When we first arrived in Sicily last year, we spent the first month in the honeymoon phase. After our difficult passage across the Ionian, the culinary and visual delights of Siracusa were sorely needed, and we wafted from Siracusa to Licata on a delicious wave of new sights and new tastes. We soaked in the food, the piazzas, the beautiful neoclassical and baroque architecture, and the pure Sicilian-ness of it all. And then, just as the luster of our quaint Licata was starting to tarnish, we departed on a whirlwind train trip up the Italian peninsula. On our return, we threw ourselves into winterizing our boat and then we were gone. So that’s all to say that even though we spent a combined month or so in Sicily last year, I feel like we stayed mostly at the tourist-level.
But now that we’ve been here for about six weeks, I think we’ve lived both versions of Sicily: the tourist Sicily and the get-things-done-in-your-everyday life Sicily. (I don’t want to call these “real” and “fake” versions, because I find that a bit condescending as if somehow only the daily life of Sicilians is real. I think they’re both real; they’re just different. The Eiffel Tower, for example, is a real and important part of Paris but climbing it is hardly part of a typical Parisian day.)
The Sicily we inhabited when we first arrived is full of richly-flavoured street food and brightly-colored, exotic marzipan sweets; dramatic baroque churches; veritable gems of antiquity ranging from temples to amphitheaters to mosaics; azure coastlines; flamboyantly colored tchotchkes and pistachio-flavored everything. It’s dazzling, vibrant, colorful, but almost completely reserved for the throngs of Northern Europeans, all of whom are somehow burnt the same color of salmon pink and sporting jaunty white straw fedoras as they sweat their way through Sicily’s many incredible towns.
Last season in Licata, we did encounter more normal Sicilian life, but its newness and its quintessential “Sicilian-ness” imbued it with an aura of idyllic charm. When we returned this season, however, we began to experience the more typical, one might say, difficult, aspects of Sicilian life. I’m not sure when the rose-colored glasses fully came off. Maybe its was our seventh unsuccessful trip to a vaccination center (one which we’d reached after a harrowing walk through a semi-abandoned industrial park on the outskirts of Catania where we wondered whether we were risking our lives more trying to get the COVID vaccine than we were by not getting it).
Or maybe it was the time I got chased in Licata by an actual pack of stray dogs when I was trying to go to the beach.
Or maybe it was our visit to the Post Office where we stood in line for almost two hours behind the other 50, yes 50 as in 5-0, people who were waiting before us.
No matter when it was, though, the glasses are off and for better or worse, we can now clearly see this complicated island for what it is. Some people may rankle at the idea that Tourist Sicily and Everyday Siciliy are so different. But I think this happens everywhere. It’s inevitable that cultures want to shield tourists from ugly realities. It’s just that, in Sicily, as with most things, it’s just happening to a degree you almost can’t believe. I can’t help but think of Anthony Bourdain’s disastrous Sicilian episode of Parts Unknown. In this episode, Bourdain goes out with the owner of an “authentic” Sicilian restaurant to catch octopus, but to his surprise, the owner takes him to a bay filled with tour boats and day trippers and tells him to dive in. In he goes, and he was immediately startled by splashes as someone on the boat above threw frozen octopi and cuttlefish into the water. His mood turned utterly black as he watched piece after piece of dead, frozen seafood hit the water and then slowly drift to the bottom, until it was speared by the chef and raised aloft in a kind of farcical triumph.
To me, this epitomized the Sicilian attitude toward tourists: give them a good show, but never really let them peek behind the curtain to see the real thing. And I kind of get it, because the more “authentic” Sicilian experience is a lot more frustrating and a lot less joyful than what is conveyed to tourists. It’s not like they’re hoarding the best and keeping tourists out of it; it’s the reverse. They’re selling the good stuff and hiding the ugly bits.
And I’ll be honest. Some of the ugly bits were quite hard for me. Drivers here are absolutely 110% out of their minds, and Angel says I look like a frightened bunny stranded on the roadside anytime I have to cross the street. The other day I saw a two year-old girl on a tricycle that she was pretending to drive like a car, pushing a pretend horn and going “beep beep” while she gesticulated at the offending imaginary traffic and I thought to myself, “My god, it starts so young here.”
