Chapter 11: In Which We Learn that Sicily Is Amazing

Well guys. I may not be an “unreliable narrator” in the more high-brow literary sense, but it looks like I am indeed unreliable in the sense where I promise you the next installment in less than a month and instead I take my sweet time and get this to you not one, but two, months later. 

I blame the holiday season in Spain, which is a mysterious wormhole lasting from December 22 to January 6 where time has no meaning and all days run together in a haze of small school children singing lottery numbers, polvorones (traditional sweets that no joke are still made with LARD), alcohol, an actual leg of a pig on your kitchen counter, and long afternoons spent lounging around trying to remember what day of the week (or month) it is. 

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And then just as the holiday season was wrapping up here, the United States went to hell in a handbasket as a bunch of lunatics attacked the U.S. Capitol building, and I proceeded to spend the next two weeks screaming at the television and checking the New York Times app 47 times per day.

So that’s all to say these haven’t been my most… ahem… focused weeks. But now that I’m starting to see Valentine’s Day decor in the shops and President Biden has been safely installed in the White House, I have no more excuses and it’s time to wrap up our adventures with Gradisca and let you know what we’ve been up to.

So if you will, please cast your mind back to September where I left off our last entry as Ángel and I headed to bed on the day of our arrival into Syracuse, Sicily. We lay in bed, attempting to shake off the feeling that we had narrowly missed disaster and wondering what was going to happen when the storm made landfall in Greece. Our boat, which had always felt so safe and dry, suddenly felt so much more… vulnerable. We finally dozed off, but after what seemed like only moments,  we were both awakened as Gradisca began lurching side to side. Drawers shot out, spewing their contents to the floor and we jerked back and forth as violently as a mechanical bull. 

“What the hell is going on???” I asked, staring pointlessly without my glasses into the darkness.

Ángel didn’t reply. We were both disoriented and confused, trying to figure out why Gradisca was suddenly thrashing about like a dying fish. 

But we soon realized what was going on. We had been told to tie up in the first space in the quay, which was in the corner with a dock both alongside us and behind us. See visual from a far happier sea state:

The incoming rolls of swell would smack into us on the port and forward sides, pushing us back toward the dock and then the bulge of waves would ricochet off the quay to smash into our aft and starboard sides two seconds later. As this was happening both laterally and vertically, we were basically being pummeled by an endless roil of incoming and rebounding waves that pushed the boat in every direction. And lest you think I’m talking some kind of uncomfortable washing machine sloshing, no I’m talking terrifying surges that would most certainly have pulled our cleats out of the topsides if Ángel had not secured the lines with shock-absorbers. Even with these, the back of our boat was at one point sharply slammed into the dock and our transom suffered some (luckily only cosmetic) damage. 

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We didn’t know it then, but these waves were the first in a series of heavy swell kicked up by the passing storm that were now finally reaching us. From that first bleary-eyed ride on our bucking boat, we endured a continual cycle of waves that would surge with intensity and then subside. Every two hour cycle would have about thirty minutes of calm that would start to grow progressively more bumpy and rolly until we’d be bouncing back and forth, being pulled side to side and forward and backward by straining dock lines, the groaning cleats echoing through Gradisca’s interior. 

It felt like the reverse of birth contractions. With each cycle, the worst of it would be so very slightly shorter and less intense than the last time. By the end of the night, the cycle had relented to the point that out of every three hours we’d have a period of 45 really bad minutes and even those bad minutes weren’t quite as bad as before.

If coming to grips with how close we’d been to the path of a hurricane was Ángel’s lowest moment of our time aboard, our first night in Syracuse was unquestionably mine. The resounding BANG of Gradisca’s transom hitting the dock; the fear and the lack of certainty of whether it was safe to be tied up where we were (WHY DID THEY TELL US TO TIE UP HERE?? WHY?? WHY??); the constant questioning of whether it would be better to wait this out at anchor while making pro-con lists of how we could move in the dark with such wild conditions; and the lack of sleep all combined to make my head somehow simultaneously groggy and alert with panic while my stomach was knotted with indecision and fear. 

I would pull out my phone to scan the Windy app every 5 minutes to reassure myself that the swell was predicted to go down. In 3 hours, the swell would be 1.8 meters, in 6 hours 1.7 meters; in 9 hours 1.6 meters… I ticked off each tenth of a meter decrease, and tried to use my three remaining brain cells to calculate what that would be in inches since that seemed like a bigger number. 

