Next Stop: Sicily 🇮🇹

How the Italian island recalibrates my ego.

Jan 12, 2023

I'm a food and travel writer from the shores of Lake Erie, now based in Berlin. I attempt to send out weekly essays on my latest mishaps and travels around the globe and in the kitchen. If you would like to support my work, please consider sharing this newsletter with a friend or acquaintance (I’m not picky).

Places like Sicily recalibrate my ego. It’s easy to get lost in one’s ambitions. You want something to go your way and hope “the universe” makes it happen.

Sicily, with its ancient foundations, puts me in my place. Empires have come and gone. Physically, they’re still there. But as ruins. It’s a reminder that, at best, we’re all just droplets of water in an ocean of time.

And that’s okay. Might as well enjoy the view, which Sicily has in spades with all the carbs you need to keep you moving from one spot to the next.

I thoroughly enjoyed every meal I had during my five days on the island. There was only one meal I wasn’t nuts about. (Next time, I’ll just trust that anchovies really aren’t my jam.) But I still relished that dinner. I was in Sicily, for god’s sake!

That’s the power of Italy. The bar for a bad experience is high. Because even if the dish in front of you isn’t technically the best ever, there are other ingredients at play – the ambiance, the language – that make it the best dish for that moment.

I don’t know, maybe all the conquerors of the past (the Greeks, Romans, Normans, Arabs, Spaniards) can take some credit for that in Sicily. The subtle mark they left.

In any case, it’s all Sicily to me.

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