Personal project, 2022, on-going

If Italians are the Latinos of Europe, then Sicilians are the Cubans. Proud of their island, giving zero F’s and a flair for drama —I felt right at home. I went to Sicily to spend time with my family last year.

I wanted to learn the language and my family history, get off the grid for a while and give myself the luxury of being bored in a small town. It turns out I picked a perfect place: while I was there, one of the world’s most infamous crime bosses was hiding out in plain sight, just down the street. For a month, I planned my days around meals, lingered on the beach in the same blue chair every day, reading, and practiced my vocabulary with Francesco, a 65-year-old widower who asked me on dates and told me Sicily made me more bella (the ten pounds I'd gained and the tan I'd perfected?) The whole town spent their summer at the beach.

I loved doing nothing so much, I even got a little tattoo that says "la dolce vita".

My Sicilian family are olive farmers, (today they have day jobs too), their orchards just a few minutes’ drive from the ocean. My new runaway fantasy is moving there, buying my own olive orchard, and pissing off the neighbors listening to Sfera Ebbasta too loud from the tractor I’ll hook up with a sound system. As cool as they are, they need to dance a little more. In this fantasy, I’m wearing overalls.

I’ve been drawn to this place a few times since growing up with my grandmother’s stories and listening to her gossiping in Sicilian on the phone. My great-grandfather Giuseppe had left Sicily as a kid but still carried that signature scratch in his voice that made everything he said sound like the movies. Last summer I got to hear stories about my great-grandmother, Anna, who joined a convent and then escaped just before marrying Giuseppe in Tunisia, later leaving for the U.S. from Marseille on a ship called the Saturnia. A baddie in her own right.

And I wanted to go back to where my family came from because I’d connected with the people there, especially my cousin’s wife Paola: the kind of woman who cooked every meal like a chef, called everyone by a sweet nickname, and gave hugs that made you forget everything else: all my weaknesses rolled into one person. But when I got there last year, Paola was battling cancer — and had taken time off her job in the healthcare field for her chemo treatments. At home, she still doted on everyone relentlessly, while quietly coming to terms with her mortality. It was like every time she fed them, she made sure they'd be alright for just a little longer without her. Her love had a gravitational pull that kept a constellation of people around her at all times.

Earlier this year in March, when my tan and the pasta weight were just falling away, and Sicily fading a little from my memory, I received a jarring text, sort of crudely-translated, it said Paola had passed away. In our last messages she'd told me she'd had an emergency surgery but that the worst was over. I held hope but knew it might be bad. And my heart broke with the news. I heard recently that we should treat everyone as if they carry "a great sorrow." And it seems true now more than ever. Everyday we reconcile the bliss of being alive with the agony of missing something we thought we couldn't live without. And the world keeps teaching me so much.

I didn't share anything from Sicily before, the trip was bittersweet. Even some of that drama I was telling you about went down, of course I can't tell you more, I'm not a snitch.

Today, I just felt like reminiscing.

I hope to get back to Sicily soon. I have more stories to tell, and I need more of the food and my family's homemade olive oil, that Mediterranean sun and sea.