Home From Italy, Thank God

Long thoughts on travel, tourism, and maturity

Readers: For just this week, until and including Christmas Eve, I’m offering a holiday discount for new yearly subscribers. If you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, this is a great time. Your support—whether reading, sharing, or subscribing—keeps this thing going. Here’s to a fourth year of The Deleted Scenes!

So my wife and I went to Sicily, as I’ve mentioned in a couple of pieces, back in October. Two weeks. Six cities. We’d been planning it for awhile, and expected—from all the travel blogs we read and excited reactions we got—that it would be amazing. Well. We were a little underwhelmed.

I can say everything I’m going to say. I’m half Sicilian. “It’s a good thing that half of your family escaped,” my wife said.

I used the trip to practice my quips. Sicily is Alabama, with espresso instead of sweet tea. In Sicilian cities, the car part that most frequently wears out is the horn. In the sleepy, touristy-but-not-pleasant city of Agrigento, everything was closed on Sunday, including the churches. (Agrigento, in addition to having almost no Sunday Masses—imagine not being able to go to a Catholic Church in Italy!—also earned the distinction of being the first city in which my wife and I both sent back a dish at a restaurant. Italy: where you send back your dinner, and you can’t go to church.) In Sicily, every city is a one-stoplight town. Not because they’re small, but because they don’t install any stoplights.

The travel blogger who said every American should give driving a whirl in Sicily, because everyone can use a little thrill? A car crash in a foreign country in a region with weak English proficiency? Eh, stories for the grandkids.

The main recurring feeling we had, however, was not disappointment but confusion. We weren’t disappointed. The landscapes are beautiful, the volcano is cool—especially hiking it!—the cuisine is interesting, the architecture is historic. You won’t have a bad time, and we didn’t. But all of the travel writing about Sicily seemed to be overselling it.

Sicily will steal your heart, one gushed. It’s the only place I’ve never forgotten about. My family has to come back here at least once a year. One person wrote about the Catania fish market: It will change your life, visiting this fish market. I’ve been all over Europe and it’s like no fish market anywhere!

We went. We walked around. There were stalls, and fish, and vendors selling it. It was a fish market. Frankly, watching out for the puddles of fish-gut water (part of the old-world charm and atmosphere, we read) and watching flies land on the whole swordfishes made me want to go to a supermarket and point to a fillet behind glass in a refrigerated case.

The absolute best rice balls in Catania were...not great. We didn’t even finish them. (The volcano looming over Catania was supposed to be stunning, haunting, otherworldly… I mean, most of the time, you can’t see it. But it did almost wipe the city off the map a few times. That’s a little haunting.)

The restaurant where two people reported having the best meal of their life was...fine. The baked spaghetti was a little salty and a little dry. But it was fun giving the friendly cat who hung around the patio a little nibble of the steak tartare. More than one restaurant with overwhelmingly positive reviews turned out to be actually bad. At one of them, the owner would leave nutty screeds insulting the customers if they reviewed him with one star. I wish I had seen that before we spent our $40 on a pretty platter of frozen rice balls and stale bread.

The street food in Palermo. Street food capital of Europe! Street food capital of the world! Your life isn’t complete until you try this street food and walk through one of the historic centuries-old markets! There’s street food 24/7! Go get a spleen sandwich at 2am! Ugh so good!

We visited Italy in 2018, and went to Naples, which, being in southern Italy, is similar in some respects to Sicily. It’s somewhat known for street food, too, though nobody really goes on about it as much. There were little carts and vendors on lots of street corners: this guy has baked spaghetti pie, that guy has rice balls, another has deep-fried mixed seafood. It was all quite tasty and cheap.

Palermo? We saw almost no street food vendors distributed throughout the city. Most of it was concentrated in relatively tight corridors in a couple of the old city markets. It was like running the gauntlet, trying to see what was actually being sold and resisting the aggressive salesmanship. Every vendor made a bunch of dishes, and every vendor made the same bunch of dishes.

How do you know which of 20 octopus salads or stuffed sardine fillets is the best? How do you know whether the platters of swordfish involtini and fried calamari have just been pulled off the grill or out of the fryer, or have been sitting there all afternoon? Whether that fly is the first or the 100th to crawl over it? What the price is, for that matter? You’ll read a lot about how tourists might get a little upcharge. Attempt an inquiry in Italian, and you might get a little discount. Eh, part of the fun.

