distinctive black-and-white lava stone architecture still visible today. The city was a significant cultural and economic center throughout the early twentieth century.
Catania is a thriving modern city with a population of over 300,000. The historic Baroque center, centered on Piazza del Duomo with its famous elephant fountain, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The city's Via Etnea, fish market, and Teatro Massimo Bellini remain major attractions.
Visit: Catania Historic Center (historic site)
Eastern Sicily — the volcanic presence looming over Modesta's world
Etna is not merely backdrop in the novel but a living force that mirrors Modesta's own volcanic, ungovernable nature. Born into the shadow of the great volcano, she identifies with its capacity for destruction and creation alike. The mountain's omnipresence — visible from village and city, monastery and manor — anchors Sapienza's Sicily as a place where elemental forces shape human destiny, and where conventional morality is as powerless as the peasants who farm Etna's fertile slopes.
Mount Etna, at 3,329 meters, is Europe's tallest and most active volcano. Its eruptions have shaped Sicilian civilization for millennia — the lava that destroys also enriches the soil, making the surrounding land among the most fertile in the Mediterranean. Etna has been continuously erupting in some form throughout recorded history.
Etna is one of Italy's most visited natural attractions and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors can hike or take cable cars to its summit craters. The Etna Regional Park protects the surrounding wilderness, and wine produced from vineyards on its slopes has gained international acclaim.
Visit: Parco dell'Etna (park)
Inland Sicily — Modesta's birthplace and childhood poverty
The novel opens with its explosive, disturbing beginning in Modesta's impoverished childhood home somewhere in the impoverished Sicilian interior. Born in 1900 to a family of the rural poor, Modesta witnesses violence, hardship, and subjugation from her earliest years. It is here that she forms her fierce conviction that she is destined for something beyond the crushing fate assigned to women of her class — a refusal that will propel every subsequent choice she makes.
The interior of Sicily — the zone between Palermo, Caltanissetta, and Enna — was among the most economically depressed regions of early-twentieth-century Italy. Feudal land arrangements persisted well into the 1900s, leaving rural populations in dire poverty. Peasant families lived in conditions little changed from medieval times, with very high rates of emigration to the Americas.
Many small towns of the Sicilian interior have declined further due to depopulation throughout the twentieth century. Some, such as Gangi and Sperlinga, have been designated among Italy's most beautiful villages and draw visitors for their medieval character and extraordinary landscapes.
Catania environs — where Modesta is sent as a girl and begins her ascent
After escaping her impoverished origins, Modesta is placed in a convent — a Benedictine institution near Catania — where she receives the education that will transform her. Far from breaking her spirit, the convent becomes her school of desire, discipline, and cunning. It is here that Modesta learns to read and think, forms intense relationships with nuns and other young women, and begins to understand that institutions created to suppress women can also be subverted from within.
Benedictine convents in Sicily were enormously powerful institutions throughout the medieval and early modern periods, often housing daughters of the aristocracy alongside girls sent for education or because families could not support them. The great Benedictine monastery of Catania, San Nicolò l'Arena, is one of the largest in the world.
The Monastero dei Benedettini di San Nicolò l'Arena in Catania is now part of the University of Catania and is open to visitors. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and houses one of the most spectacular examples of Sicilian Baroque architecture in existence, with extensive gardens and cloisters.
Visit: Monastero dei Benedettini di San Nicolò l'Arena (historic site)
Catania province — the grand manor Modesta acquires through marriage
The Brandiforti villa is the great stage upon which Modesta performs her most audacious act: the assumption of aristocratic power through marriage. She secures her union with the prince, inheriting not only wealth and title but the villa itself — its salons, its servants, its library, its labyrinthine secrets. It becomes her domain, where she raises children, takes lovers of both sexes, hosts political figures, and orchestrates the lives of those around her with a clear-eyed amorality that Sapienza treats as the ultimate form of freedom.
Sicilian aristocratic villas of the Baroque and neoclassical periods were centers of enormous landed wealth. Families like the Brandiforti (a name with real Sicilian aristocratic resonance) controlled vast latifundia — great estates — that gave them near-feudal power over surrounding communities well into the twentieth century.
Many historic Sicilian aristocratic villas in the Catania and Palermo provinces have been converted into agriturismo hotels, museums, or cultural foundations. Some remain in private hands. The landscape of stately villas amid citrus groves and almond orchards remains characteristic of the Catania hinterland.
