Sicily is the last trip of the year, a landmark in the end of the Smith College Junior Year Abroad program. It’s the trip that they take the group picture on, to show how much we’ve changed, grown, become italianizzata. I never put my camera down while we were in Sicilia, the trip took us from Catania to Palermo in a circuitous route around the island, stopping in major cities, beaches, and Grecian temples and ruins. By the time we returned I had an extra 600+ photos to upload onto my already full hard drive, full of my Italian memories.
To the rest of Italy Sicilia is the south which, much like the south of our country, represents a lot of the country’s problems: poverty, racism, and lack of industry, but also the birthplace of the mafia, political corruption, and never truly feeling a part of the united Italy of the nineteenth century. But just ask any Italian and they’ll tell you how much nicer the southerners are, how welcoming they are, willing to talk to foreigners, share food, give directions, or as we found out, teach us curse words in dialect.
Sicily has been controlled by everyone from the Austrians to the Arabs to the Greeks and their culture shows it. The cuisine is full not only of amazing sea food from the Mediterranean but also a mish-mash of Italian cuisine mixed with rice from the north, and yogurts and spices from the East. We visited temples and Grecian ruins that are some of the oldest still in existence, nestled among hilltops far above even modern day Sicilian civilization, that keep them safe from harm. The churches that are so common in every Italian community here are completely different. Many of the writing on the inside is done in Arabic and the architecture takes from both Grecian temples and Muslim mosques.
The people are just as diverse, from tall and blond to typical dark, short, and greasy looking Mafiosi. We went through a food market one day in Palermo that would never be found in Florence, the feet long “pisci spada” (swordfish) were displayed with heads intact inches from your face, piles of fruits and vegetables I had never seen before were being sold for cents per kilo, and one stand even had several goat carcasses hanging around waiting to be bought.
During our daytrip to the baroque art filled town of Noto, we sat on a bench to eat our granita and brioche when an older woman started to talk to us, by the end of the conversation she had invited us to show us her house, where she then invited us and anyone we knew to stay if we ever needed a place. After only about thirty minutes with this woman we knew her entire life story, where each one of her family members were and had a reason to come back to Sicily. After this confirmation of the Sicilian hospitality we decided to ask our waiter at the hotel in Palermo to teach us a few words in Sicilian dialect, and he immediately leaned in close, “what words do you want to know? The bad ones?” Our table of ten giggling college age American girls responded “Si!” he taught us a smattering, as well as how the Sicilians refer to each other as “Cusci” a form of the word for cousin “cugino.” From then on whenever we entered the dining room we greeted our new “cusci,” and he would test us on how our “parolacce” (curse words) were coming along.
The name “Sicilia” supposedly means the island of the sun, but we were unlucky enough to only have two days of sunny weather. Many of our bus rides were spent dozing and hoping that we were driving away from the rain, but strangely enough every time we ended up somewhere the rain let up enough to enjoy our visit, and even the cloudy beach days were moments we got to spend swimming in the Mediterranean. Our second to last day we finally reached another archeological park, after close to an hour of driving through torrential downpours that crushed every hope we had of having our tropical Sicilian vacation. As we made our way to that millionth Grecian temple we looked up to see blue sky contrasting its white-beige stone columns. From then on the “sole siciliano” (sicilian sun) stuck by us, following us through our lunch that day and staying with us on the beach, and again through the last day on a chic beach in Palermo where we sipped granita, ate arancino a type of ragu filled rice ball, and dipped into the cool-blue water of the Mediterranean when the Sicilian sun beat down too hard.