When I tried to get a good look at one spread, the owner yelled, “Sit down, sit down!” He didn’t apparently want me to look too closely. Or maybe he was being inviting, in that Italian “who’s yelling? I’m not yelling!” way. But in any case the only ways to make him quiet down were to sit down or leave. Guess which one I chose. We started our walk through the historic market starving. By the time we’d run the gauntlet, we hardly wanted to eat anymore.

So much of what you read is just disconnected with reality. I kind of wish instead of trying to learn everything about these cities, down to which exact famous street food items I wanted to try, or which cannoli or arancini place you had to go to, we’d just shown up and made our way.

The best granita in Taormina almost made me skip granita for the rest of the trip. I’m glad we tried it again in Palermo, in the east. Supposedly western granita is more authentic, but you know what, the whole “granita in the east is better” or “you must eat [X dish] in [Y city]” is more hype—especially when all these places are only about two hours from each other. It’s like saying you have to eat the pizza in Union, New Jersey rather than in Tom’s River.

The confusion was not limited to food. Most of the glowing writing about the history and monuments and landmarks and museums fails to convey that the hours are frequently confusing—think little thrift shop in a basement run by a church lady, open Wednesdays 10-2 and Fridays 12-4. Google fails to capture as much real life in Sicily as it does in the United States. For some reason, the hours are bogus more often than not. Maybe they change seasonally or more often than that, maybe business owners don’t use Google and customers input faulty times. (Maybe the boring reliability of chain stores and corporate sites is kind of nice.) I don’t know, but if you read more honest and unbiased travel advice, like Reddit threads, you’ll see this come up a lot.

It’s kind of cool to be in a place where the internet hasn’t captured and recorded all of life, honestly. But it’s a little challenging to make phone calls about these things, and it’s a little disconcerting when you’re just a tourist trying to see things.

I almost felt like a college student considering enrolling in a fascinating but very difficult course. You want to enjoy the material but not feel the pressure of earning a high grade. I could see enjoying a longer, lower-pressure visit. I wouldn’t say Sicily is the easiest vacation destination.

The weight of all of this—a minor but constant sense of stress or friction—became annoying. I write a lot about learning to deal with little inconveniences, about cultivating a sense of contentment with what you have. But I also don’t like the tone of travel writing, which treats real, actual frustrating situations as just a whimsical part of the experience.

---

This raises a broader question about what you could almost call an ideology of travel: the sunken ideology of most travel writing is limitless individual autonomy. It’s not about particular experiences, or sharing things with your family, but about exercising your mobility and lack of attachment. All these things are things to presumptively do without kids, who would put a damper on all of this breezy adventuring and fun inconvenience. And I guess our Sicily trip brought this home.

I think I first had this idea when I read an article back in college, in the “youth” web magazine Thought Catalog, if I recall correctly. It was by a woman in her late 20s who described becoming disillusioned with her good job and nice boyfriend, and quit her job, broke up with her boyfriend, and embarked on a long overseas adventure to “find herself.” At least, that’s what I remember. Maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. Maybe a right-wing anti-feminist troll wrote it. It probably wouldn’t have been different if he had.

I hardly think this is a common thing in any case. But I was reminded of this, reading these travel blogs, and how they almost read like fiction. How they abstract and sidestep actual human needs—and, as noted, particularly children’s needs—like finding a bathroom, or being able to figure out how to order, or sleeping well and not being too hot at night in a hotel with weak European air conditioning, or being able to figure out when the museum is open, or why it’s closed the day it says it’s open, or why the attendant at the desk expects you to know that already.

What does it mean to “eat your way” through a city? As if you can fit more than two or three normal meals and a snack, as if you don’t have needs to attend to in between, or keep the kids occupied. If “eat your way” just means “have your normal meals in a new city,” well, fine, but that’s not quite so exotic and enticing, is it?

There’s almost this idea that travel is about improving ourselves, making ourselves more cosmopolitan and cultured, less rigid, less stuck in our ways and our expectations of comfort. As if it’s both about shrugging off all responsibilities but also tolerating new discomforts and inconveniences. This notion of travel is coded as sophisticated.

