List of Exemplary Sicilians

Characterizing Italians as non-European, exemplified by invading mud people, would be like saying English are characterized by Pakistanis or Germans are characterized by Turks.

More, I didn't say that the blue eyes of Sicily and southern Italy came from genetic hide and seek. I am sure that they came from Viking, Lombard (German), Visigoth, Vandal, Goth and more. If genetic "hide and seek" is a recent canard, its a new one on me, because I (to my knowledge) made up the description in order to explain a phenomenon of variety among Italians, and surprises among their offspring, that I have observed for myself - I did Not say that it produces blue eyes, which would not appear, I guess, unless there are genes from the above mentioned groups.

I am sure that whoever wrote these comments has never been to Sicily - I recommend a look at the Greek temples of Selinunte, the amphitheaters of Siracusa and Taormina.

As I've said, give DNA tests, visit the place, whatever.

If Italian cultural patterns are not for you, don't bother with them. You are mistaken in your understanding and the perspective that you've adopted does harm in drawing the boundary still farther into Europe - it puts at risk those whom you would not want to put at risk if you knew them - and it puts those farther north more at risk.

I haven't been to North Africa but to my knowledge, this would be a false comparison.

Again, though I am not a Sicilian, with its being held suspect for its proximity to Africa, here is a clarifying list of some exemplary Sicilians for people who don't know (I don't necessarily like all of these people):

Empedocles (c. 490 BC - 430 BC), scientist and philosopher; Gorgias (c. 483 BC - 375 BC), philosopher; Timaeus (c. 345 BC - 250 BC), historian; Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287 BC - 212 BC);

Rudolph W. Giuliani; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

Frank Zappa, his father, Francis Zappa was born in Alcamo, Sicily. His mother Rose Marie Colimore was of half Italian, 1/4 Sicilian and 1/4 French descent;

Frank Sinatra - Sicilian; Chazz Palminteri Palminteri; Francesco Bellini; Steven Tyler, born Steven Victor Tallarico); Jon Bon Jovi (father was born in Sciacca, Sicily); Mario Lanza - singer;

Robert DeNiro; Martin Scorsese; Al Pacino (grandparents originate from Corleone, Sicily); Susan Sarandon - mother Sicilian; Marisa Tomei; Sylvester Stallone; Sonny Bono; Joseph Barbera, born Joseph Roland Barbera;

Joe Dimaggio; Mike Piazza;

Kitty Genovese - murder victim; diffused responsibility; Eva Riccobono, model - Sicilian father/German mother;

Giuseppe Piazzi , 1746-1826, astronomer, a Theatine priest from 1769. He became (1781) professor of mathematics at the Univ. of Palermo, supervised construction of a government observatory (opened 1791) at Palermo, and was its first director. He also established a government observatory at Naples (1817). He was the first to discover (Jan. 1, 1801) an asteroid and named it Ceres . In 1803 he published a catalog of the fixed stars, and in 1814 he enlarged it to include 7,646 stars. He wrote Lezioni elementari di astronomia (1817); Justin R. Cristaldi - Cristaldi Communications;

Stanislao Cannizzaro, FRS (July 13, 1826 - May 10, 1910) was an Italian chemist. He is remembered today largely for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight deliberations of the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860; Antonino Zichichi (born October 15, 1929) is an Italian physicist who has worked in the field of nuclear physics. Zichichi has called global warming models "incoherent and invalid".

Ettore Majorana (5 August 1906 - 27 March 1938 (presumed dead)) was an Italian theoretical physicist who began promising work on neutrino masses. He disappeared suddenly in mysterious circumstances. He is noted for the eponymous Majorana equation. Majorana was born in Catania, Sicily. Mathematically extremely gifted, he was very young when he joined Enrico Fermi's team in Rome as one of the "Via Panisperna boys", who took their name from the street address of their laboratory. He began his university studies in engineering in 1923, but switched to physics in 1928 at the urging of Emilio Segre. His first papers dealt with problems in atomic spectroscopy. An important paper (1932) in the field of atomic spectroscopy concerned the behaviour of aligned atoms in time-varying magnetic fields. This problem, also studied by I.I. Rabi and others, led to an important sub-branch of atomic physics, that of radio-frequency spectroscopy. Also in 1932, Majorana published his paper on a relativistic theory of particles with arbitrary intrinsic momentum, in which he developed and applied infinite dimensional representations of the Lorentz group, and gave a theoretical basis for the mass spectrum of elementary particles.

Wolf Europe