Re-Visiting Sicily (In Words)
A long letter from a reader and some comments and commentary
During the week before Christmas, I published a series of longer pieces here—a little tradition I have, along with the same sort of thing for the anniversary week of this newsletter in early April. I try to run pieces that touch on the different topics I write about: urbanism broadly understood, of course, but also retail, culture and history, home life, food, etc.
One of those pieces was a long series of thoughts following our trip to Sicily in the fall. And that piece ended up the second-most-read of the week, and tying for most “likes.” It also tied for most new subscriptions generated. And it got a lot of comments, including a long and interesting letter from a reader, Annemarie. She’s a great writer, and wrote this letter too, which I also published as a guest piece here.
I’m going to share her letter here, and then a few web comments and my thoughts below.
I really enjoyed reading your own travel narrative, Addison. Not because I agree necessarily, but because you beautifully captured the age-old question of what travel is meant to afford us, as well as what, as travelers, should our relationship be to places that are not “our” places—where our responsibility to them lies as visitors, not as residents. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on these questions, (focused on 18th and 19th century British travelers to Spain), so it was fascinating to see these from your modern perspective.
What I saw in your piece was that you’d read about many exceptional experiences had by other writers, and their descriptions had led you to believe you would have a similar experience in Sicily: amazing rice balls; an out-of-the-ordinary visit to a fish market; awe at the majesty of a volcano. You were expecting to, as it were, be enchanted by the place (which is one of the things that travel writing in particular, but also literature set in/about particular places, inspires). Instead, what you got was local ordinariness, which tempered Sicily’s delights and amplified its irritations.
To read into your experience a bit, my interpretation is that you encountered the complex reality of a place that relies on transient people (tourists) to survive economically. There’s a particular relationship to places that comes about when some people are constantly coming and going, and another where people stay a long while—and this relationship to place affects both the tourists and the locals.
For tourists, many people go to new places expecting to see something interesting or out of the ordinary, to maybe meet some locals, to be treated well (or welcomed), to be accommodated linguistically and otherwise, and then to leave with photos, memories, positive feelings, and maybe a souvenir or two. I’m not criticizing these expectations. They are inherent to tourism.
For locals, what they get is a revolving door of visitors who often are but may not be respectful of them and their home; they are supposed to treat visitors with hospitality, warmth, and friendliness of the sort that is often expected of people with whom you have a longstanding relationship; and then they get tourists, writers, or Instagrammers who broadcast a narrow view of their home/place to the world, either driving more people to visit (for more money and more crowds) or flattening the place to a caricature. If “your place” is constantly at the mercy of other people’s money/perspective/behavior, as a local you have to come up with different ways of negotiating that. Some places lean into the friendliness and tourist hospitality. Others don’t.
It’s not that people who live in tourist towns are unfriendly people or dishonest (though some are). It’s just hard to keep up perpetual excitement and interest in people who will be there for a brief period of time. Maybe you’ll develop relationships with regulars who come back year after year, with whom there’s a reciprocity of interest, of care, of shared experience. But then you’ll also get an English granny who expects her tea to be served the same way in Mallorca as in Yorkshire. Everyone’s expecting to be enchanted by their experience away from home—whether enchantment means comfort, or awe, or something else. Why else leave home? But I think the locals know better than anyone that enchantment is not always a positive or benevolent thing.
By “enchantment,” I mean it in the sense of philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. He means a worldview prevalent five hundred years or so ago, that the physical world and the spiritual world were completely intertwined. That material objects and places could affect you bodily and spiritually. It’s emblematized in the Roman “genius loci,” that is, a spirit that inhabits a place, and if you pleased or displeased it, could materially bless or wreak havoc on you. It’s also a similar logic in that if you kiss a saint’s knucklebone you could be healed of demons or paralysis. The physical and spiritual worlds were not separate. In our modern day and age, they are separate. The “spirit of the place” is a metaphor, not a literal being.
How does this relate to travel? Well, think of pilgrimage. Very broadly, that’s about undertaking a journey to a physical place that has spiritual significance. You expect to be transformed by undertaking the journey to a holy site, and that visiting the place itself will change you. Tourism is a successor of pilgrimage.
Tourism began as visits to places with cultural significance, but then as mass travel and travel writing grew in importance, visitors wanted to experience the same emotions as their favorite writers, not just the places themselves. In the Lake District of England, I want to feel the same awe of nature that William Wordsworth experienced and wrote about. In Rome, I can see the Caesars’ monuments to themselves, but I can also see the places where Audrey Hepburn’s character in Roman Holiday felt freedom on the back of Gregory Peck’s Vespa—and recall the feelings of delight and desire for a similar freedom and romance.
The reason I bring this up is because, as I’ve been suggesting, travel rests on a desire for enchantment, which hearkens back to the older worldview where we could be affected by the material world. From its earliest origins in pilgrimage to current tourism, most travel, particularly for leisure, is about being affected somehow by the place you visit: being awed, inspired, shocked, welcomed, accommodated, challenged, etc. In all those examples, it’s about developing a relationship to a particular place’s genius loci. I use the term relationship deliberately, because travel is about connection with others, most of whom are human, but maybe some of whom are spirits. Enchantment, then, is about our relationship to the world. In travel, we encounter other beings in new ways.