It’s an aggressive, in-your-face place that reminds me a lot of my Californian stereotypes of New York or New Jersey. Californians like to complain that New Yorkers and New Jerseyites are too loud and too bossy, that they use their horn too much, and that they have an attitude of “me first, sucker.” Well…. Sicily is like the O.G. New Jersey. It’s New Jersey on steroids. It’s where New Jersey learned to be New Jersey. It’s an intense place and it’s one where I’ve had to grow a bit of a tougher shell.
It’s also a place that can be hard to crack as a foreigner. Unlike Greece where we were invited to parties by people we barely met and where every day was an opportunity to share good food, homemade wine, and music with as big a group of people as possible, Sicily is more insular. Things are kept in the family. The best cooking happens not in restaurants but in nonna’s kitchen.
We somehow always managed to remain on the outside, to be just a little bit off from the norm. I vividly remember a Friday in Licata when Angel and I had spent the whole day working our butts off on the boat. We walked into town, tired, sweaty and disheveled, to enjoy a well-deserved evening gelato and found ourselves surrounded by the hubbub of Licatesi, dressed for a night out, spilling out of restaurants and looking at our grubby attire with bemused pity. As we walked through a group of teenage boys, rank with cologne and each sporting a hairstyle that truly only could exist in Europe, I saw one of them gesture to us and say “turisti.”
My blood boiled. I refused to accept the condescension of this pimply youth, and I vowed that the next night, we’d stop working earlier and get dressed up for an overdue date night. “I can look cute too, Licata,” I thought to myself. Saturday came and I marched resolutely to the marina showers at 6 p.m. I washed my hair; I shaved my legs; I removed the winch grease from under my fingernails; I applied actual makeup; and I put on a dress. We walked into town feeling more like human beings and less like little sweaty, greasy gremlins than we had in days. And the town was EMPTY. It was a ghost town. We walked to the restaurant where we had seen such a lively atmosphere only the day before and there was one lone table with patrons. On closer inspection, we realized they were German sailors. What. On. Earth. Where did everybody go?
And then we passed a bar and realized, “Oh, the Eurocup has started.”
It was Italy’s first game and I kid you not, every last person in the town of Licata was either at home watching the game or already seated in the bar to watch. Which meant that for us, there was no hope of getting a seat to join in watching AND anywhere we would go to eat would be completely empty. It’s little things like this that remind you you’re a foreigner, that you don’t fully fit in.
And so that night, we embraced not fitting in. We went back to the boat, put on our pajamas, and watched historian Mary Beard’s great series, Meet the Romans, while eating pasta and splitting a bottle of wine on the boat.
And beyond being just insular, Sicilians are notoriously tight-lipped. The Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia, has imbued the island with a culture where things aren’t stated, especially outside circles of deep familial trust. Angel’s passable Italian has enabled him to connect with a few people: he can joke with restaurant owners and he earned the affection of Catania’s crusty marinero by helping with Italian-English translations for boats of German and Danish sailors. But if you don’t speak Italian (and even if you do), you’re always going to be on the outside, left confused by Sicily’s dialect and even more by its unspoken norms and codes of conduct.
It’s been hard for me to connect, but the more time I’ve spent here, the more empathy I’ve developed for the people who live here. While at first I was a little put off by some of the nastier elements of Sicily- the crazy driving, the lack of recycling (thankfully that was just Licata which appears to be truly the most backward town ecologically in the entire island), the lack of respect for lines or orderliness- I’ve come to see that many of these issues are rooted in fundamental social issues that are probably more painful and frustrating to Sicilians than they are to me. If I had to categorize them, I’d say that Sicily’s biggest problems are:
1. Corruption and suspicion of corruption are everywhere. The on-going legacy of the mafia in Sicily is undeniable. In Palermo, we visited the No Mafia Memorial, a site that documents the peak of the mafia’s violent reign from the post-WWII period until the 1990s. This memorial documented the hundreds of victims– judges, politicians, policemen, civil servants, and private individuals– who were murdered for standing up to the mafia.
