Susan’s Sicily Letters | Real letters from Sicily to America 1907-1908
Forty-two letters, written by a young woman travelling through Sicily more than a century ago.
In the winter of 1907-1908, a young American woman named Susan sets out for Sicily with her aunt Anne, leaving behind a sister named Betsy waiting at home for her letters.
Those charming letters are Susan’s Sicily letters and were published by an American travel writer in the Edwardian era.
Susan’s Sicily letters reveal a different era, a different way of travel, a different set of challenges before mass tourism. She writes from aboard a German steamship, from Palermo, from Taormina and from towns and hotels across Sicily, recording the people she meets, the places she visits and the peculiarities of travelling through an island that is still a very long way from becoming a tourist destination.
Now, more than a century later, we’re going to follow her.
It’s time Susan’s letters travelled again.
Susan’s Sicily letters and the world behind them
Once a month, Susan’s Sicily arrives in an envelope.
Inside is Susan’s next letter, complete and in full, accompanied wherever possible, by a period photograph of the place she is describing. But there is something else.
Each month, we’ll take one or two seemingly ordinary details from Susan’s letter and step through them into the world she inhabited.
Susan mentions going to a shipping office. What did that actually involve in 1907? How did an American woman arrange passage to Europe? What class did she travel in and how was it different to those travelling steerage? What did she pack into those enormous trunks, and what happened to them once she reached the docks?
She checks into a hotel. We’ll discover what that hotel was like, what it cost and who worked behind the scenes.
She boards a train, hires a carriage, walks through a Palermo street, eats dinner, visits a church or encounters a custom she finds strange and suddenly we have a doorway into another piece of everyday life in 1907.
This isn’t simply a reproduction of an old book.
Susan’s Sicily is an attempt to reconstruct the world around the letters and understand what Susan was actually seeing and experiencing as she travelled through Sicily.
Forty-two letters, complete and in order.
One envelope a month.
A beginning, a middle and an end.
What you will receive in Susan’s Sicily Letters
- Susan’s next letter, complete and unabridged
- A period photograph connected with the place or subject of that month’s letter, wherever one can be found
- An original piece of social history exploring something Susan encounters. This could be travel-related, money, luggage, hotels, food, class, customs, transport, women’s lives and the countless ordinary details she had no reason to explain to her sister
- A crossword puzzle for an interactive experience, created around each letter
- An original Edwardian advertisement
- One envelope every month for 42 months
- The letters in their proper sequence, always beginning with Letter One
It doesn’t matter when you discover us.
Subscribe in January or subscribe in September and your first envelope will still contain Susan’s first letter written when she discovers that her aunt is taking her to Sicily for the winter.
You’re never behind.
This subscription isn’t tied to the calendar.
It’s tied to Susan’s journey.
Why this story is different
Susan’s letters were published in 1910 after her journey, and every instalment contains the complete text of Susan’s corresponding letter, not simply selected extracts.
The social history accompanying it is researched and written especially for this series.
We might discover what a lady packed for a transatlantic voyage. Where there any luggage restrictions, and how much would a comfortable day travelling in Europe cost? What has changed in over a hundred years in the train trip she took around Mt. Etna to taking the same trip today? Or what travelling the road to Taormina actually involved in 1907.
Sometimes the most interesting history will begin with something Susan mentions in a single sentence.
The letters will be reproduced in their original form. Susan’s words remain Susan’s words.
And occasionally, her opinions have aged exactly as you might expect the opinions of someone writing in 1907 to have aged.
We won’t change them.
Instead, we’ll put them into their historical context.
An ending, on purpose
Most subscriptions are designed to continue indefinitely.
This one isn’t.
Susan’s journey has an ending.
After Letter 42, there isn’t a Letter 43 waiting to keep your subscription going. When you reach the end, you’ll have followed her entire journey and built a collection of forty-two envelopes containing her correspondence, photographs and the social history surrounding them.
And when Susan’s journey ends, we’ll send one final letter of our own to close the story.
The complete 42-letter journey through Sicily, delivered one envelope at a time.
Cancel whenever you wish. There is no minimum subscription.
But if you stay with Susan until the end, you’ll have something rather special: the complete correspondence and the reconstructed world around it. Forty-two letters, forty-two glimpses into another age, and one young American woman’s journey through Sicily.
You will always start with Letter One
Already here for my own letters from the island?
Choose your Letters from Sicily subscription.
Susan’s Sicily is a different shelf.