Since 1994, photographer and writer Martin Cole has travelled to Sicily, developing an ambiguous fascination with its landscape, hybrid culture and unique history.

Cole’s Wine Dark Sea, is both photography and travel book; dwelling on the Sicilian enigma in a powerful series of colour photographs and in texts by Cole and his brother Adrian, an historian, who travelled with him.

The often bleak and unremitting Sicilian landscape is at the core of this book. Yet, from this terrain the book conjours its own kind of beauty, unfolding a pitted map of a place largely unchanged for centuries.

In Wine Dark Sea, personal experiences are used as a setting for historical and cultural commentary. The Mafia, and their continuing hold on Sicilian life, is the thread that ties each experience and observation together.

Includes an essay by Adrian Cole.