Sicily Part I: Dear Diary, What is "Enough"?
I came, I saw, I overintellectualized my vacation.
Let’s get this out of the way: something almost always goes haywire while traveling, and on my recent trip to Sicily with Ed, that something was that I forgot my driver’s license.
Admittedly I was distracted in the week leading up to our trip— my car was involved in a minor accident, Catholic guilt was very much alive and well in me (the world is suffering and I’m going to… enjoy myself?), and my travel anxiety manifested as a very specific and incredibly arbitrary compulsion to consume. Leading up to my 2019 sabbatical to London, it was an aching need to find the perfect tortoiseshell hair clip. This time, it was a late-onset obsessive yearning for zipper pouches, for which I logged hours of Youtube recon and two trips to Pacific Trimming the week before our departure in order to sew my own.
It’s anxiety, it’s not supposed to make sense.
But I wasn’t so distracted tending to my holy host of pathologies, religious or otherwise, that I forgot to slip my license into one of my freshly sewn coin purses. Truth be told, at one point while packing I looked directly at my license, thought, “Don’t need that!” and tossed a fourth pair of brown sandals into my bag, just in case.
All of which is to say, there was the itinerary I had planned for Sicily, and then there was the itinerary available to us once we got there. Because I did, in fact, need that. The original plan involved a few days in Catania/Etna and then in Siracusa, between which we’d travel by train, followed by five nights at a remote, renovated oil mill-turned-rental-cottage outside of Noto, with loosely planned day trips throughout the southeast in the automatic Citroen C3 I’d reserved. A charming urban-to-rural switch in gears that was now not so much impossible as it was completely reliant on the limited railway network and Uber economy of one of Italy’s most neglected regions.
I discovered my mistake a few days into our trip while we were still in Catania. By then, we’d walked the morning fish market twice, spent an afternoon getting tipsy at a Benanti wine tasting, and had a geriatrically early 4:30pm dinner of caciocavallo, anchovies on toast, and a few vermuttinos at Vermut. Life was good, even if I was still fending off pangs of guilt that it was my life that was good. I loved watching a leathered old Catanian man in a souvenir apron squeeze juice from a lemon, top it off with seltzer, then dip the tip of his knife into a jar of salt and use it to stir the whole bubbling, mineral mix together. I also paid only €2 for it. Even in a tourist town, can you really make a living wage pouring seltz limone e sale? That man should be retired on a beach somewhere, putting the finishing touches on his transformation into a handbag, not laboring for a few euro. Gaza is still starving. Our trip was off to a humming start, and I felt terrible about it.
When you realize you may have ruined not only your vacation but that of your overworked boyfriend, the feeling isn’t as strikingly catastrophic as you might think. It was more of a slow dawning, the replay of how you got there like watching a drop of ink in water, the ribbons of color mesmerizing until suddenly they’ve diffused into concentrated darkness. We could easily get to Noto proper by train, but then what? What of the spontaneity we had left room for? What of the farm lunch at Agriturismo Giannavi, the beach trip to Marzamemi, the chocolate we were meant to eat in Modica and the vintage linens I was determined to hunt for in Ragusa?
I sulked. I tried to keep my chin up— we would just pivot! I punctuated our nicest moments— laying like lizards in the sun at the base of Ortigia, the Ionian Sea lapping at our feet— with profuse apologies to Ed. I dove into my phone screen and came back to the surface with a master plan involving Trenitalia, car transfers, and a detour back to Siracusa for our last night, paid for with credit card miles. I thrive so fully in chaos that I had to question if I’d subconsciously sabotaged our plans just so my survival skills could shine. I was mainlining the adrenaline of problem solving. I cried at what we’d miss.
Then, the next night at dinner, a pigeon shit on my head. Just completely unloaded onto my slicked-back knot, narrowly missing the red scrunchie I’d splurged on ahead of the trip. Anyone who counts Under the Tuscan Sun as formative in their romantic views of Italy knows in equal measure that Diane Lane is just so, so hot, and that being a pigeon’s personal dumping ground is un segno di Dio, as auspicious as it is foul. Our server said maybe I’d turn the corner and discover a bag stacked with €10.000; even that wouldn’t buy me a dilapidated villa to throw my sorrows into. I hoped instead that I’d find the license I knew I didn’t pack tucked into a pocket of my suitcase. I spent the next day waiting for my luck to kick in, some slime-induced absolution for my mistake that would allow our plans to return to their original form.
But my luck remained largely the same. We ate arancini al ragu while walking winding Palazzolo stone alleyways, and swordfish panini while sitting in the sun; in attempting to reserve an Uber from the Noto train station to our Airbnb, we got a crash course in just how few drivers wanted to take a winding 30-minute drive to nowhere (one, tentatively). At some point in the reckoning, though, the guilt of happiness and the torment of making such a silly, substantial mistake coalesced into a wary pluck. Okay, our plans changed, and our options became more limited. Didn’t we still have plenty? Wasn’t the fact that we had less and yet had enough my good fortune?
Sicilians have known this for millennia. It’s easier to ask who they haven’t been conquered by, what hasn’t hobbled their economy and public infrastructure, than to get into their lineage of kings and rulers, earthquakes and Cosa Nostra corruption. And yet.
Time to get out of my head and into the world. Coming in Part II:
Man, what a town! The bedrock of Catholicism is obsessed with boobs! You’re probably ordering wrong at Caffè Sicilia, yearning in vintage Moschino as a recession indicator, and more!
See you there.
Worth mentioning is that the long-awaited reveal of the NYT’s new restaurant critic(s!) dropped today. The editorial board has already established with it’s 2025 100 Best list that it’s giving the Food section the group project treatment (read J Lee on this), but, “in a break with Times tradition,” also doing away with critics going to lengths to disguise their identities. The Times has been delusional for a long time but this one made me audibly laugh. Let’s discuss soon xx