It was embarrassing to think that, in my country, “mafia movies” are a celebrated genre while here in Sicily, the mafia is so much more than the gangsters and the legends around them. I’ve seen a few Godfather t-shirts in tourist shops here, but not many, because here the impact of the mafia here is still too raw, even to exploit to tourists. Here, the mafia is seen as a deeply violent and corrupting force that has literally held back the social, political, and economic development of millions of people. Like a vile, suffocating web, the mafia infiltrated business, politics, the church, transportation, public works projects, and the everyday lives and homes of nearly all Sicilians, siphoning off value and perverting outcomes away from the public good and for the benefit of the very few.
As I walked through the memorial, I tried to imagine decades of picking up the newspaper or turning on the TV only to see assassination after assassination of judges, politicians, and policeman who weren’t in the pocket of the mafia. Beyond living with the fear caused by acts of such violent brutality, it must also breed suspicion against the state: are the politicians who are still alive corrupt? Or will they be next? The harm inflicted on Sicilian society by the mafia is so deep and so pervasive it’s hard to comprehend.
And mafia-related violence may be down from its peak in the 1960s-1990s, but corruption, kick-backs, vote-buying, protection rackets, illegal bid garnering, and the sneaking tentacles of the mafia are on-going issues. When we arrived in Siracusa last year, we were in the office of a port service, and a massive man walked in, muscles rippling. He nodded, and proceeded to walk out with a small bag. “He’s the trash collector,” we were informed. Having just arrived, it seemed harmless, almost funny, to see such a stereotype in real life, but after more time here, thinking back on this makes me sad, because it shows how real and ongoing these issues are .
2. Opportunities are scarce and there is little trust in institutions so people hoard what they have. I know the American vision of Europe is some sort of socialist utopia, but much as China is the most capitalist place I’ve ever been, Sicily proves that not all of Europe has a communal mentality. The schools, hospitals, and public services we’ve seen in many parts of Sicily are hopelessly underfunded and appear to have last seen robust public investment in the 1960’s. Tax evasion here is basically a sport and most business is conducted off the books. Our desire to pay IVA and leave a paper trail by paying with credit cards is viewed as some bizarre and slightly annoying foreigner quirk.
But there’s money in Sicily even if very little of it ends up in the public coffers. In fact, it’s a very showy, very spendy society. Even in some of the poorest outskirts of Trapani, we saw people driving around in Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW cars. In every town we’ve gone, we’ve seen big, elaborate weddings every day of the week (I’m not sure if this is a post-COVID thing and all the postponed weddings are happening now or if it’s just normal to have weddings on weekdays here). In Sicily, weddings are an opportunity to see and be seen. Female guests wear floor-length elaborate gowns even midday in the summer heat, and men are in full suits or tuxes.
Death too is a time for show. We saw Bentley and Mercedes funeral hearses even in the poor town of Licata, and the cemetery there is like another town unto itself with looming family mausoleums, carved and elaborate, and huge marble tombstones.
It can be a jarring contrast to see such underfunded public systems and such a generally depressed economy juxtaposed against such outlandish personal displays of wealth. But the prevailing attitude seems to be: you never know when your time will be up, so spend it now because that’s sure better than the government getting it. (Sound familiar, my fellow Americans? There’s a reason Berlusconi, Italy’s version of Trump, and his party have been so popular in Sicily.)
3. The population has suffered serious violence and hardship historically and into the present. You can’t travel anywhere in Sicily without stories of hardship. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, foreign invasions, floods, despotic regimes, famines, bandits, and of course, the mafia.
All through Sicily, you hear a lingering resentment against the ruling powers of Europe for basically exploiting the island. For most of its history Sicily has been a kind of vassal state in a broader empire. During the period of Roman rule, Sicily was predominantly used to supply grain to Rome and after its brief zenith in the 900s-1200s when Palermo in particular thrived under a fascinating period of multicultural Arab-Norman-Byzantine rule, Sicily fell back into a kind of subjugated chaos, held first by the Holy Roman Empire and then the French Anjevins, the Spanish Aragonese, and later several of the royal European houses, from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons.
A feudal system of agrarian land ownership persisted in Sicily well into the 1800s (arguably in some form into the 1900s), allowing the aristocracy to control much of the wealth and delaying many of the developments to civil society that marked other countries in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. When Italy was unified in 1861, Sicily’s landed gentry and the Catholic church controlled pretty much all the island’s wealth and power. Sicily must have seemed like a provincial backwater to many other Italian city-states whose mercantile and artisan classes had been acquiring wealth, status, and power since the Renaissance. (For an unforgettable look into Sicily at this time, I recommend Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, “The Leopard,” which is one of my favorite books of all time. It was also made into a spectacular film directed by Luchino Visconti starring the impossibly perfect trio of American actor Burt Lancaster, French actor Alain Delon, and the impeccable Italian actress Claudia Cardinale).