“You can do this. You can get through this.” I told myself aloud, literally gripping the counter as I rode out the latest wave.

Eventually, as with everything, the worst of it passed. Slowly over the next 24 hours, terrifying jolts gave way to uncomfortable rolling which finally gave way to noisy but harmless sloshing. 

After our mid-day Wednesday arrival, I finally felt secure enough to step off of Gradisca at about 7 p.m. on Thursday night when the swell had lessened such that there was no longer any danger of further damage. We left cautiously, delighted to finally step ashore in Italy and so hungry I could almost taste the pizza I’d been fantasizing about for our entire crossing. 

We soon learned that Sicilian pizza is thicker than Neapolitan pizza, which is my ultimate gold standard of thin-crust, oven-charred deliciousness. But what they may lack in ideal crust technique, the clever Sicilians make up for with wonderfully unique toppings, including to my delight: pistachio pesto. 

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Pistachios are used extensively in Sicily, and are one of the many culinary vestiges of Sicily’s diverse history. From the Arabs, Sicily was introduced to almonds, artichokes, cinnamon, oranges, pistachios and watermelon, which remain staples of Sicilian cooking today. Additionally, flavoring dishes with Middle Eastern items like raisins, saffron, and pine nuts is common, and Sicily continues to serve icy granita, which derives from North Africa, alongside the more traditional Italian gelato.

In our next few days exploring Syacuse, we learned a great deal more about the Arab and other historical influences that make Sicily quite unique from the rest of Italy. And in fact, on our first day exploring the city, it was a little hard to believe that we’d left Greece. 

Beginning in the eight century BC, Sicily was part of Magna Grecia (the larger Greek empire) and many of the best preserved ancient Greek temples and ruins can actually be found in Sicily. 

Early influences in Sicily also include the Phoenicians, who attempted to expand their empire from Carthage and north Africa to Sicily, clashing with first the Greeks and later with the Romans after the Greek states made peace with Rome in 262 BC. After the first Punic War between the Phoenicians and Rome (264-241 BC), Sicily became the first Roman province. Rome again protected its holdings in Sicily in the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC), expelling all Phoenicians from the island for good. Following this period, Sicily became the “granary of Rome,” providing much of the grain that fed the expanding Roman empire. 

Incidentally, Sicily remains a bread-lover’s paradise with little panifici (bakeries focused on bread more than pastries) on seemingly every block. There are over 70 types of bread in Sicily, with your average panificio stocking at least 20 different shapes and types of fresh baked goodness. This wide variety is made possible by the different types of wheat grown in Sicily, including durum wheat, which is ground into a cornmeal-like texture known as semola. While semola is more commonly used to make pasta, it may also be ground a second time to make a bread flour called rimacinato. Typical Sicilian bread is made with only rimacinato, water, salt and yeast, and does not use any kind of oil or shortening. This bread is often baked in wood-burning ovens resulting in a brown, crusty exterior and coarse, chewy crumb with a distinctive yellow color. Sicilian bakers also use the more traditional soft white flour that is used elsewhere in Italy to make soft, fluffy loaves, though these will sometimes be flavored with a Sicilian touch like sesame or anise. 

In many ways Sicily reminded us of Crete. They are both very large islands with a unique history of their own that differentiates them from their countrymen. Both islands have a reputation for wildness, for rugged people who have scratched out a living amidst an often-tumultuous or violent history. And both islands are remarkably fertile, with flourishing agriculture and wonderfully flavorful cuisine.

And like Crete and unlike much of the rest of modern-day Italy, Sicily remained part of the Eastern Byzantine after the fall of the Roman Empire.

In the 800s and 900s, Byzantine Sicily was under constant attack and eventually was fully conquered by the Arabs in 965 AD after over 500 years of Byzantine control. Under Arab rule, Sicily became a center of international trade between North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Palermo, in the north of Sicily, was the seat of the Arab government and was especially noted for its opulent wealth, elegant palaces, and diversity of cultures and learning.

