In Italy, it is against the law to emerge in public with bad hair. Italians remain housebound on bad hair days. In the summer, having white skin is also considered a serious fashion gaffe. There is simply no excuse. Strangers repeatedly threaten to report phosphorescent Celtic people like me to the fashion police. Sometimes gangs…
Category: Humorous
Sicily’s always good for a laugh!
Seven Top Tips: How to cook pasta like a real Sicilian Godmother
When I got married, I was given a 35 person dinner service which had belonged to my husband’s grandmother. Not just a 35 person dinner service, but a nine-course 35 person dinner service. “I’m sorry a couple of items have got broken over the years,” my mother-in-law, The Godmother, apologised. A couple of pieces missing? Did…
31 Mafiosi Arrested in my Town Yesterday
They arrested 31 mafiosi in my little town yesterday, and two of them were neighbours of mine. The newspapers are saying that this has practically demolished the Mafia in this town. Personally I am not so sure. Fighting the Mafia is like trying to eliminate cockroaches. You can stamp on a couple but there are…
QUESTIONNAIRE: Could YOU make the grade as a Sicilian Housewife?
Housewives exist all over the world, but Sicilian Housewives are a unique breed. Are YOU are made of The Right Stuff? Answer a dozen questions to find out! 1. What is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? A) Have a mug of tea. B) Have a cup of coffee….
Sicilian Enigmas part 1: Road Signs
Sicilians often complain that their road signs are ridiculous, hopelessly misleading or simply wrong. They are probably just using this as an excuse for their wild driving. Or are they? This one got me so confused I even swerved onto the wrong side of the road. Is there an underground cinema? A tiny weeny cinema…
Ten ways to tell you’ve been living in Sicily too long
1. You wear an anorak when it is 25 degrees centigrade and you don’t even feel hot. 2. You sometimes give your child an octopus to eat for dinner. 3. Whenever you get in a draught you just KNOW you will have a cervicale the next day. This is an exclusively Italian type of headache…
Blessed by a Pregnant Nun at Sciacca Carnival
The Carnival of Sciacca in Sicily may not be as famous as the Venice or Rio carnivals, but it is just as much fun. The day started with such heavy rain there was even talk of calling it all off, but in the end the rain stopped and the festivities started. All the children were…
The Ten Commandments of Sicilian Driving
1. Thou shalt not double park if thou can find somewhere to triple park instead. 2. Thou shalt not, never, ever stop to let anyone out of a side road in front of thee, unless thou fancy them a lot. 3. Thou shalt always leave rosary beads dangling distractingly off thine rear view mirror to…
Happy Valentine’s Day with some Kinky Chocolate
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
What did YOU do with your milk teeth?
One of my little boy’s milk teeth fell out recently. He now has two outsize grown-up size teeth at the centre of his mouth, and a space each side of them. He looks like a rodent. “Do you want to leave it under your pillow for the tooth fairy?” I asked him. “Or do you…
The Mediterranean Diet – how to do it properly
All over the world, there exists the myth of a “Healthy Mediterranean Diet,” which everyone is urged to emulate for the sake of their arteries. The Mayo Clinic (which always makes me think of Mayonnaise, anyone else?) says on its website: “Mediterranean diet: Choose this heart-healthy diet option” A cursory search on the Internet will…
Riding in a Car made of Sticky Tape
I attended a vehicular funeral last week. My friend Totò, a bright-eyed and sprightly septuagenarian, had a maroon Alfa Romeo which was, basically, made of sticky tape. I don’t mean trashy thin stuff, I mean the top quality wide, brown parcel kind. By the time I had seen his car enter the final, declining years…
Can you smell that pong of broken glass? A really rubbishy blog post
My town has 56,339 inhabitants. This morning, when I opened the window, it smelt as if every single one of them had just farted. The noxious gases billowed in and tinged the kitchen air a mustardy pea green. The whiff was coming from the local sewage works, whose manager feels that complying with health and…
21 Mafia arrests and 2 Mafia murders in my town last week
They arrested 21 Mafiosi in my little backwater of a town last week. All of them had been very high profile players in international organised crime. Along with the 21 arrests, the police also recovered 30 million Euros in cash, buildings, businesses, supermarkets, and other varied loot. The men had been engaged in drug trafficking,…
Would you marry your cousin? All about inbreeding, and very small elephants
A lot of Sicilians would. In fact, a lot of them do. Of course Albert Einstein is the Poster Boy for cousin marriage. Not only were his parents cousins, but he also went ahead and married his own cousin. His wife was either his first cousin or his second cousin, depending which parent you trace…
How did YOU find this blog?
I have been rummaging through the statistics for my blog today. When I was new to this blogging lark, I did it obsessively. Nowadays I just take an occasional look at the search engine terms which have brought new visitors to my blog. One of the strings typed into Google that immediately jumped out at…
International Joke Day
My little boy had a fantastic idea yesterday: We should institute an International Joke Day. This is a day when everyone tells every one else a great joke, to cheer up the whole world. I think he is a genius, and so I officially declare that tomorrow, Monday 22 April, is International Joke Day. IF…
La Traviata and the Italian Art of being ill Dramatically
Sorry I haven’t written any posts for so long. I’ve been too busy mopping up puke. My little boy has vomited almost every day for the last three months. The house smells like a bleach factory, and I am buying new mops from the local hardware store so often that the cashier there thinks I…
Sicilian Women Are Scrubbers
Honestly. They spend more time scrubbing, washing and generally sanitising things than they do in any other activity, save possibly ironing. This year, I am joining in the spirit of things by spring cleaning early. I didn’t want to, but my Mother-in-law made me. I admit the place has become a little grimy but, frankly,…
Urgent! I need some Ancient Romans to build me an Aqueduct
We have no running water to our house any more. The reason is that some of the other people in our street haven’t paid their water bills for over eight years. So the water board cut off the water to the whole street. One thing I’d first like to say is, thank the Lord this…
The Top 5 causes of Death in the Home: Doing Housework
I electrocuted myself yesterday. I was cleaning the toaster and I forgot to unplug it first. That’s what having a seven-year-old with verbal diarrhoea and real diarrhoea, both at once, can do to your mental faculties. Whilst emptying the equivalent of three whole loaves of bread, transformed into burnt offerings, out of the bottom of…
We Sicilians Want Some Privacy, Capeesh?
Yesterday, someone in Belarus hacked into my Facebook account. What did the Slavonic sod want? What did he find out about me? I have images of him in my head, in his standard-issue East European shell suit trousers, toasting his friends with a bottle of Stolichnaya in one hand and a samovar full of beetroot…
Wildfire, Deaths and Tomato Sauce Everywhere: A day in Lercara Friddi, Sicily
I posted some photos of the hair-raising electrical wiring in Lercara Friddi last week. I feel I should do the place justice by showing a more complete picture… so here goes. Hubby and I went there shortly after the annual festival celebrating the town pie, the pantofola. Pantofola means slipper. They still had some left…
The Dangerously Truthful Diary of a Sicilian Housewife 