Sicilians are a romantic lot and they love St. Valentine’s Day. Rather than give their girlfriend sweets or champagne, most Sicilian men are more likely to take her out for a delicious organic Italian ice-cream. What better way to wish all my readers Happy Valentine’s Day than by sharing this marvellous advertisement I saw in our local…
Category: About Sicily
Sicilian Amber – the Tears of the Sun God’s Daughters
On some of Sicily’s beaches after a big storm, if you’re sharp-eyed and lucky as well, you can find pieces of a rare type of amber called simetite. Some pieces of simetite have recently been found to contain hitherto unknown types of prehistoric insect. It dates from the Miocene, a later period than the more…
Dolce and Gabbana pay tribute to Pope Francis?
The Sicilians adore Pope Francis. This is not just because he once worked as a nightclub bouncer and is way more down-to-earth than any other pontiff in living memory. He is the first pope ever to condemn the Mafia, repeatedly and unequivocally. He rejects the pomp and wealth of the traditional church and genuinely helps…
Eureka! Archimedes the Sicilian Detective
We all know the story of Archimedes flooding his bathroom, leaping out of his bath, and dashing stark naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” in excitement at his discovery of the Archimedes Principle of water displacement. But exactly which city’s streets did the world’s first flasher actually dash through? For years I thought it was somewhere…
Does your child know more than you do?
Mine does. He’s eight. People often comment on how much he knows about animals and their evolution. A few days ago I was watching a film with him in which this bizarre little animal appeared: “That’s a honey badger,” he told me immediately. “They love eating honey but they sometimes attack lions to steal their…
How do you get Edible Salt out of the Sea?
We are so used to being warned not to eat too much salt nowadays that it may be hard to imagine how life in the past involved a constant effort to obtain enough of it. Not only does it render any food tasty, it is a vital nutrient and death is the inevitable consequence of…
Big Brother Is Watching You
Until recently, in my part of Sicily, owning an iPhone was so cutting edge and high-tech that it was basically one step away from being an astronaut. In a culture where speaking is impossible without bilateral full-arm gesticulation, it was fairly obvious that talking to people using just two thumbs would feel far too restrictive….
Multicultural Sicily: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ridiculous
This afternoon we went for a walk around central Palermo. In Piazza Politeama we saw these fellows. The man at the bottom was sitting cross-legged on a glass tumbler. All along Via Ruggiero Settimo there were buskers playing drums and guitars, there were fire-breathers and jugglers, there were men on stilts making balloon animals for the…
Christmas in Sicily with Santa’s Smallest Elf
We celebrated Christmas this year with roughly forty people. I could not count accurately as they were Sicilian, therefore unable to keep still. There were four different pasta courses. One was spaghetti with olive oil, lemon zest and cheese, served in a bowl carved out of a whole Parmesan cheese. Another pasta course was with…
Dancing in the Street with a Homeless Nigerian
I ended up dancing in the street with a Nigerian tramp yesterday. (Tramp means “homeless person”, in case you’re American.) How does a Sicilian Housewife end up acting so weird? Well, it started with some Christmas shopping. I find this activity traumatic, for three reasons. 1. Almost all toys in Sicily are made in China…
What’s the Use of Modern Art?
In Castel di Tusa, you can sleep in it, sit on it, eat off it and even take a pee in it. Seriously. In the old days, art was mainly a way of preserving moments in time and, especially, commemorating or glorifying certain people for posterity. Nowadays we have photography and the Internet for that, so…
The Signs of Maturity
Today I was waiting at the traffic lights and a truly gorgeous dark-eyed hunk of a young man stopped half way across the road, bent down to look at me through the windscreen, and gave me a very friendly wave and a dazzling smile. Then off he dashed, his golden-brown biceps clenching in the autumn…
The Hanging Gardens of Bagheria
The legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. They were supposedly created by the Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of Babylon, for his Persian wife, Queen Amytis. We have a hanging garden in my home town in Sicily, too, and this post has photos of it. The…
Festival of St Martin: Time for Children to Drink Wine and Play with Naked Flames
Throughout early November, the weather here in Sicily is often still warm and summery enough to go for a swim in the sea. We Sicilian housewives are still walking about in our boob tubes and hot pants (or something like that) while our poor fellow Europeans, up in Germany and England, are getting wet and…
What do Dead People Eat?
In Sicily, they eat this: It looks like baskets of fruit, but it is all made from martorana, which Sicilians will rush to tell you is nothing to do with marzipan. Martorana is made from ground almonds, sugar and a little water, nothing else. Since Sicilians refuse to use anything except the freshest organic almonds,…
Sicilian Maiolica Ceramics from Caltagirone and Taormina
Maiolica is Italian tin-glazed pottery made in dazzling colours. New methods for making varied colours of glazes were initially brought to Sicily by the Arabs of North Africa in medieval times, and the art of making Maiolica then spread from Sicily throughout Italy during the Renaissance. Nowadays the art has shrunk back down again and…
The Sicilian Art of Arranging Yourself
Have you ever wondered how you’d cope if you were stranded in the wilderness with nothing useful at all? Tom Hanks in “Castaway” lived on a desert island for several years, using an ice-skate as a multi-purpose cutting tool, part of a heinously tasteless party dress as a fishing net, and a football with a face…
Water water everywhere… and all in the wrong place
Sicily sits on the edges of two completely different weather systems. The edges overlap. What this means in practise is that Sicily gets way more weather than other places. This weekend, for example, Africa blew the Scirocco wind at us. This starts in the Sahara desert, builds up to 150 degrees centigrade (I never exaggerate)…
Buying a house in Sicily! Where they cost 1 Euro!