You know what? There’s nothing less sophisticated than that. As if regular people and regular cities in other countries are these exotic places that have so much hidden wisdom to teach us. It’s a faux-cosmopolitan inverse of tourists wanting a fake Disneyland experience of a foreign country.

Foreign countries and cities don’t exist to entertain us or to teach us anything. They’re just places where people live, and do some things differently and some things the same. Most places aren’t “must-see” or “magical” or “otherworldly” or places where you’ll “leave a piece of your heart.” Maybe America can “teach” you things too if you treat it as a great big country full of fascinating places.

The idea that there’s nothing worth seeing here at home—that to broaden your mind you must leave the country—is a boorish, provincial opinion. I went even further while in Italy: I felt particularly grateful for being an American. Even patriotic. I’m rather glad that I don’t live in an ossified country that rests on its Roman Empire laurels and gets mad when you point out that most of its iconic dishes were invented in the 1950s. Pasta alla carbonara is American. Sorry.

I like Europe. I like Italy. But they’re just countries, just places where people go about their lives. I don’t treat them, in my mind, as places that exists to make me a “better” American, or less of an American.

As I was thinking through this, I wondered if I was guilty of it too. I thought back to some of my pieces here about strip malls and old neighborhoods, and how I describe them in glowing, almost mystical language. Like:

The spirit of the city resides in or subsists in the suburbs. That, in a sense, suburbanites in some of these places are urbanites who don’t know it.

I think about this, not with any flippancy, in terms of the Eucharist. The idea that a piece of bread can somehow convey, contain, or become the body of Christ is, of course, a religious belief in a miracle and a mystery. But the idea that form and substance can differ is a very powerful one. It allows you to see or discern a deeper level to things.

So in a similar—non-miraculous—sense, I’ve come to think that a place like Eden Center looks like a strip mall, but really, in some essential sense, is not.

Is this any better than This place where people sell fish will change your life?

I even asked a couple of people if they thought I was doing this in my writing—sort of abstracting, idealizing, almost fictionalizing things. They didn’t think so. Most of you seem to think I’m making real observations, not uncritically selling something. Good. Thank you! (I am selling subscriptions, though, at a discount this week!)

But about that “ideology of travel,” and that idea of exercising autonomy. I have another set of thoughts about that.

---

What kind of autonomy, specifically? Well—not the autonomy of using the car as it was intended to be used, for striking out and adventuring.

I’ve always found international travel unpleasant. Not the destination or its potential inconveniences, but the journey. (Thank God the journey isn’t the destination.) International air travel makes you very conscious of hitting up against the limits of your freedom. Yes, I’ll probably be fine. Maybe, once, if a TSA boss reads this, I’ll get pulled aside or have my suitcase checked (just olive oil and wine—both allowed).

But it’s an interesting thing. For someone from another country—like my wife—or someone who travels a lot or lives in two countries, all of this recedes into the background. But for me, the airport is the only place where I keenly feel what I think of as American freedoms being diminished. The airport is the one place in normal life where citizenship and rights and democracy more or less cease to exist.

Absolutely nothing makes me appreciate my car—my trunk, my glove box, full of whatever I want to put in it, going wherever a highway or a country road can take me—like the customs guy pretending to make conversation to maybe make you reveal something you haven’t declared on your form. “How long were you out of the country, what was the purpose of your trip?” What’s it to you, buddy?

Or that painful wait while some official stares at your passport for an extra second before he decides to stamp it.

Or the security guy who took my nice steak knife that I’d used to cut a salami stick I was bringing on the plane (to finish eating on board) and had forgotten to pack back at the hotel. Of course I was wrong to literally bring a knife into an airport security line. Nonetheless, I’ll always remember that if we’d driven somewhere (and I’d found good salami there) I’d have not only gotten to keep my knife, but not even had to give its whereabouts a second thought. There really is a certain freedom in getting away with little things.

Is it so bad to vacation somewhere within six or eight hours by car? Is it so bad to visit an American city you’ve never been to? To eat at nice restaurants that aren’t serving some exotic cuisine? Is it so bad to rest your heart close to home?

Look, there are foreign countries I’d like to visit, but to think of them as a category unto themselves? That’s the error. As I wrote once about the D.C. suburbs, there’s as much in a place as you’re willing to see.

