Savoring Sicily: Exploring My Ancestral Roots

Naples was just as chaotic and crazy as I had heard, especially in the historic center and the Quartieri Spagnoli  (Spanish Quarter), with motorcycles zipping down narrow cobblestone alleyways and around corners, but it offered a few surprises, too. As a pedestrian, I sometimes felt that walking around town to a museum or to find dinner was like being in a video game, with an obstacle around every corner ready to take you out.  Naples is a city of hills and steps so I found walking to be a challenge at times in other ways, especially since I had come down with a respiratory bug. Here's the link to a video we shot on our last morning, climbing the steps outside our apartment complex. Most people in the center of town live in mid rise apartment buildings, with a small balcony being their only outdoor space. As we walked by or rode by on the tour bus, it was common to see people standing out on their balconies smoking cigarettes or talking on the ...

My memories of Sperlinga are of wildflower meadows, family connections, and a stone castle build into a mountain.  Sperlinga is the mountain town in the center of the island of Sicily where my father's father, Giuseppe Matarazzo, was from.  The ride to Sperlinga from Palermo was bucolic, with fields of wildflowers in purple, yellow, and red, flocks of sheep grazing, cows lazing in the shade of trees, and occasional small groves of olive trees. It's  a town built on a huge rock with a castle on top and with some of the homes actually carved into the rock. There are about 900 people who probably all know each other so it was obvious that we were visitors, though tourism is increasing with the renovation of the castle. We stayed in a small, rustic house very close to the castle called, "Casa Della Nonna" (Grandmother's House) which was decorated with vintage touches.  I was told by a cousin who visit...

Yesterday we went on a tour to the island of Mozia, a small island off the coast of Marsala,  the oldest Phoenician settlement in the Mediterranean, and to the saltpans of Genna where salt has been collected from the sea for thousands of years.  The island, especially, was fascinating, its history going back at least to the 5th century B.C.  We saw the white marble Greek statue of Giovane di Mozia (the Young Man of Mozia)  We saw the House of Mosaics which was once a magnificent house with Doric columns and mosaic floors made of marine pebbles in the shapes of animals with decorative borders.  In the island's museum, I also found fascinating the archeological evidence of the Phoenicians' way of weaving, using weights to keep the warp threads taut.  After the tour of the island and the lagoon, where what looked like hundreds of people were wind surfing,  we toured the saltpans of Saline Genna ...