VESTIGIA SARACENE E NORMANNE PER ILLUSTRARE "THE NORMANS IN SICILY"

In this edition of "Saracenic and Norman Remains" we wanted to draw attention, through the Italian translation of the preface and description of the tables, on the part less taken into account of the volume, usually considered only the elegant iconographic repertoire accompanying the account of the trip to Sicily by Henry Gally Knight, published two years earlier. It is not only a "translation", but a critical reflection on the maturation of the historiographical thought of Gally Knight around the Sicilian medieval architecture, "Saracen" and Norman in the first instance, of which "Saracenic and Norman remains" represents a further development in relation to the European coeval debate on the birth and development of medieval architecture.It is the object of this Work to afford a View of the Architecture of the Normans in Sicily , of the singular difference of the style which they employed in Sicily from that which they employed in any other country , and to explain how that difference arose . The Drawings were taken from the buildings themselves by a professed architect , and have , at least , the merit of exact fidelity. But, in order to make the subject more completely understood , a few introductory words may not be out of place . It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that, in the beginning of the eleventh century, various parties of Norman adventurers repaired from Neustria , in France ( the province of which the Normans first obtained possession ) , to Calabria , and , at first entering into the service of the Lombard Princes , as stipendiaries , gradually possessed themselves of Apulia as well as Calabria , and wrested the neighbouring island of Sicily from the hands of the Saracens , who , two centuries before , had severed it from the Greek empire (H. Gally Knight, 1840)