Even today, Sicily is blighted with a deeply corrupt agricultural system. Poor provinces in the south like Ragusa and Agrigento are covered in hothouses where migrant workers are exploited for illegally low wages. The farms in these provinces used to hire predominantly undocumented refugees and migrant workers who arrived to southern Sicily by boat from north Africa, but after government crackdowns, they have now turned to hiring Romanian immigrants. Romania is an EU country so workers can legally immigrate to and work in Italy, thus relieving the landowners of liability for hiring “illegal” African workers. But the landowners, many of whom have mafia connections, know that economic opportunities are scarce in Romania and so many Romanian immigrants are coerced into accepting illegally low wages and living and working in unsafe conditions.There are also many documented cases of rape and sexual abuse perpetrated against female Romanian farm laborers by Sicilian landowners.
And then there is the land itself, which is a volcanic, earthquake-prone island with a history of disasters. In Modica, we learned about the 1693 earthquake that leveled the town, along with Ragusa, Noto, Catania, and others, prompting these towns to rebuild in the baroque fashion that now defines the Val di Noto. We also learned about violent floods Modica suffered until it filled in the river that used to cut through its valley floor.
In Catania we learned about eruptions from Mount Etna in the 1600s that erased dozens of villages, covering them in lava and ash. To this day, Etna continues to be active, with lava flows and ash and sand spewing from the volcano. When we arrived in Catania, the whole city was coated in a layer of fine black sand from an eruption days before.
In Messina, the 1908 earthquake killed over 80,000 people and left Messina in ruins that the city has not recovered from to this day. Messina remains off many tourist itineraries (including, unfortunately, ours) because the city lost not only its buildings but all its records and therefore its wealth in the earthquake and tsunami that followed.
But as our time in Sicily comes to a close, I’ve come to feel a love for the island that encompasses both its virtues and its flaws. It feels like how only you can make fun of your own parents; if someone else does it, it’s not cool. If I heard someone else dissing Sicily, I’d want to stand up for this amazing island. Only after living here do I get to make fun of its terrible drivers and over-the-top weddings.
So lest I leave you with an all-too-negative view of Sicily, I’ll end by tantalizing you with my Top 10 Sicily List. In reverse order, these were my favorite places:
10: Agrigento: Some of the most impressive Greek temples that aren’t actually in Greece! We enjoyed our little one-day jaunt to Agrigento.
9. Erice: A medieval hilltop town perched above Trapani, this was fun to explore for an afternoon and a good day trip from Palermo.
8. Caltanisetta: Our trip to Caltanisetta was a happy accident: our plane from the Canaries was delayed and we missed our bus to Licata so we spent a night in this quaint, often-overlooked town.
We spent another afternoon there on our way to Palermo and had a wonderful lazy summer lunch.
7. Taormina: I feel like I’m going to get hate that this isn’t higher on the list but Taormina was a bit over-touristy for my taste. It does, however, have a spectacular Greek / Roman amphitheater overlooking Taormina’s bay. Standing by crumbling marble columns above the sparkling turquoise bay made me feel like Goethe on his Grand Tour of Italy, and for that alone it’s worth it. But be warned this place is Tourist Sicily to the max.
I would however rank Taormina quite highly as an anchorage, and it was our perfect final night in Sicily.
6. Val di Noto (Modica, Ragusa, Noto): Here I’m cheating and lumping Ragusa and Modica together, but I think the baroque towns of the Val di Noto are fairly similar and many people visit them in a kind of “baroque circuit.” If you can only pick one, we particularly loved Modica because not only does it have baroque architecture, but it also has CHOCOLATE. Also, the steps up to the Duomo di San Giorgio were epic.
Ragusa:
Modica:
5. Cefalù: Like Taormina, Cefalù is touristy. But unlike Taormina, it has a UNESCO World heritage cathedral and also one of the most spectacular hikes up to the hilltop ruins that have served as protection for centuries of inhabitants. It’s accessible easily by train and a lovely day trip.
