First impressions — Sicily

I’m travelling around Europe seeking intergenerational inspiration on a Churchill Fellowship (read more about the trip here). My first 10 days have been a combination of holiday and research — stretching from Italy’s longest running Passion procession to youth farming cooperatives in remote, ageing communities.

This blog contains a few things I’ve noticed so far — it’s not intended to be an exhaustive or definitive list of conclusions. It’s a few ideas that have bubbled up, so if you know Sicily better than I do, I’d love to know what I’ve got right and what I’ve misinterpreted or misrepresented.

1. From soaring volcanoes to deep valleys, Sicily is an island shaped by its geography. It feels (to me at least) to be a hard place to live. Ferociously hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, when it rains it pours and its mountains make travel torturous at the best of times.

View from the small town of Polizzi Generosa in the Parco Delle Madonie.

2. Sicily has been invaded, occupied and claimed by just about everyone you can think of throughout history. And they all left their mark both on the landscape, the architecture and the hearts and minds of Sicilians. Tomasi Di Lampedusa in The Leopard (allegedly the ultimate Sicilian novel, fast becoming one of my favourite novels) summed this up: ‘This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts … all these things have formed our character.’

Valle Dei Templi, Agrigento. Dating back to the 5th century BC, these are some of the best preserved Greek temples outside of Greece.

3. From street food to orange blossom — it’s an intoxicating sensory delight. The climate and the fertile volcanic earth make it a verdant place which translates into delicious food and beautiful spring flowers.

Important research. Espresso and connolo.

4. It’s a place that seems to me to be both repulsed by — and captivated by — its relationship with class, privilege and wealth (much like the UK). Reading The Leopard by Tomasi Di Lampedusa against the backdrop of the Palazzos of Noto really bought this to life.

Palazzo Castelluccio, Noto. Restored to its former 18th century glory by a French film director.

5. Maintaining a “bella figura” — a beautiful image — is of utmost importance. Dressing well, maintaining respectability and dignity and keeping up appearances (or more like exceeding appearances) is a key defining Sicilian belief — so much so it feels like a sacred value.

Three girls participating in the Misteri di Trapani — a day-long procession featuring 20 floats each depicting a scene of the Passion. It’s taken place on Good Friday since 1612 — making it one of the oldest continuously running religious events in Europe.

6. It’s a place of ritual — some religious, some less so. From the uniformed youth groups handing out olive branches on Palm Sunday to the immaculate outfits and pre-performance ice cream at Catania’s Bellini Opera House. This is a place that holds on to a strong set of rituals and rhythms to define its collective life — for some at least — Simona who hosted me this week rolled her eyes at the role of the church in her rural, ageing, depopulated local community.

One of the 20 floats each depicting a scene of the Passion in Misteri di Trapani. Accompanied by huge Trapani brass bands and watched by thousands of impeccably dressed Italians (and less impeccably dressed tourists like me).

7. It’s got some unreliable infrastructure. Driving around Sicily often involves being 100 metres in the air on dual carriageways on stilts with no hard shoulder and road blocks that come out of nowhere, push you off course and offer you absolutely no alternate route. One particular journey last week that should have taken me 2 hours took me 5!

Road block!

8. It’s a place of strong family ties and close communities which are being tested to the max by the migration of young people to cities for work. In the words of 32 year old Simona, host of Happy Glamping in Polizzi Generosa: ‘we are few but we are close’.

A poster of a woman in the hill town of Erice alludes to a past when this village was actually lived in. Whilst still very beautiful, it now feels like it’s been rather hollowed out by tourism.

9. It’s a place of independent, fighting spirit. ‘Everyone else has left, but we’re determined to stay’ is how Enzo described his decision to stay in Polizzi Generosa the hilltop town of his birth, where he estimates just 5 babies were born last year. All his peers have left for white-collar jobs in cities or abroad. ‘To stay, we’ve had to create our own work’. And that they have done. He and Simona run a thriving hospitality business and are part of a farming cooperative called Verbum Caudo comprised of 11 young people growing chickpeas, tomatoes that need little water and grapes for wine, all with a shared determination to not let their rural places die.

The town of Polizzi Generosa clings almost impossibly to the hills of Parco Delle Madonie.

10. It’s a place that is sometimes a bit grating to travel through on your own as a woman. Asking for a ‘tavolo per uno’ is often met with ‘you’re on you’re own, oh sorry’ before you’re tucked around a corner where no one can see you. Or being quizzed as to my marital status is normal: ‘oh you have a boyfriend! Is he happy about you being here?’. That said, I feel mostly very safe (except on those motorways surrounded by lorries and a 100 metre drop…or when trying to take a photo of Mount Etna I almost had my phone whipped out of my hand by a man in a car who didn’t want to be photographed).

‘Gentrify this’ — Il Lupo is a project for the temporary reuse of abandoned public buildings. Progress and change seems both strident and contested at every turn in cities and rural places alike.

Enjoy this?

I’m posting more regularly on Instagram @ionaflawrence if you want to follow along as I go.

Where next?

I’m off to the capital Palermo for a few days and then the rural central town of Mussomeli where I’m spending 10 days with the Good Kitchen and its founder Danny McCubbin.

Thereafter — armed with an inter-rail pass and some patchy language skills (thanks Duolingo) — my route is roughly as follows:

• Sicily: 1st — 24th April
• Florence: 25th — 30th April
• Bologna: 30th April — 4th May
• Padua: 4th — 8th May
• Vienna: 8th — 15th May
• Heidelberg: mid May
• Cologne: mid May
• Amsterdam: late May

I’ll finish with a reminder of 3 questions I’ve asked before:

1. Do you know folks who are working to bridge generational divides — especially (but not only!) across Italy, Austria, Germany or the Netherlands?
2. Do you bridge generational divides? Even if I’m not (currently) visiting your place, I’d love to meet virtually.
3. Do you fancy grabbing lunch, going for a walk or just having a chat about anything we have in common — I’m interested loads of things including in the health of civil society, how we attend to endings in nonprofits, and walking in beautiful places (you can find out a bit more about me on my website here).

Anything else? I’d love to hear from you: iona@ionaconsultancy.com.