Sicily, Italy

It’s my third day in Palermo (of 11 in Sicily) and I’m puzzled. The sights are famous. The pictures are beautiful. The food is everything you hear about from Sicily. The evening brings the city to life and the crowds come out.

I’ve made my way down the pedestrianized Maqueda, checked out the famous cathedral, the Palatine Chapel with its golden mosaic art, and even made my way up to nearby Monreale for even more mosaics. I’ve walked through the markets. I’ve gotten real-time advice from friends on what food to try — arancini, pasta alla norma, cannoli, granita, brioche col gelato, pani ca meusa (spleen sandwich)… I’ve taken the train to Cefalù and climbed all the way up to the top of La Rocca, then all the way back down again to dive into the azure water sandwiching the town to said rock.

So yeah, I’ve done all the stuff. But something feels…off. The heat is stifling. The jet lag lingers, I’m disengaged, and anxiety keeps me awake even longer at night. The food recommendations may be solid, but the places I’m getting them at aren’t hitting the spot. The crowds are everywhere. All of that can be managed. As I sipped on an overpriced limoncello spritz by the shore, trying to cool off while watching the world go by, seeing neighbourhood residents chatting it up, I suddenly felt an odd sense of enjoyment. It finally dawned on me: as pretty as the pictures were, I was focusing on the wrong stuff.

The Mercato Ballaro may fill up with all sorts of colours, but it felt mostly aimed at tourists. Maqueda may feel vibrant in the evenings, but the restaurants are hawking menus also clearly aimed at tourists. In my exhaustion, I never really looked deeper into the side streets, past the short term rental apartments. There’s real local life here, the stuff I didn’t capture in photos, and I missed out on it — aside from catching snippets of the odd conversation among residents, kids playing ball, or even older residents lowering and raising baskets from their balconies to errand-runners. What I’m missing most is interaction.

Taking a rental car out of Palermo, into the countryside full of hills, orchards, and windmills, gave me the reset that I needed. Pulling over at a random restaurant in Sciacca with no English speakers for lunch forced me to speak Italian for the first time, rewarding me with utterly mind-blowing renditions of simple dishes. Resting for the night at the small working-class town of Porto Empedocle, a stone’s throw away from the big attraction of Agrigento, gave me a chance to chat with more locals and take in the evening life at a restaurant in the piazza. Even if they weren’t the postcard perfect highlights, the fact that both places have nondescript churches and structures from the 1300s so casually ignored and just there reminded me of what I was actually experiencing.

Staying at an agriturismo (a fancy bed and breakfast on a farm) in the middle of nowhere felt like a true dream, surrounded by olive and citrus trees with horses and sheep roaming around. Over a delightful dinner of entirely farm-produced food spread over a stereotypically excessive four-course meal (antipasto, primo, secondo, and dolce), being the first Canadian and first Asian guest ever on the non-English speaking farm made for a fun night of conversation and cultural exchange with the proprietor and her family. An entire pitcher of red wine all to myself that I came nowhere close to finishing certainly helped with confidence in speaking an otherwise error-strewn Italian that I’m proud to say took my hosts by surprise.

Interspersed, the picturesque touristy highlights of the famed bright-white stepped cliffs of the nearby Scala Dei Turchi and wandering the old town of Agrigento and its steep alleys built long ago yet repurposed for modern use all felt refreshing and exhilarating.

The crown jewels of Sicily for history buffs (of which I am not typically one) in my eyes, however, has to be both the Valle dei Templi and the Villa Romana del Casale, about an hour’s drive from each other, both built around the 4th century in the era of the Greek empire. The fact that so many temple pillars and structures are still standing in, and even visibly clear remnants of a statue of Zeus, is a feat enough, but it’s the scale and sprawl of the complex that left the biggest impression on my imagination.

At the villa, highly detailed mosaics on the floors for everything from a sauna area to living quarters were made by slaves of the Greeks with a construction period of over 20 years. (I can’t imagine any modern building or residence ever taking that long.) As ridiculous as designs of everything from mythological gods to sport hunting prizes to bikini women are, it’s the odd details that reveal other information of the age – animals from far-off countries, for example, that point to the breadth of the exploration taking during the empire.

Heading further east inland brought me through beautiful though perhaps indistinct towns, save for a notably defining feature or two. Caltagirone has an absurdly grand staircase with tiles on the front of each step, while houses and side streets of cars abut (and dead-end) directly onto stairs. Modica has some nice baroque streets, but a peculiar local tradition of making chocolate at a low temperature, preventing the sugar crystals from melting and leading to a pleasingly grainy texture.

Noto’s old town is just generally charming, and Ragusa’s is built on a cliff. Streets are full of tourists in the day and restaurants and shops general cater as such. After the heat of the day passes, the streets and piazzas gain more life in the evenings. Ragusa even has an unassuming 14th century cathedral whose adjacent stairs turn into the local date night spot.