Northwestern Sicily — political capital, fascist power, and resistance
Palermo appears in the novel as the seat of political and ideological power — the place where fascism consolidates its grip on Sicily and where the battles of the twentieth century are most viscerally felt. Modesta's journeys to and awareness of Palermo connect her domestic world to the larger forces of history: Mussolini's regime, the suppression of dissent, and eventually the war. Her encounters with political figures reflect Sapienza's own experience of antifascist intellectual circles.
Palermo, founded by Phoenicians around 700 BC, served as one of the great medieval capitals of the Mediterranean under Norman, Arab, and Byzantine rule. In the twentieth century, it was the administrative capital of Sicily and a significant center of both fascist organization and antifascist resistance. The city suffered severe Allied bombing in 1943.
Palermo is Sicily's capital and largest city, with a population of about 650,000. Its historic center, including the Palatine Chapel, the Ballarò market, and the Cathedral, draws millions of visitors annually. The city has undergone significant urban renewal and cultural renaissance since the 1990s.
Visit: Palermo Historic Center (historic site)
Piazza Verdi — opera, beauty, and the performance of power
The world of culture, art, and performance runs through The Art of Joy as a counterpoint to political brutality. The Teatro Massimo — the great opera house of Palermo — embodies the aristocratic and bourgeois culture that Modesta both inhabits and subverts. Attending opera is one of the rituals of the class she has entered through marriage, and Sapienza uses such spaces to show Modesta's complex negotiations between belonging and radical difference.
The Teatro Massimo in Palermo is the largest opera house in Italy and the third largest in Europe, opened in 1897 after twenty-two years of construction. Designed by architect Giovan Battista Filippo Basile, it became a symbol of Palermo's civic ambition. Its grand neoclassical facade appears in the closing scene of The Godfather: Part III.
The Teatro Massimo remains one of Europe's premier opera venues, hosting an internationally acclaimed season of opera and ballet. Guided tours of the building are available and the theater is one of Palermo's most visited cultural attractions.
Visit: Teatro Massimo (theater)
Northeastern tip of Sicily — gateway, crossing point, and wartime disruption
Messina, the city that faces the Italian mainland across the narrow strait, represents the permeable boundary between Sicily and the wider world of the twentieth century. As Modesta's story moves through the decades — past fascism, war, and liberation — Messina's role as a crossing point carries symbolic weight. The Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, which Sapienza's narrative registers, culminated in the Allied capture of Messina, marking the end of Axis control of the island.
Messina was devastated by one of history's deadliest earthquakes in 1908, which killed between 75,000 and 200,000 people and effectively destroyed the medieval city. Rebuilt in earthquake-resistant style in the early twentieth century, it was then heavily bombed in World War II. The city's history is one of catastrophic destruction and repeated reinvention.
Messina is a busy port city of about 220,000 inhabitants, serving as the main gateway between Sicily and mainland Italy. Ferry services cross the Strait of Messina continuously. The rebuilt city has a distinctive early-twentieth-century character and notable monuments including the animated astronomical clock of its cathedral.
Visit: Messina Cathedral and Astronomical Clock (historic site)
Central Sicily highlands — the spiritual and psychological heart of the island
The isolated highland city of Enna — the so-called 'navel of Sicily' — resonates with Modesta's inner world: proud, solitary, commanding views over the entire island yet perpetually enclosed within its own walls. The deep inland landscape of Sicily, steeped in Greek myth (Enna is where Persephone was abducted), echoes throughout the novel's treatment of women's entrapment and liberation. Modesta's consciousness is shaped by this mythic geography.
Enna, perched at 931 meters above sea level, is the highest provincial capital in Italy. In antiquity it was the sacred center of the cult of Demeter and Persephone, one of the most important religious sites in the Greek world. The Romans called it the 'umbilicus Siciliae.' Its Norman-era Castello di Lombardia remains one of Sicily's best-preserved medieval fortresses.
Enna is a small city of about 28,000 inhabitants. The Castello di Lombardia and the nearby Torre di Federico II are open to visitors and offer sweeping views across central Sicily. Enna remains one of the least-touristed provincial capitals in Italy, retaining an austere, time-worn atmosphere.
Visit: Castello di Lombardia (historic site)
Eastern coast — beauty, decadence, and the European gaze on Sicily
Taormina — the clifftop resort that became a playground for European aristocrats, artists, and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — represents the world of desire and transgression that Modesta inhabits on her own terms. The foreign artists and aesthetes who colonized Taormina (Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, the German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden) created a space of erotic freedom at odds with fascist Sicily. Modesta's own polymorphous desires mirror this tradition of using Sicily's beauty as cover for transgression.
