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…
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…
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.…
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…
