Savoring Sicily: Exploring My Ancestral Roots

We're in lovely, less touristy, Marsala where my maternal grandparents were from. People seem friendlier. We like it so much we decided to extend our stay to a week. One of the highlights for us so far was an olive oil tour and tasting at Oleificio Fratelli Mezzapelle (the Mezzapelle Brothers Oil Mill), producers of  Donna Giacoma  olive oils.  I use olive oil all the time, so we wanted to see how it's made and to taste it at its freshest. Since we didn't have transportation and there are no buses out to the mill, Diego, one of the brothers, kindly arranged for his brother Michael to pick us up in Marsala and bring us out for the tour.  The first thing they did was show us the olive trees and explain to us how various trees produce different flavored olives. They showed us ancient grinding stones used in the past and then they took us into their modern factory where the oil is separated from the olive in a very high tech way. ...

Expectations are funny things. Sometimes you don't even realize that you have them.  When you travel as a tourist, you expect to see the sites, eat the food, take a lot of photos, and come home with your memories. But when you travel with the goal of exploring your roots? You have all those same expectations and do all those things, but there is something more, another element added. For me, it's a yearning to see life here in Sicily beyond the glimpses that tourism allows and I am finding that difficult. I can't express myself in the language. Also, I am not even sure that what I am looking for still exists -- the Sicily of 110 years ago when my grandparents lived here? A simpler Sicily? A more real Sicily, without the veneer of tourism? Family dinners around the table from movies I've seen? Paul and I were talking about it the other day and he said it well: "It's hard to find where the real is."  There is also some sense of disappointment fo...

Today we leave Palermo for the next stop on our Sicilian journey. Palermo is a somewhat gritty city, loud, chaotic, crumbling in places, a feast for the senses, full of color, with all of the tourist-focused bling that screams, "you have to take me home with you!"  For the most part, I loved it. Paul and I are city people so we enjoy the energy of people just going about their daily lives. We visited Palermo during   Settimana Santa  (Holy Week) so we saw some of the processions leading up to Easter.  On Sunday morning , the city was quiet except for the sound of the church bells ringing.  Generally though, traffic, both motorized and pedestrian, is heavy in the city.  We expected to see a lot of motorcycles but one thing that surprised us was people riding these scooters in traffic without helmets.  Our Italian teacher lives near Cefalù and rides her scooter every workday to the train...