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 under William the Conquerer is universally known, but what is less known is that right around the same time, the Normans also conquered Sicily. The early Norman rulers retained much of the Byzantine and Arab influences, including most famously King Roger II of Sicily, whose court was the European height of learning, culture, and elegance during his reign from 1112-1154. He gathered preeminent scholars, bureaucrats, architects, poets, doctors, and other learned individuals, many of them Greek, Arab, or Jewish, to administer his government and enlighten his court.

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Eventually though, this multicultural tolerance and flourishing was stamped out by meddling Popes who wanted Sicily to reject its peculiar union of Eastern Orthodoxy and multiculturalism and fully embrace the Roman Catholic faith. By 1226, all the Muslims had been forced out of Sicily and after a short period of oppressive rule by the Anjevin French, the Sicilians, assisted by the King of Aragon, rose up against the French in the War of the Sicilian Vespers. Following the conflict however, although the French were ejected, Sicily was absorbed yet again into a foreign empire, this time that of the Spanish Aragonese. 

While the Aragonese crown was not as oppressive toward Sicily as the short-lived period of Anjevin rule, Aragonese control did bring to Sicily the religious zealotry of the Spanish Inquisition and Sicily’s significant Jewish population was expelled, which was a great loss to Sicily. 

After its zenith in the twelfth century, Sicily continued its steady decline that would continue for centuries to come. While the Aragonese left Sicily with many ornate baroque churches, they did little to develop Sicily’s civil society and the closed-mindedness of the Inquisition was as great a setback to Sicily’s development as it was to the rest of Spain. After approximately 400 years under Aragonese control, Sicily passed from one prominent European house to another as the ruling elite of Europe swapped territories, intermarried, and warred with each other. Following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Sicily was acquired by the House of Savoy, later became part of the Austrian Habsburg kingdom and finally passed to the Bourbons where it was part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Sicily and Naples). Sicily languished during this period of distant foreign rule. Local Sicilian barons partnered with their foreign monarchs to maintain their power with each successive regime, and Sicily remained an essentially feudal economy up until the point of Italian unification in the nineteenth century. 

Many historians find the roots of Sicily’s lasting problems with the mafia, corruption and poverty in (1) the centuries of, at best, disinterested and, at worst, exploitative foreign control; (2) the internal power struggles between Sicily’s corrupt aristocrats (the precursor to later problems with the Sicilian mafia, La Cosa Nostra), and (3) the prolonged existence of feudalism and failure to enact the type of land ownership reforms that elsewhere in Europe enabled the development of civil society. 

But these are things we were to see later in Sicily. In our first week in Syracuse, our eyes were just starting to open to the complexities of our new island home. 

On Friday, we watched with broken hearts as the hurricane that we had narrowly missed made landfall in Ithaka, Kefalonia, and Zakinthos, wreaking havoc on the beautiful Ionian islands we had just left. We thanked our lucky stars that we had made it safely and were encouraged to see the Ionian sailing community raising funds for the impacted communities.

We spent the next several days recovering from the stress of our crossing, catching up on chores and laundry, and getting to know many remarkable historical sites in Syracuse. 

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We ate indulgently. 

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We watched the weather shift as late summer thunderstorms sent violent cracks of lightning splintering across the sky, and I needed a sweater in the evenings for the first time in months. 

We took this change in the weather as the final signal we needed: it was the end of our first season aboard and time to get Gradisca safely to her winter berth in Licata. 

Our two days of motor sailing from Syracuse to Licata were uneventful. The southern Sicilian coast is not particularly beautiful and our biggest excitement was when we spotted a couple of offshore oil-rigs that looked like something out of Star Wars and when we split some leftover pizza at our “halfway home” point.

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And so it was that in the final week of September, with little fanfare and a lot of COVID-related paperwork, we arrived in Licata, a small town on the southern coast of Sicily that was to be Gradisca’s home for the winter. 

We fell in love with Licata from the moment we first glimpsed the rooftops and church steeples nestled into a hillside that had an actual castle perched at the top. Walking into town felt like a time-machine trip back to the 1960’s. The streets were crisscrossed with cobbled alleyways and laundry hanging overhead. Stray dogs luxuriated in patches of sunshine while old men monopolized all of the outdoor cafe tables, playing cards, and nursing a single bottle of beer all afternoon. It looked like the scenes of the town square in “Cinema Paradiso” (which, incidentally, were shot in the director’s hometown in Sicily).

