The view from the terrace of our villa in Taormina, Sicily
My wife Vicki and I recently returned to Sicily for two weeks, our third sojourn to this Mediterranean island where the volcanic summit of Mount Etna broods and which nuzzles up to the tip of Italy’s boot. Scant miles of ocean separate them, yet Sicily in its customs and culture has unapologetically remained very much a world apart. As Vicki is of Sicilian descent, her physical and emotional connections to the island are generational and ancestral. Mine are less so, but with each visit they have grown more intense.
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The turquoise waters that hem Sicily have been less a barrier than a bridge. She has endured ages of arriving invaders who have each left their footprints and thumbprints–from Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, French and Spanish, to Patton’s army on it’s way to Italy in World War II and present-day visitors. Sicily is a trampled paradise. Yet she resolutely remains a paradise.
We flew from Jacksonville to New York, and from there, first-class via Alitalia (think of a fine Italian restaurant with wings) to Rome. Then it was just a short flight to Cantania, Sicily. We began our visit in an ocean view villa that clings to a cliff in Taormina on Sicily’s eastern coast. The streets of Taormina often bustle with tourists, but its wide piazzas, ancient sites, shops and side streets beckon to new adventures and discoveries. We spent nine days happily wandering, eating and exploring.
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From there we traveled south, staying in a waterfront villa in Ortigia, a small (you can walk its perimeter in several hours), time-worn, 2,700 year-old island just off Siracuse on Sicily’s southeastern coast. Ortigia is Baroque in architecture and bewitching in charms. Our villa in Ortigia, with its original marble and terrazzo floors, soaring ceilings and twin balconies, overlooked a fleet of local fishing boats. In the mornings, over coffee and melon-wrapped prosciutto, we watched as they prepared their lines. And in late afternoon, with glasses of Sicilian wine, we watched them arrive and unload their catches.
While we had stayed in fine hotels on previous visits, for this trip Vickie chose accommodations that granted us water views and, most importantly, kitchens where she could cook authentic Sicilian meals with fresh provisions gathered from local markets and vendors. She wanted to eat and live like the locals, often darting into small shops to ask the proprietors where they ate, seeking Sicila typica, where foods follow a stubborn ritual of ingredients and preparations honored for centuries.
The smallish size of Sicily encourages day trips. We first went south along the coast to Giardini Naxos, a charming beachfront town just past Taormina where we shopped and lunched. We later drove north to the tiny town of Gioiosa Marea on Sicily’s north coast to visit Vicki’s family members who have lived and owned shops there for generations. To see her standing next to the places where her late grandparents lived was to sense the profound difference between revisiting and reconnecting.
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But this is not a travelogue reciting what we did on our travels. It is simply a whetting glimpse of a place unlike any other.
Sicily is eternal. A place of secrets, straddled somewhere between what we can see and what we can never fully know. To visit is to gain the slightest of understanding of the words of German author Johann Wolfgang van Goethe who, in 1917, penned a simple summation of this remarkable place: "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."
Sicily is ever patient. She goes about her ancient rhythms while gently inviting you to sip briefly from the torrent of history and experiences that have flowed there for millenniums. There is a sense of holiness here, not merely in the multitude of cathedrals and churches, but in something somehow deeper, more intimately personal. To sit for a few hushed moments in a structure that took decades to hand shape from stone is a humbling reminder of the tiny speck of time we occupy. There is magnetism in Sicily that resets one’s compass to true north.
We returned to a place where history is measured in a span of centuries and where streets are often little wider than one’s outstretched arms. A place where stooped, stoic Sicilian women trudge home with their groceries from market, sharing cobbled streets they have walked for decades with visitors who are there but for a few days.
Sicily is a spectacular organic orchestra. The summer sun blisters the landscape to umber, yet readies and ripens endless groves of olive, lemon and fruit trees, and blesses streets and gardens with wondrous profusions of flowering plants. This is a place where bougainvillea spreads unchecked up walls and along balconies like pink and purple blankets, and where wizened oleander trees grow as thick as oaks. A place of absurdly narrow, tightly-coiled streets hemmed by conjoined homes and shops where only the smallest of cars and whizzing motor bikes can easily navigate. Sicily’s towns are architecturally and emotionally intimate.
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We returned to a place of sipping tiny cups of potent espresso at small cafés in the morning, dining on fresh grilled squid for lunch, and savoring ricotta pistachio cannoli for dessert. A place of street corners where vendors offer up rainbows of ripe local fruits and vegetables from the backs of small trucks. And where larger, open-air food markets stretch for blocks with endless tables of iced fresh seafood of every description, warm breads, sweet fruits and the exotic aromas from buckets of the earthy herbs and spices that have been on Sicily’s tongue for generations. Where market vendors loudly sing out their wonderful wares to passers-by like operatic tenors.
We returned to an island of residents who greeted us with spontaneous warmth and welcome. A place where language often separates, but kindness always connects.
We returned to Sicily. An island from which one can depart, but from which one can never fully leave.