4. Piazza Armerina: We took three different buses to get to Piazza Armerina and I’m STILL ranking this as my fourth favorite place in Sicily. That’s how good it is. But while the town itself is lovely, the real reason to trek to Piazza Armerina is the Villa Romana del Casale, a former hunting lodge and sprawling mansion of an ancient Roman aristocrat. Discovered in the 1960’s, the Villa Romana del Casale has the most stupendous collection of Roman floor mosaics in the world and all are still displayed in situ. We visited on a sweltering 94 degree day and our journey on three different buses took us through Gela, which I consider to be Sicily’s ugliest town (or at least the ugliest one I saw- sorry, Gela) and honestly I still remember that as one of the best days of my life. If you go to Sicily, go there. It’s amazing.
Capturing ostriches 
And rhinos 
And elephants 
The animals were then shipped to Rome for display 
Obviously a duck-drawn chariot is my ideal form of transport 
Ancient Roman Shake Weights 
The hilltop town of Piazza Armerina itself is also worth a visit.
3. Siracusa: Probably the most dreamy and magical city in Sicily is Siracusa, specifically the beautiful historical district of Ortigia. In Season 1, Chapter 11 I included a lot of pictures of Siracusa, but I will also say that arriving by boat into this city is particularly spectacular. It has one of the most elegant town quays I’ve ever seen and sailing in past the ramparts of the Castello Maniace was unforgettable.
2. Palermo and Monreale: I love Palermo. Yes, the historical center is both touristy and dirty, but it is chock-full of fascinating alleys, market stalls, wall inscriptions that Angel and I would try to parse from Latin or Greek, elaborate wrought-iron balconies, statues, piazzas, fountains, churches, palaces and so much more. It’s a visual and literal feast. The true jewel of the city is the glittering golden Palatine Chapel in the Norman Palace which actually took my breath away. As I sat recovering my breath, I watched and listened as others passed through the doors. The audible gasps and exclamations as people walked in were remarkable.
But after a few days in the city center, we ventured a bit further out, to areas like Kalsa and to the Palermitan waterfront.
But our favorite neighborhood was the sedate Libertá-Politeama district with its parks and tree-lined streets.
Just outside Palermo is the small village of Monreale, perched on a hill overlooking the Conca d’Oro or “golden shell” that encircles Palermo. This “Golden Shell” used to be nothing but orange groves and palatial villas of the Palermitan aristocracy. While now there are more houses dotted in amongst the trees, it’s still a lovely deep green ring around the city. In Monreale sits another Arab-Norman-Byzantine cathedral protected by UNESCO, and I found it even more beautiful than the one in Cefalù (though still perhaps outdone by the Capella Palatina). Monreale also has a lovely tradition of mosaic and ceramics creators.
1. Catania: We almost skipped Catania. I don’t know why, but I guess I thought that because it has an airport it must be some sort of boring transport hub. Not true. Our stay in Catania was my favorite time in Sicily. Not only does the city have a lovely baroque city center, romantic 19th century gardens, and a stunning seafront, but it’s a liveable city and a lot less touristy than Palermo. I heard one Sicilian in an interview state that Palermo is the San Francisco where people go for tourism but Catania is the Seattle where people live. I’m not sure how accurate this distinction is as to SF / Seattle in the post- Amazon days when I think both cities are becoming generally unliveable, but his point is taken. Catania seemed like a place where life was more than just tourism (though there is a manageable amount of that too).
So that’s it, folks: our time in Sicily has come to a close. We came, we ate, we cursed the drivers, we walked all over, and we saw more baroque architecture than I thought possible. But most of all, we saw the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, and still we fell in love. Arrivederci, Sicily. We will be back.
2 comments
Magnifico episodio, katy, he aprendido mucho de sicilia, gracias a ti. y las fotos y vídeos son también espectaculares, ya no necesitamos más de national geographic para saber de sicilia. nos basta con tu crónica.
Gracias Ángel por tus palabras generosas. Me alegro que te haya gustado. Es un lugar espectacular pero fue interesante pasar más tiempo alli para ver un poco más de la vida normal en Sicilia. Espero que estéis bien, un abrazo muy fuerte.