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We found a favorite spot for granita that is operated by the granddaughter of the original owners. 

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We sat outside with the old men as old women peered down at us from windows, deciding if we looked like trouble (answer: yes). Life in Licata is slow, and everyone knows everyone’s business, and everyone was completely perplexed how Ángel and I had ended up in this little town. We tried to explain that we were taking some time to explore on a boat, but then they’d look at us like we were even more crazy, like “So you have a boat and you came HERE???” I couldn’t tell them that what was utterly commonplace to them was, to an American, wonderfully charming. 

I would stop in the street when I saw a grandmother lowering the keys down from the balcony in a basket on a little rope to her husband below. 

And every time we walked into town, we would read the news bulletin announcing the day’s patron saint and the outside temperature which was usually wrong by at least 5 degrees Celsius.

On one afternoon, as we sipped our bitter macchiatos (I had finally given in to the intense cultural pressure of Italians who believe that one CANNOT have a cappuccino in the afternoon because it’s “too much milk”) at a cafe table we’d nabbed, three old men were grouped around a younger man with a cellphone who was showing them what appeared to be a TV show contestant singing “Nessun Dorma.” As the song swelled, all three men sang along with varying degrees of fidelity to the tune, either unable or uninterested in suppressing their fervor for Verdi. Even after the song ended, they continued to punctuate their drowsy afternoon conversation with renewed humming and abbreviated renditions of the particularly stirring bars. It was all just so sweet and so truly over-the-top, stereotypically… Italian. I loved it.

After enjoying several weeks in our new home, we tapped our hoarded Hilton credit card points and booked ourselves a three-year anniversary trip through Italy. We took the absolutely lovely (and mercifully empty) train from Sicily to Rome.

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We spent five days in Rome, dodging scattered rain showers and zipping around the city on foot, bicycle, and even once by motorized scooter. The city was EMPTY… although we did see Tom Cruise filming (see if you can spot him below!). I will spare you a march through Rome’s history as that I believe is a bit outside the scope of this blog, but I will say that, more than any city I’ve been to, Rome is a history-lover’s city. I felt an overwhelming urge to understand everything that I quickly realized was a fool’s errand. The scale of Rome’s importance in history, art, religion, and the development of modern society is just…. insane. So with only five days, I just tried to soak in as many beautiful scenes as I could, learn as much as possible, and then forgive myself for throwing in the towel as I sat back with a cone of gelato to watch the world go by.

But during our trip, Europe’s summer respite from the global pandemic began to reverse course. When we left, the numbers were still quite low and people were feeling confident that masks and outdoor dining would keep the virus at bay. In Rome, it wasn’t too hard to avoid crowds because in the absence of international tourists, the city was a ghost-town. We waltzed right into St. Peter’s and the Vatican Museums and gazed up at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel without the usual crush of humanity craning up all around us. 

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Traveling as the second wave began to take hold was a challenge. We questioned daily whether we were making the right choice to be traveling and whether we should head back early. We tried to balance the grateful hotel and restaurant workers who welcomed us with joy with our fears about whether tourism at this time was irresponsible. We avoided public transport and by the end ate most of our meals in our hotel room (which was certainly not a hardship since Italian markets are stocked with every imaginable delicacy). Sometimes the guilt and uncertainty of if we were being selfish to travel got to us, and at other times we just felt insanely lucky to be having these experiences of empty museum hallways and serene piazzas.

We decided that as long as we could keep traveling safely, we would finish out our trip. So we hopped onto another train to Florence, where we met up with one of my dearest childhood friends, Lauren, and her partner, Luca. Lauren has lived in Italy for the last ten years, mostly in Rome, but they now live in Livorno,  Luca’s beautiful hometown on the Tuscan coast.

Both of them work as tour guides for their own company, Unlock Italy. COVID was obviously a disaster for Italy and especially for Italian tourism, so we were the first tour they had given in almost a year. Their joy to be back in Florence and sharing their wealth of knowledge about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, about the Medicis, the popes, the Renaissance, and all the incredible works of art, history, and cuisine of Florence was a delight to behold.  

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After several days in Florence, we took the train to join Lauren and Luca in Livorno. In addition to hosting us in their apartment, they gave us a spectacular tour of some of Tuscany’s lesser-known gems, including the Tuscan coast, the idyllic village of Bolgheri, a winery producing the Bordeaux-like “Super Tuscan” style of wine, and the parts of Pisa that go beyond just the leaning tower. 

