The statue of the grief stricken Madonna, cloaked in an exquisitely designed floor length, black mourning cape, lined with silk and embroidered with golden thread, leaves the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Via Carlo V, Polizzi Generosa, on a wooden litter adorned with flowers. It follows a coffin carrying an effigy of her dead son.

The residues of feudalism and faded titles, a closed world of provincialism and a large illiterate class were part of the Sicily that a young enthusiastic Sicilian doctor, Eugenio Carini, left behind when he ventured to the east coast of the United States of America to specialise. It was 1907, the beginning of a new century.