I Thought I Knew What Sicily Would Be Like
Turns out I didn't really, and I'm glad.
I’ve been trying to get to Sicily for over a decade.
I gave my first Italian class presentation in college on Cefalù and Siracusa, narrating alongside printed photos of crystalline blue water and golden ruins in dusty heat. I also grew up in New York, where we spent every Sunday night of my childhood eating family-style Italian-American meals, mythologizing the Sicilian and Neapolitan food that arrived (and mutated) on our shores: eggplant, red sauce, granita, cannoli, and arancini the size of baseballs to name a few. I earnestly tried to plan trips to Sicily twice (once with my brother on a bike tour, another time with business school friends) and both fell through.
Maybe that was a good thing.
I used to live 10+ hours away, and now it’s two and a half.
What I imagined was a landscape that was dry, hot, yellow, historically rich, vaguely unsafe, and likely swarming with tourists after White Lotus. I thought Sicily would be a red sauce pilgrimage, the way Naples was for me two years ago. It was a vision I built off years of research and confirmed by friends who came back heat-stroked and furious, swearing they’d never do a 45°C summer in Sicily again.
But we visited northwestern Sicily and neighboring Favignana during one of the May long weekends (in France, there are three bank holidays this month), and within a day, I realized I had been very wrong.
Our first morning, we climbed La Rocca above Cefalù, passing wild fennel growing knee-high, bursting out of the hills. The higher we climbed, the more the landscape opened up. We looked out onto rows of hazy mountain ridgelines and lush green valleys in the distance. Water twinkled far below. I hadn’t expected it to be so verdant—more like northern Tunisia near Morag, or Mallorca around Valldemossa, which are also surprisingly green.
It’s also where parts of Homer’s Odyssey likely take place (and why the upcoming Nolan film is being shot on Favignana)—something I learned mid-trip, while Matt drove and I “podcasted” the Wikipedia pages of the next town we were heading toward (our road trip tradition). Ancient Greek historians like Thucydides described Sicily as fertile and abundant, and I was starting to understand why.
So instead, I spent the rest of the trip admiring fennel, recalibrating my sense of beauty, unearthing old memories from nearly 20 years ago, and furiously Googling recipes that combined warm squid, sardines, shrimp, or tuna with almonds, pistachios, fennel, and citrus in ways I rarely consider.
Sicily is hard to pin down—which is kind of the point.
The wild green hills and the food pulled me back to one of the best summers of my life, when I lived on a sailboat and camped in Sardegna and the western Greek isles as a teenager.
Despite everything I’ve seen since — places around the world that are objectively spectacular, even overwhelmingly gorgeous — Sardegna still sits at the center of how I understand beauty. I can still see it; I can still smell it. It was the first place I hiked through juniper and rosemary, realizing those scents from kitchens and soaps came from real plants growing wild in the dirt. It’s where I had Nutella for the first time (and barefoot, and in a bathing suit, I ate it from the jar with a spoon or a finger so much in the first three weeks that I gained seven pounds). It’s where I learned to scuba dive, sea kayak, and sail. It’s where I sometimes slept under the stars on rock-slab beaches or on deck, and took marine showers short enough to preserve water for my boat mates too. I came home looking like I’d always been at sea, with sun-bleached hair, salt-stung skin, and a striking watch tan line where my watch hugged my wrist for days on end.
That summer led to years of studying Italian, and another summer living in mainland Italy — in a small Tuscan town called Monsummano Terme, and later in the beach town of Vasto, on the Adriatic. But I never made it back to Sardegna. And the longer I waited, the more I started to doubt the memory. Maybe it wasn’t as beautiful as I remembered. Maybe nostalgia exaggerated it, turned the saturation up to 100%, just because it was the first time I experienced anything like it.
But then we went to Sicily. And while it wasn’t perfect (and not a place I’m racing to return to), it brought some of that feeling back. And it reminded me that I didn’t make it all up.
There are places *that* beautiful and inspirational that linger long after you leave. Where new food combinations, sights, smells, and history rewire existing references and seed new ones. This is my favorite kind of trip.
So the version of Sicily I built up in my head didn’t hold. But the real one was actually better, and going in May was a great idea.
Photos below.
I may not be on a beach in springtime Sicily anymore, but I did just steam an artichoke while writing this in Paris.
Beautiful review of your trip. I have toured the east of Sicily from North to South. Loved every minute of it. This article has brought it all back. Thanks 🙏👍
Loved the description of your summer in Sardegna— barefoot nutella and bathing suits. So special. Those summer memories can be so visceral. I remember one in Sicily/ Cefalu when I was 18. We were renting this small villa on the Tyrrhenian Sea, and I was sipping a Coca Cola/ reading a magazine. Our neighbors were diving at dusk for octopus (successfully) and threw one on the grill right on the beach and cracked open a bottle of Cataratto/ offered me a glass. I can still visualize the moment. I felt infinitely cooler just being near them!