Sfinciuno Itinerary

Page 248:

"... the fabled Sfinciuno Intinerary, a map or chart of post-Polo routes into Asia, believed by many to lead to the hidden city of Shambhala itself."

"Try to put yourself back in the place of Domenico Sfinciuno or one of his caravan."

Page 249:

"The Sfinciuno Interary," explained the Professor, 'conflated from its original fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sources, was encrypted as one of these paramorphic distortions, meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aid of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors...'"

Sfinciuni (also spelled Sfincioni) is the Sicilian member of the Italian flatbread family. All around Sicily sfinciuni takes many local disguises. It can be made with or without cheese, with tomato sauce or 'Strattu, the fantastic sun-dried Sicilian tomato concentrate, with or without bread crumbs... the list could go on forever. In its probably original version, from the nuns of the San Vito monastery, it is even filled with sausage meat. The name of this dish, sfinciuni, probably comes, as many Sicilian terms do, from the Arab. The original Arab isfang, meaning fried sweet, became the Sicilian sfingia which took up the meaning of something soft and spongy.