As president and editor of Arba Sicula, a non-profit international organization that promotes the Sicilian language and culture, I am always looking for materials that can help me fulfill the objectives of the association. So, I was pleased to purchase the entire set of publications prepared in the sixties by the National Defense Institute in Monterey, California, to teach Sicilian to United States military personnel.

The package contained five volumes of dialogues, pattern drills, readings and exercises, 50 tapes recorded by native speakers of Sicilian, and several other support volumes such as Corrado Avolio’s Introduzione allo studio del dialetto siciliano published in 1882; another text written in Italian of a Sicilian Grammar written by Innocenzio Fulci also published in the middle of the 19^th century and reproduced as printed in 1963, as well as a Reader containing various Sicilian texts ranging from short stories to poems.