Taormina became an international destination for northern European artists and travelers in the nineteenth century, drawn by its Greek theater, the panorama of Etna, and a local culture of sexual tolerance. The German baron Wilhelm von Gloeden photographed Sicilian youths there, and the town attracted a notable homosexual expatriate community. D.H. Lawrence lived and wrote there in the early 1920s.
Taormina is one of Sicily's most visited tourist destinations, receiving millions of visitors annually. The ancient Greek-Roman theater hosts summer performances and concerts in the Taormina Arte festival. The town's corso and belvederes remain among the most spectacular urban vistas in the Mediterranean.
Visit: Teatro Antico di Taormina (historic site)
Central Sicily — the exploited underclass whose suffering Modesta escapes
The sulfur mines of the Sicilian interior represent the social abyss from which Modesta flees and the class structure she subverts. Though she may not descend into the mines herself, their shadow falls over the novel's entire social landscape: the carusi — child miners, effectively enslaved — and the impoverished men who worked the zolfare embodied the fate of Sicilian boys from the laboring poor. Modesta's escape from poverty is partly defined against this brutal alternative.
Sicily was the world's largest producer of sulfur throughout the nineteenth century, and the mines of the Caltanissetta province employed tens of thousands of workers, including very young children known as carusi who carried ore on their backs in appalling conditions. The industry collapsed after World War I due to American competition. The mines' brutal conditions were documented by writers including Luigi Pirandello and Giovanni Verga.
Several of the historic sulfur mines in the Caltanissetta area have been converted into museums and open-air heritage sites. The Museo della Zolfara near Caltanissetta and the Museo delle Zolfare di Trabonella preserve the history of this vanished industry. The landscape remains dramatically scarred by the centuries of extraction.
Visit: Museo della Zolfara (museum)
Southern Sicily — antiquity, female myth, and the depth of Sicilian time
The ancient Greek temples of Agrigento haunt Sapienza's Sicily as a reminder that the island's patriarchal and religious orders are themselves historical constructs that have risen and fallen many times. Modesta's deep feeling for life — what Sapienza calls her 'intense feeling for life' — is implicitly connected to this Mediterranean antiquity, to the pagan world before Christianity imposed its morality of sorrow and shame. The temples of Concord and Juno, standing for two and a half millennia, dwarf the fascist century.
The Valley of the Temples (Valle dei Templi) contains the ruins of seven ancient Greek temples from the fifth century BC, when Akragas was one of the most important cities in the ancient world. The Temple of Concordia is one of the best-preserved Greek temples in existence. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
The Valley of the Temples is Sicily's most visited archaeological site and one of the great classical monuments of the world. The adjacent Regional Archaeological Museum of Agrigento houses an extraordinary collection of Greek and Roman artifacts. The almond blossom festival held there each February is one of Sicily's most celebrated events.
Visit: Valle dei Templi (historic site)
Southeastern Sicily — Baroque nobility, deep tradition, and the weight of class
The extraordinary Baroque city of Ragusa Ibla, rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake in a style of extreme theatrical splendor, represents the aristocratic world Modesta penetrates through marriage. The palazzo culture of the Sicilian southeast — the noble families clinging to their titles and estates as the twentieth century dismantles them — is the world Modesta both inhabits and ironizes. Her position as a woman of peasant birth who commands a noble household is an act of constant, pleasurable subversion of everything Ragusa Ibla represents.
Ragusa is actually a twin city: the lower medieval district of Ragusa Ibla and the upper Baroque city rebuilt after 1693 on a hill across the ravine. Both districts are part of the Val di Noto UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognized for the extraordinary concentration of Sicilian Baroque architecture in the region. The area's noble families maintained feudal estates into the twentieth century.
Ragusa Ibla is considered one of the most beautiful towns in Sicily and a major destination for heritage tourism. The Cathedral of San Giorgio, with its spectacular curved Baroque facade, is the centerpiece of the town. The area has also become famous internationally as the filming location for the Inspector Montalbano television series.
Visit: Ragusa Ibla Historic Center (historic site)
More by Goliarda Sapienza: All Goliarda Sapienza books
Other nearby maps: Angels & Demons by Dan Brown locations map