I have been back in Sicily for a month and I’ve only just got my head together well enough to write a new post. After three months in the quiet English Cotswolds, I was suffering from extreme culture shock. I realised how much I love this place, and I also realised that having dozens of Sicilians…
Looking Good in Chain Mail – a trip to Caccamo
You can trust an Italian to make chain mail look stylish. I snapped these fine young fellows in a medieval town called Caccamo. They were attendants at a wedding, waiting to take the bride and groom to their reception in this carriage. Did you notice that the nearest one has a falcon on his shoulder and a…
My other car’s a Fiat Punto
What do Sicilians drive when they’re not driving their Fiat Puntos? This. It’s called a Carro Siciliano (Sicilian carriage) and dates back to… oh, goodness knows how long ago. Each successive invading culture added some extra detail and decoration to it: at a glance you can easily estimate how many times Sicily has been invaded!…
Come to Italy and meet Mickey Rat and Donald Goose
One day, when I went to collect my son from school, a rat eight inches long was spotted sprinting across the playground. Being Sicilian, the mothers knew how to do “hysterical” with great virtuosity. Yet they were calling the rat a “mouse.” Let’s weigh this up. Mice are fairly harmless compared with rats. People even have…
The Life and Adventures of Santa Rosalia, Patron Saint of Palermo
I described, in my previous post, the sanctuary of Saint Rosalia, which is a baroque church facade with a drippy cave behind it. Now I’ll tell you about her amazing life. Santa Rosalia was born in about 1130, when Sicily was ruled by the Normans. The king was Roger the Second. I’ve been inside his…
The Sanctuary of Saint Rosalia on Monte Pellegrino, Palermo
Walking through the doorway of a magnificent Baroque church, and finding youself in a gloomy cave with water dripping on your head, has to be one of life’s most interesting experiences. The church is the Sanctuary of Santa Rosalia. It stands at the very top of Monte Pellegrino (Pilgrim’s Mountain), which overlooks the whole bay…
Top Tips for Renting a Car in Sicily and not getting Killed in it
Part umpteen of an occasional, hysterical series on DRIVING IN SICILY Car rental in Sicily is quite a surprising experience for most people the first time around. Firstly, it is blood-curdlingly expensive. The insurance will be exorbitant but heaven help you if you opt out of that! If you book online, or even if you…
My husband was nearly shot by the Mafia
This event happened when he was six years old, and he lived to tell the tale, obviously. The story startled me, though, as he was so blasé about the whole thing that he only got around to telling me about it last month, after eight years of marriage. He had been hanging about by the…
What does “Confetti” mean in Italian?
Sicilians, like many other Mediterranean people, give little gifts of sugared almonds to all their friends when celebrating the key events in their lives. If they are fancily wrapped sugared almonds, they are called confetti. If the almonds also have a gift attached, the whole thing is called a bomboniera. Sicilians take this art form…
The Celebrity Chefs of Palermo – They’re Offal!
Do you eat offal? is it forbidden by your religion? Or do you just think it tastes like poop? In Palermo, fast food sold in the streets is almost all made of offal. One of the absolute classic dishes of Palermo is U pani ca meusa, which means, “bread with spleen”. I ususally give this…
About Jews, Greek Philosophers and Offal sandwiches
Q. What do Socrates and a spleen sandwich have in common? A. Read on to find out! There was already a significant Jewish population here in Sicily by the 5th century BC. They came with the Greeks from Athens, which also had a large Jewish community. Since the Jews influenced Greek culture a great deal…
A Lateen, or Latin Sail boat
A friend of mine took these photos while we were with his wife, having coffee, ice-cream and shameful amounts of chocolate biscuits on his gorgeous terrace overlooking the sea. The sail is triangular, and its front side is lashed to the mast from top to bottom. This Vela Latina or Lateen was the sail used all…
A bird’s eye view of Piazza San Domenico, Palermo
I took this photo from the rooftop café of La Rinascente, a swanky department store in central Palermo. This is PIAZZA SAN DOMENICO. On top of the giant column stands the virgin Mary. The piazza takes its name from the Chiesa San Domenico, which is out of frame to the left. The street with red…
THE GODMOTHER of Sicily, and how to message her on the Auntienet
I’m excited to find, in mid-2013, that my blog is approaching 1,000 subscribers. I do hope you’re all enjoying it! My readers come from exciting places all over the world. Their blogs are in many language and scripts, some of which I don’t recognise. I even have a subscriber called जागरण मिडिया सेन्टर, and I…
The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife 