At the destination of his “Walk to Syracuse,” the writer Johann Gottfried Seume reassured himself by saying that in Sicily, “if you don’t get killed,” you don’t get lost, but always stay on the island. On his journey he was attacked and harassed several times, but always remained in good spirits. He had once gone to sleep in the inn when he was woken up by an official-looking guy who subjected him to strict questioning. “He was very polite,” is how the traveler describes one of these not always funny encounters, “first asked in Italian, then spoke a little Tyrolean German because he heard that I was German; then French, then English and finally Latin.” The German Seume, who had already traveled around the world quite a bit, had no trouble understanding the Sicilian; they had both learned Latin at school.