Living in Sicily
A morning at the Partanna Livestock Fair in Sicily
A Day Out at the Partanna Livestock FairWhere children and adults alike can enjoy a good day out Last Sunday I spent a few enjoyable hours at the Partanna livestock fair in western Sicily. We decided to go early, and we were glad we did. We decided to go early, and we were glad we did. Parking near the venue in Contrada Vallesecco was already getting harder to find, and one look at the sky told us it would pour within a few hours. Looking for Vito I had arrived hoping to see Vito Trapani, one of the fair’s regular stallholders and something of a living legend. He must be…
Dolce far niente: What Sicily taught me about doing nothing
Everyone knows la dolce vita. Fellini gave it to us in 1960: Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain, Vespas, sunglasses, champagne at three in the morning. The sweet life is glamorous, a little reckless, and best lived in Rome. Here in Sicily, people talk more about something quieter: dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. They sound like cousins, but they’re not the same thing. La dolce vita is about having. Dolce far niente is about being. One needs a nightclub, and the other needs a chair in the shade. An old idea The idea is much older than the cinema. Nearly two thousand years ago, Pliny the…
What didn’t fit in this month’s letter from Sicily
I sat down to write this month’s letter of everyday life in Sicily, as I always do. I was thinking I would tell my subscribers about a birthday lunch in the Sicilian hills near Corleone. I did tell them that story. But it led me back to a village we visited years ago in South Africa, which in turn reminded me of Borgo Parrini, not far from Palermo. I told them how Parrini had come back to life after years of abandonment, and how we went into its bakery looking forward to buying bread but left empty-handed after spotting flies beneath the glass counter. I reported on the eleven new…
The day my garden turned into a lake in Sicily
One Saturday recently we woke up to find a lake in our garden. It had appeared overnight. The cracks in the earth created by the summer heat were gone. Replaced now by shimmering water that was soaking the ground and moving towards our actual lake as the ground fell in that direction. Thankfully, our own lake has an overflow pipe, otherwise the damage to the property could have been far more extensive. Where had it come from? With no rain for months, this was not that. On closer inspection, the water was gushing from a large pipe used for agricultural water, provided by the province. It is a service we…
