Fosco Maraini was an Italian photographer, writer, mountaineer, and anthropologist born in Florence in 1912. In 1935 he married the painter Topazia Alliata and later became well-known for the accounts of his expeditions in Tibet. During the Second World War he lived in Japan, where he worked as a lecturer of Italian language in various cities. For two years he was imprisoned in the Nagoya concentration camp. Maraini travelled extensively in Japan, Central Asia, North Africa, and Italy, and he organized numerous photographic exhibitions in Europe and Japan. Many of his photos illustrate the books he published. He died at the age of 91 in 2004.
The collection includes 26 photographs taken by Fosco Maraini in Sicily between 1950 and 1952. These include views of various places such as antiquities in Selinunte, Segesta, and Agrigento, monuments and houses in Trapani, mosaics in Palermo, and the Villa Valguarnera in Bagheria, in which the Maraini family lived in the 1950's. Other images show local people in small towns around Sicily and the Aeolian islands as well as landscape views from mount Etna and Taormina.