The author takes the reader on a journey that begins in Naples ("Naples is black and bare. Naples, with its din and daualor, appears barbaric to the traveler who comes down from Rome, although no other city on the peninsula is so subtle, ingenious or civilized"), proceeds to Southern Italy, thence to Sardinia, and ends in Sicily ("Have the Sicilians not known everything already? Have they not, from Empedocles to Pirancello, written everything?. . . . They have known such a lot, precisely, and drawn at all the wells of knowledge, that their science has become blurred").