It was such a treat to spend time with old friends.

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Together, we explored the Tuscan towns of Livorno and Bolgheri:

And we ventured one afternoon to Pisa where, along with a lovely city, there is a truly LEANING tower. Not sure why this surprised me so much, but I think I just expected it to only kind of lean. Nope. The thing looks like it’s going to topple over any moment.

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After four lovely days with our friends, it was time to head back to Sicily. From Livorno, we took the day-long ferry journey back to Palermo in the north of the island.  

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By the time, we arrived in Palermo, Europe was fully in the clutches of the second wave.  Restaurants were shutting back down except for takeout, and curfews were back in force. 

Palermo is an amazing city. Like New Orleans or Havana, it’s grand and gritty at the same time. It has a crazy rich past that is visible everywhere in the ornate, over-the-top Sicilian baroque architecture, much of which is graffiti-ed and filthy, and all of which is teeming with life. The food, the markets, the architecture, the public art- it’s a true feast.

We spent our two days in Palermo exploring outside and trying some of the city’s famous street food. But two days during a pandemic is not the way to see this city so we left Palermo assuring ourselves that we will return someday. (For a glimpse into this complicated city during pre-COVID times, I recommend this incredible photo journal which really captures the feeling of Palermo.) 

When we returned to Licata, we spent a week preparing Gradisca for her first Sicilian winter. We stored the sails, put up the protective dodger to shelter her cockpit, and gave her a good end-of-season cleaning. Ángel hired an Aussie living in Licata to help us with many of the repair and maintenance projects for the off-season, including most importantly, new batteries and redoing the electrical panel. I joined the hundreds of millions of Americans who voted by mail by faxing in my ballot from a small town in Sicily.

We moved up our holiday flights to Tenerife to November 7, nervous that if we waited longer, borders would close and we’d miss our window.  We spent our layover celebrating Joe Biden’s win over Donald Trump and arrived in Tenerife much like we’d arrived to Gradisca five months earlier: to a home we’d bought but never seen in person, and that yet again had no electricity, no furniture, and no internet. At least this time we had running water and Ángel’s parents had kindly left the apartment stocked with kitchen supplies, sheets, and a mattress!   

(Backstory: a year and a half ago we bought an apartment in La Laguna, Tenerife that is across the street from Ángel’s parents. We bought it as an investment property to rent out and never intended to live here, but after months of COVID-delays, the apartment ended up being finished and ready for us to move in just as we needed a new place for the winter. I wish I could take credit for this serendipitous timing but honestly, we just got lucky.)

We’ve made some real progress getting this apartment renter-ready, which here means fully furnished. It still seems weird to me to pick out someone else’s furniture, but it’s beginning to make sense. La Laguna is a university city on a remote island off the coast of Morocco. Many people spend only a few years here either studying, teaching, or doing a stint of government work and it isn’t worth it for them to invest in furniture that they would have to ship back to the European continent. So apartments are normally rented furnished. It works for us, because in the meantime, we’ve made it a very pleasant place for us to spend the winter.

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And because Ángel doesn’t know how to live without seven thousand projects going on, we’re also embarking on remodeling another property while we’re here. I’ll insert some scary “Before” pictures below so you don’t just think we’re hanging out at the beach all day (although we’re doing that too).

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So that’s where we are now: in Tenerife, remodeling apartments, tackling new projects, reading, hiking, and waiting out the winter and COVID. We’re not sure when we’ll make it back to Gradisca, whether countries will be open for travel in the spring, or when it will feel safe to travel. So we’re taking the days as they come, making the most of our time here, and feeling so grateful for our health and for the continued good health of our families and friends. *knocks on wood*

Thank you so much for following along with Season 1 of The Gradisca Diaries and especially to those of you who commented or reached out about the blog! It made me so happy to hear you were enjoying sharing our adventures. We’ll be updating our IG account @thegradiscadiaries and my personal account @latelykaty with some posts and stories here in Tenerife. (Let’s be honest, mostly pictures of plants and political rants, but feel free to follow along!) Sending lots of love and hope as we enter 2021.

XOXO

Kate, Ángel, and Gradisca