---

You might not suspect it from reading this, but we usually love our international vacations (well, the other three we’ve had in seven years). Yet we both felt exactly the same here. I was thinking about this a lot, in yet another way. And it occurred to me that part of the explanation for all this overselling and hyping—other than travel bloggers wanting to be nice to the places they visit, and people on vacation wanting to be pleased—is that a lot of the appeal of travel and vacation is not liking your job. Maybe even, on some level, not being satisfied with your life.

Yet we found ourselves missing our work, our house, our cats, our home-cooked dinners. Our routine. My reaction to that overselling, that ugh so good! tone, made me feel a little bit more…mature. I like being excited by little things that don’t matter that much. I like getting giddy about seeing some famous landmark or trying some iconic food. But I found myself able to say, “Look, it’s just a meal. It’s not the last meal I’ll ever eat.” (I mean, I hope. I think I had international medical coverage.)

So we didn’t get to see the number one tourist site in Palermo, or try the iconic whole boiled octopus? It’s okay. We can see photos. I can make octopus at home. Home is fun. I don’t need these things. The point of flying thousands of miles in a metal tube isn’t to eat a couple of interesting dinners. Ironically, this trip did help me to deal with little annoyances. It sort of pulled back the curtain, cleared away the mystique. I didn’t feel that a series of annoyances were ruining some perfect trip. There is no “perfect trip.” Daily life, home, family, with its pleasant chaos, is perfect.

Really, this trip made me realize how much I love the work I do, and how much travel is fun but less appealing, relatively speaking, when your everyday life is so nice. The idea of choosing travel over a rich home and family life seemed even more distant and absurd to me. It’s just food. It’s just buildings. This mystique around travel just recedes away when you’re happy every day.

So despite all these little annoyances, all these points where we realized some fairly ordinary thing was being hyped to the skies, I felt more of a sense of gratitude for my everyday than I have in a long time, maybe ever. How great must our daily life be if the excitement of a foreign country and two weeks off work doesn’t actually make us completely happy to leave it behind for a bit?

I’ve never been so ready to return home after a vacation, not to escape, but truly, to return. Our flight home was leaving at 6am, and around midnight on our last night, as we got ready for bed, I half-seriously suggested we just book a cab to the airport right then and there.

Wouldn’t it be cool to play hooky and cut vacation one night short?

---

So what about Sicily? I did mean, when I started this piece, to say a little bit about it. It’s not like we had a bad time, I promise you.

We had a few poor meals, but some wonderful ones. There was a place in Taormina, and one in Siracusa, that we went twice. The first one was the sort of restaurant experience you remember. A friendly older man, probably the owner, was constantly making rounds. He knew the exact wine pairing for our dishes. He seemed to enjoy his work. He didn’t try to high-five me or refuse to let us order second courses, like the guy at a touristy restaurant in Palermo.

The owner even told my wife, who’s from China, that a famous Chinese actor liked to travel to Taormina and eat at his restaurant. When she knew who he was, the owner pulled up a voice message from the actor, confirming, in some slightly halting English, a dinner reservation. “This is him calling me!” the owner said. It’s been a long time since we’ve really felt like we’ve had a completely worthwhile dining out experience. This was one.

The best meals we had were little DIY lunches from Italian delis—salumerias. Several times we’d go into a tiny deli, order 100 or 200 grams of a few different meats (one or two salamis, prosciutto, mortadella), some olives and marinated mushrooms, a loaf of bread, and just find somewhere to sit. The business owners were quite friendly, and nobody slices salumi like Italian deli owners. At the seaside town of Cefalù, we set up the meats on some flat rocks on a beach lookout, and had our little personal Italian deli buffet while we watched the ocean.

The history, especially the architecture, is the closest thing there is to stunning. We kept feeling a sort of sad sense of faded greatness. These cities, big and small, are chock-full of historic buildings, some of them UNESCO sites. Yet many of them are barely signed, decayed, neglected. There might be one guy at a makeshift desk, blocking the entrance to a grand old church until you pay the entry fee. Then, inside, you’ll see chipped, faded paintings and cracked marble.

I don’t think there’s a lack of pride. Though I did feel a contrast with Croatia, where people in the tourism industry seemed nicer, and where architecture and monuments were better preserved. I do wonder if there’s a little bit of truth in that famous ad from Avis. We’re second, we try harder.

