Sicily: Defying the Mafia
Sicilians have been fighting back against the Mafia, and now tourists can join the fight, said Caroline Chaumont in GlobalPost.com. Specialized travel agencies are offering tours that specialize in restaurants, hotels, and retailers that have taken a stand against the Mob, by collectively defying its demands for kickbacks. Committee Addiopizzo, a business alliance whose name means “Good-bye, protection money,” even operates in Corleone, the town immortalized by The Godfather. Traces of the “romanticized” view of the Mafia promoted by Hollywood still remain: If you book a tour through Addiopizzo Travel (addiopizzotravel.it/eng), you might find yourself staying at Terre di Corleone, a B&B located in a stone farmhouse that was confiscated from a former Mob boss, said Katrina Onstad in The New York Times. In Palermo, our guide wasn’t above taking us to the beautiful opera house where Sofia Coppola’s character was offed in The Godfather III. But limiting our stops to Addiopizzo establishments usually required some sacrifice, and our decision to support the movement provided “a tourist’s backstage pass, a bittersweet taste” of Sicily as only its embattled citizens have known it.
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Birmingham, England: Middle-earth’s inspiration
Birmingham is not just the hometown of J.R.R. Tolkien, said Graham Young in the Birmingham Mail. If you look hard enough around this industrial city, you’ll find landmarks said to be inspirations for the author’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Using an “excellent but hard-to-find” leaflet produced by the city council, I recently took a visitor on the self-guided Tolkien Trail tour, starting at the writer’s childhood home, on Wake Green Road, across from a well-preserved 18th-century water mill. The house bears no plaque, but visiting it “gave us a flavor” of the author’s early life, especially when we wandered into Moseley Bog, a nearby nature preserve. “Once you are inside this woodland wonder, it’s clear how it would have inspired Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” Not far away is the 96-foot-tall Perrott’s Folly, one of two still-standing brick spires said to be the inspiration behind the trilogy’s second book, The Two Towers. At the Birmingham Oratory, we found a plaque for the priest who became Tolkien’s guardian following the death of the boy’s mother. But not until we visited the Plough and Harrow Hotel, where Tolkien once stayed, did we finally find a plaque for the author himself. My companion wasn’t pleased. “I can’t understand,” she said, “why Tolkien’s past in Birmingham isn’t treated more like Shakespeare in Stratford.”
