Journal
This isn't a guide to living in Sicily. It's what living here actually looks like — week by week, season by season, from a working farm on the island's southern coast. The beautiful and the chaotic. The funny and the frustrating. Whatever the island throws at you next.Join me on my journey.
After the rain: Picking fresh figs in Sicily
Every summer in Sicily is hot. It comes with the territory. But this year, the heat has been relentless. An African anti-cyclone low pressure system has settled over the island for weeks now, baking the landscape day after day until the earth has cracked into a thousand pieces. Across the fields, deep fissures spread through the soil like the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. For days we have watched the sky, searching the clouds for the slightest promise of rain. Most of our rainfall comes during the winter months, but every now and then, summer offers a brief reprieve. This morning, quite unexpectedly, it arrived. First came the wind.…
Why are so many doors in Sicily painted blue?
There are certain things you notice when you first arrive in Sicily. The honey-coloured stone that seems to glow in the afternoon sun. Laundry dancing between narrow streets. Bougainvillea tumbling over ancient walls. And then, quite unexpectedly, the blue doors in Sicily that seem to be the dominant colour in coastal towns and villages. Not every door, of course, but enough of them that you begin to notice a pattern. Walk through the old quarters of Cefalù, Ortigia, Marzamemi, Sciacca or the winding streets of countless fishing villages, and blue begins appearing everywhere. Some doors are painted a deep cobalt. Others are faded turquoise after years beneath the Mediterranean sun.…
The decapitated caper bushes
As a family, we love capers. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but we love the slightly salty, tangy addition to salads and various pasta dishes. After all, after nearly fifteen years of living in Italy, capers are firmly a pantry staple. So I decided last year to purchase two caper bushes and plant them in my garden. Making sure the holes were deep enough, and that they would enjoy plenty of daily Sicilian sunshine, I inspected them daily to watch their progress. One morning I went out and discovered, to my horror, that both bushes had been brutally decapitated by my overly-enthusiastic son with a brush cutter. In the same…
The Nuns who Named a Cake after a Chancellor’s Bottom
“You have to try this one,” I said, pointing to the little green pastry in the display cabinet. My family looked unconvinced. They had sensibly ordered cannoli. I had chosen something called Fedda del Cancelliere — The Chancellor’s Bottom. Not exactly the sort of name you expect to find inside a convent. Hidden within Palermo’s former Convent of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria is a small confectionery bakery where centuries-old recipes have quietly found their way back to life. The convent itself is magnificent, but it was the pastries that had drawn me there. Long before cafés lined the city’s streets, cloistered nuns were creating elaborate sweet treats behind these walls, selling…
Why I write Letters from Sicily
“If you can’t come to Sicily, let Sicily come to you.” There is a moment each morning, just before the heat begins to settle over the valley, when everything is wonderfully undecided. It’s a new day where the day will unfold where it wants to. The swallows are already awake, stitching invisible lines across the sky. Somewhere beyond the olive trees a tractor coughs into life, and the church bells from a neighbouring village drift across the fields a few seconds later than they should, softened by distance. It is my favourite part of the day. Here we expect the unexpected and we are never disappointed. By eight o’clock the…