I couldn’t tell the age of the residential buildings. Many are post-WWII and designed to look older. Our hotel in Palermo had a huge marble staircase full of cracks, with one slab of marble loose, and potentially a hazard. It would be very hard to get around in a wheelchair. Or with a stroller. Or a broken leg. Many of these old buildings have massive, heavy, wooden castle-like doors. In Ragusa, a smaller mountain city, lots of the ground-level apartments in older buildings were basically wrecked, full of trash and debris. This is a Palermo street market scene.

Some say there are still war ruins, never rebuilt. More likely it’s a property-ownership issue, or just a plain economic issue. But it’s sad to think that there must have been a moment when all of this was in great shape. Or maybe, since it’s an old-fashioned urban pattern and not a large-scale built-all-at-once deal, not.

A lot of the older buildings could use some real work even on the exteriors: crumbled or peeling stucco, discoloration, a general look of deterioration. Block after block. It even made me consider why “urban renewal” at one time seemed like a good idea: American cities after the Great Depression and the war were surely in far rougher condition than this. The thought of bringing all of these individual buildings up to standard must have seemed overwhelming. But, of course, if that had happened in Sicily—or if nothing traditional had been rebuilt after the war—we probably wouldn’t have been there.

Sicily’s larger cities are diverse, in an organic way. Sicilian culture is a melting pot. It struck me that Sicily, and its capital of Palermo, is like a sort of inverse of Brussels. Palermo is the diversity of centuries, many peoples coming and going and staying and living together, up to the present day. Brussels is the diversity of the airport terminal writ large.

I guess I kind of get why people treat Sicily as mysterious, as having a mystique. The centuries of conquerors, the shadow of the Mafia, a different predominating visual style given that the Renaissance largely skipped the island. But, as I noted above, the more we explored these places, the more I felt I was just in a regular old place that happened to be somewhat different from my own.

---

I am an urbanist, so I have to come back to my first point, about how American travelers frequently find themselves blown away by Europe. Part of it is that much, even most, of America really does lack some things that major European destinations have.

When there’s so much food, so much history, so many places to sit and stroll and busily and contentedly do nothing in particular, your stuffy hot little hotel room isn’t so much of an inconvenience. It’s a little push saying, “Go on, get out there!”

The sense of lively public spaces, the sidewalk cafes, the pedestrianized old-town streets, the tiny delis and cafes and street food stalls, the overall sense that you’re stepping into something that’s solid and lasting and layered and complex? It’s all genuinely lovely, and it really is something far too rare in America, for a lot of reasons. Urban renewal. Rigid zoning. Cultural differences, maybe, and cultural differences born of decades of regulation.

But it’s not that stark. Someone on Twitter made a really interesting point: Europeans who visit America see some of its sprawliest places (with the exception of New York City), while Americans who visit Europe see some of its finest old cities. Far from all of Europe looks like that. And despite the condition of some of America’s old cities, they’re there, and some of them, like the Rust Belt cities, are seeing what may be a second wind.

A lot of Americans think everyday European life is like the life they live for two weeks while visiting Europe. But for the most part it isn’t. And how many times can you have an afternoon gelato and stay healthy? Do you want every other food item you buy to be at a market stall, and involve inspection and haggling and friction? (And it’s not like Europe doesn’t have big-box stores. Heck, Europe is often credited with invented the hypermarket, or supercenter!) Half the reason you go sit on the square and sip espresso is because your apartment isn’t air conditioned. There may really be a fundamental tension between lovely, rich, pleasant public spaces and large, convenient private spaces.

I like to think that I’d take the grand public realm. Yet I didn’t find myself actually yearning for a European-ish life in Europe. Rather, I find my appreciation for cars, AC, and anonymous big-box stores to increase. I like the smoothness and ease of American suburban life. I like being alone in my car for a few minutes here and there.

But I understand the costs of that lifestyle, which are hard to discern but very real. And, of course, I do want to see more urbanism and better public space here.

It’s fun to visit these other places. But it’s also good to put down roots, to aspire to the kind of places that are lovely to simply exist in, and to build some of our own.

---

Related Reading:

A Peek at What’s Possible

New Jersey’s Little India

Good Friction

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter, discounted just this week! You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 800 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!