Friday October 25 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm. I AM BOOKS, 189 NORTH STREET, BOSTON, MA 02113. For the travelers coming to Sicily on the Grand Tour, the encounter with the luxuriant vegetation of the Mediterranean was as aesthetically and emotionally moving as the sight of the classical ruins they had come to view, an encounter that was almost always enhanced by some knowledge of botany and by a thorough education in the classics.

The Garlands of the Gods is an attempt to restore the fullness of this ‘Sicilian experience’ to today’s travelers, providing them with historical, botanical and mythological information about Sicily’s spectacular wild flowers. Mary Taylor Simeti is a New Yorker by birth and a Sicilian by adoption. In 1962 she went to Sicily to work as a volunteer in a community development center run by the writer and social reformer, Danilo Dolci.