But peek into any of the many centuries-old cathedrals during mass hours and it’s a bit of an odd story: there might just be a dozen people. To have these grand luxurious buildings with no detail spared, built almost one per block or two, surviving centuries of changing empires and even large earthquakes, and built to support large congregations that were once there but no longer… Where have all the locals gone?

Actually, that’s a more general question than for just the church. Where is everyone?

There’s a clear pride in the achievements and grandeur of the past — the great empires of which Sicily was an integral part of, and the cultural cachet it holds worldwide in art among many other things. With that in mind, much of this seems to be assumed by residents as general knowledge globally, yet came new to me. At a random free art gallery in Agrigento, an insistent older woman who I couldn’t turn down spent a whole hour guiding me entirely in Italian (a language I barely speak) through a single room of a dozen paintings of people with ties to town history, all with backstories and interpersonal dramas. As otherwise unremarkable they would be in a sea of far more significant 16th-century cultural artifacts, her passion and pride was infectious even if a little self-important. That’s kind of adorable.

This pride can also sometimes be disconcertingly myopic. At a city museum in Ragusa dedicated to Italian exploits in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya, walls are covered in Mussolini-era fascist propaganda, from newspapers to memorabilia and photographs. A kindly, mild-mannered museum guide, speaking a hybrid Spanish-Italian to accommodate me, brought up the current-day migrant crisis by extolling the virtues of colonialism as an era of “helping Africans on their lands instead of ours” that he implied should not have ended. Under the colonial administration, health centres were constructed and slavery was abolished, but beyond the flimsy reasoning of racing the French and the British over carving up the continent, what about the human toll of invasion, bombings, and occupation?

Amongst the general public, a universal sense of pride exists for the architectural beauty of the old towns, an amount of work that simply wouldn’t be possible now whether for the ludicrous cost it’d be, the sheer amount of time it’d take, or the fact that society’s done away with the labour practices of the past. The cobblestone streets and alleys are a scenic walkthrough for locals and tourists alike.

But that’s just it — they’re for a nice walk, like a museum. What about the now? Beyond the restaurants largely aimed at well-heeled visitors, the art and souvenirs for tourists, and perhaps the odd corner store, I found little commercial activity aimed at residents: few services, few stores, few offices, many empty storefronts. The historic old towns do have a small remaining population, but most people live in the surrounding new towns, and there I found the same issue albeit to a lesser degree — lots of old apartment buildings, little street life beyond traffic. (At the extreme, in Taormina, already famous for its stunning setting by the just-erupted Mt. Etna and recently made even more TV-famous, the main strip may be picturesque and full of visitors, but a walkthrough feels like a Disneyland, devoid of local life.) Beyond the essentials, where are the jobs, and where is the discretionary spending? In the smaller cities and towns, the population seemed overwhelming old. Did the whole young population move to Palermo and Catania or even further afield?

Conversations with locals gave me the impression of a bleak economy in Sicily, where a full-time aesthetician job brings in only 400€/month, a more demanding 12 hour-daily construction job in the hot sun bringing in only 1200€, and multiple jobs are needed to scrape by. This, in a country where so much costs more than in Canada, with food prices even I found to be surprisingly high, at least at the current exchange rate. And as for the large agricultural sector, the years of record heat and drought haven’t been helping. Constantly changing federal governments from left to far-right, most barely lasting a full mandate, haven’t brought any sense of change on the ground economically. And of course, there’s the mafia at play too in Sicily, though to an outsider, that seems mostly visible in the form of posters for anti-mafia protests and talks. The wealth is still in Italy’s north, while the South remains depressed.

I spent my last few days based in Noto and Syracuse (Siracusa) joined by my dear friend Bernhard, who flew down from Vienna for the occasion. We got a great sense of what makes locals wax poetic about their home, and what draws people from elsewhere in Italy and around the world: the Mediterranean beach days spent on sun chairs in lidos (beach clubs) or straight on the sand, countryside drives past dozens of olive groves, the pretty old seaside villages like Marzamemi where Aperol spritzes are enjoyed exclusively with a sea breeze and seafood dinners abound, gelato and granita every day to survive the heat, the coastal scenery and turqouise waters, and the weight of historic grandeur walking around Ortigia (old town Syracuse) bathed in evening light. We even got the deluxe experience for our three days together: boutique hotels and fancy restaurant meals al fresco — all in all, a great holiday and a lovely backdrop to catching up with a friend. For visitors, the outward appeal of Sicily is easy to see, and it endures.

On the other hand, Sicily may not be thriving for those who live here — and however long that’s been the case, in a recorded history stretching over two millennia of ups and downs, conquests and destruction, this is but a blip from which they’ll eventually recover. In a thousand years, I wonder if this period will be but a footnote in their long history, or whether new glory days are ahead for people to romanticise, as hard as it may be to imagine. But if climate change doesn’t kill us all by then, heat be damned, I’m sure people will still be visiting, enjoying what makes this place so special.