This is a must-have book for anyone interested in Sicilian as a language on its own, or interested in Italian dialects in general, or even anyone interested in Romance linguistics.
It manages to be both a teaching grammar and a reference grammar, and it is useful both for self-study and as a textbook for a class.
If you want to use this book for learning Sicilian on your own, it would help (but isn't necessary) if you are acquainted with standard Italian spelling system (so that letter-groups like "cchiù" won't seem too strange do you), and know a bit of another Romance language, so that the word order doesn't seem to strange to you, especially with verb forms like "portaccilli" ("carry them for him"). But this book is still useable (although more difficult) if you don't have that background, because the author carefully and clearly explains all the aspects of the grammar. As such, this book can almost serve as a model for teaching the more neglected Romance languages.
I should warn you about an inevitable problem you may face: the book uses the standard writing system for Sicilian, warts and all. For example, "in order to" is "pi" (pronounced like English "pea"), and "to go" is "iri", pronounced "yiri" (like English "yearly" without the "l"); but combining them produces a phonetic change that standard spelling sometimes writes as "pi iri" (not noting the change at all), or as "pi gghiri", expressing the geminate /g/ sound with the letter cluster "ggh" that is familiar only to students of standard mainland Italian. A more phonetic notation would always write "pi" with a symbol noting that it causes a phonetic change in the following word, and "iri" as "yiri", and would write the combined form as something like "pi-ggiri". However, if you learned from a book that used such a phonetic notation, you'd have a lot of trouble adjusting to the standard writing system that you'd see everywhere outside of such a book.
So the author works out a compromise: when he introduces a word like "pi" that changes the following word, he notes this by writing it "pi+" for a few pages; and when an unusual pronounciation occurs, the author very often marks it -- for example, noting that "pi iri" can also be written as "pi gghiri", or that "in vucca" (in the mouth) can also be written as "nvucca" or "mmucca", and so on.
Also, Italian stress is usually unmarked, but the author deals with that problem by boldfacing stressed syllables in some cases. But I wish that the author had done this everywhere, instead of just here and there. However, this is only a minor distraction for students. On the whole, the book is a model of clarity!
