I got back from Sicily a month ago tomorrow, and I’ve been agonizing over the etiquette of gratitude for the past couple of weeks. I promised my cousins Valentina and Fabio a selection of recommended music and Austrian beer, but I can’t very well send a massive package of Märzen to the kids and nothing to the adults. Not that the kids are really kids anymore – Valentina’s 30 and Fabio’s 28. I think. They are my second cousins once-removed, the children of one of my grandmother’s cousins on her paternal side. Maybe I should make a chart. Hold on one sec….

You should be able to click here to make it bigger. It’s pretty basic and I have rudely left out several of Vito’s siblings and my dear aunt Kim, but I’m sure you get the point. Vito’s sister Agatha was the only other Mandina kid who came to America, and her son Nick is something of a genealogy freak. He got me in touch with Scipione’s kids in Mazara del Vallo, and the rest is history.
Part of the reason I’ve been putting off this post for so long is that there is so much to say about my trip to Sicily. It was a great vacation, sure, and I saw a lot worth writing about; the food alone could carry a three hour long conversation; I reconnected with family I didn’t even know I had; I experienced a new culture. All of these things could be handled in a series of posts, I guess, but there’s a much bigger problem at play here: I have only a very vague idea of where Sicily stopped and my family began, where culture stood in for personality and excitement for interest. Even a month later I don’t know how to properly describe my experience.
The family tree seems as good a place to start as any, and it has the advantage of being objective and certain. My great-grandfather Vito was born in 1894 in Mazara del Vallo, a small fishing city in western Sicily, in a narrow marble street facing one of the city’s magnificent marble churches, relics of the wealth of the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and finally Normans who controlled it between 800 BC and 1282 AD.

He joined the merchant marine as a young man and jumped ship in southern Texas, only to travel north to Canada and reenter the country legally a few years later. In 1929 he married my great-grandmother Catherine Rappa in New York City and joined the legions of Sicilian-Americans. All of his six brothers and sisters but one remained in Mazara del Vallo, the children of a scion of Italy’s crumbling aristocracy. A more detailed family tree shows that some aristocratic family traditions have (for the most part) endured, such as naming the first born son after the paternal grandfather. The tradition also lives on through gorgeous heirloom furniture and silver that stands unassumingly in the less used rooms of Nicolo’s and Ferdinando’s houses.

Outside of these relics, there is nothing to suggest that my cousins are special or privileged in any way. Valentina and Fabio live at home and work in Mazara (Fabio does IT for a local grocery store and Valentina co-owns a tattoo & piercing parlor with her boyfriend Peppe), but most children of the city have to move out to find a job. It’s small and the economy isn’t growing; according to Valentina you either invent a job or go to the mainland and find one. All of their friends that are still there own or operate bars, pubs or restaurants, but several who live in Milan, Parma and Rome come back to visit frequently.

Agata is 25 and lives half the time with her parents in Mazara and half the time in Rome with her older sister Antonella. She is studying to be an occupational therapist at the University of Rome. Her brother Alessandro, the oldest of the siblings, is married and lives in Parma. Life on the island, though economically complicated, is quite simple. There are three meals a day, and lunch and dinner ALWAYS have three courses. Family lives close by, the smell of the ocean wafts over the seaside promenade and the weather is fine. Openness is the order of the day and passive-aggression just means you get yelled at instead of hit. The wine is amazing, the seafood is heavenly, and espresso flows like water.

All of the stereotypes about Sicilians are true. They are loud, they eat a lot, and they love their families and their Vespas. When my minicab driver picked me up from Nicolo’s to bring me to the airport he said, ”Hey you know Nicolo’s son? What’s his name? His girlfriend, Romi, is my wife’s cousin’s daughter.” Small world, right? I wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was so I just smiled and laughed and replied with a non-committal noise like “wow” or “cool.” I did get the impression that Nicolo was a big man in the community though. He’s gregarious, loud, funny, and loves eating. I think that explains why he and Mariella are so good together: she is a marvelous cook. And when I decided I didn’t want to eat anymore she would egg me on with an urgent “Mangia! Mangia!” which became her battle cry for the week.

When I wasn’t eating, I was taking walks or drives around the town, beach and surrounding countryside with various groups of relatives. The longest by far was a magnificent 12 hour voyage through Trapani and Marsala and back with Agata. We saw many beautiful things and drank some wonderful Marsala wine.

Valentina also took me on a voyage. This one was to Palermo on a horrible rainy day. She showed me around as best she could but it was hard to enjoy anything in the torrent.

The weather eventually drove us into the small but impressive Palermo Museum of Contemporary Art, and later the macabre Capuchin Crypts, which we walked through several times before I’d had enough.

Edvige and Ferdinando took it upon themselves to show me the great cultural sites around Mazara, and we spent two more rainy days at Gibellina Nuova, a bizarre city designed and built by modern sculptors in the 1970s, and Segesta, one of the great ancient ruins of Sicily. You can Google much better pictures of Segesta than the ones I took, but Gibellina is kind of underrepresented online. The original city was destroyed by an massive earthquake in 1968, and the ruins of the city were encased in concrete. Below this maze-like monument a new city was built according to the whims of a group of Italian artists.

I think that’s all for now… To see more photos click here, here and here.