In Sicily, I think you did find enchantment but not necessarily in the positive sense. You encountered the impish gnomes of the place rather than its ethereal dryads. But it also helped you re-enchant the idea of home. It’s my sense that your enchantment became an appreciation of your own Virginian genius loci, even if Sicily’s left something to be desired.
Tourism is a successor of pilgrimage. That’s really interesting. And maybe it explains why “travel” seems to fill as serious a place for a lot of people as religion. And that final bit is absolutely right: it’s not just that I was happy to be home (as I am even when we really enjoy a trip). It’s that the boring, everyday routines of working and living in a house can actually be “enchanted.” I guess I was thinking about this, because I wrote this piece yesterday, returning again to the idea of making a home as a joyful, beautiful thing. I like to think there’s more to this than being a homebody.
It’s not that I was disappointed in Sicily, much less that people working in the tourism or service industry weren’t nice enough. I fully understand the complicated and maybe outright negative feelings these folks can develop towards tourists. If I lived in such a place I probably would to. It was more just feeling mystified that this interesting but ordinary place could be so amazing, or that taking trips like this could be worth foregoing so much more meaningful things in life.
It reminds me of the time the Airbnb CEO said that with remote work, anybody could live anywhere for any length of time. I mean, sure, unless you have children, aging parents, pets, a church you care about attending, a friend group, institutions to which you belong in some way…in other words, I get the feeling that the abstraction of “travel” is essentially a fiction unless you’re completely unrooted and untethered to people and places of your own. And that feels so empty and vaguely menacing to me that I want to keep a distance from it.
Of course, I didn’t have all these these thoughts when we went to Croatia, which we loved. Maybe I really just didn’t like Sicily.
I also want to share a few snippets from the comments which I liked:
I’ve found through all my travels that what works best for me is to have a general idea of what I want to do and then leave lots of room for serendipity. This is easiest to do when we plant ourselves in one place for an extended stay. It’s those moments of unexpected surprise that make up my best memories of my travels—driving through a herd of cattle on a remote road in rural Idaho; tramping along public walking paths through sheep pastures on the bluffs of the Isle of Wight; that incredible dinner we had on our first night in Italy in 2017.
It’s not just travel. It’s a style of writing that is also now standard in certain circles when talking about people which confused and upset me for a while because it felt like everyone else had these relationships that I didn’t... until I realized people just hype it and make it up pretty often or have super low standards I don’t know. I think some people just speak in superlatives and some people don’t.
So intriguing. As a personal observation, I’ve noticed from afar that the people who go the hardest on overseas or otherwise expensive trips are people who have ungodly work lifestyles and seem to make good money but have little home and/or family lives to speak of. Checks out. (This is a biiiiig generalization, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed in who prioritizes these “incredible experiences”.)
I love reading about exotic places, but am less enthused with going to them, mostly because of the time and expense. I don’t know about other parts of the U.S., but in the D.C. area there definitely seems to be a “keeping up with the Joneses” sort of feel to vacations too. Like, did you go to that place because everyone else is or because you’ve really wanted to go? It’s like a vacation arms race.
That said, there are a few places, abroad, that I really want to go to. But I’m happy with domestic road trips. There are so many interesting places within 5-6 hours driving time that make for great long weekends. So Sicily is fine. So is Pittsburgh, right? It has some great Italian food too. I like traveling and seeing new places, but I love my home.
What you said about freedom, and which I alluded to above before having read that bit of the article, is absolutely true. You don’t need to travel to be free, and indeed tourism is often antithetical to freedom, in the ways you describe.
It is a great but also somewhat daunting feeling to know (or to realize) that your real freedom was waiting for you at home the whole time, you just never chose to use it. I’m trying to repair my own error in this regard.
I don’t think I agree on the home life bit though. I work a job I care a lot about. I don’t dread waking up in the morning and while I might grumble a bit about Mondays it’s more about getting up early than anything else (I don’t sleep in on vacation, generally). Despite that, I’ve never experienced anything like what you describe about being excited to return home. Even when I was a child I never experienced homesickness.
I can only speak for myself, but I think some of the difference is down to innate temperament. When I stay in the same place for too long, it starts to wear on me. I feel like I have to get out and go somewhere that feels different, even if it's just an hour or two away. Often, I feel like I might have missed out on something because of that. On some level, I always wanted to be a hometown guy who loves where he lives and misses it when away, but I never liked my actual hometown and have never managed to cultivate the feeling elsewhere despite living in multiple different cities that I do genuinely love.
And finally, this. Probably not the one I would pick but, thank you!
I think this is the best, most useful thing you've written. Probably that just means it speaks to my particular, weird little interests in a deep way. Thanks so much for writing it!
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Really enjoyed this (as well as your original, very amusing essay). I took up a similar theme last week, looking at the tension between locals and tourists, and how historic preservation contributes to it.
https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/who-are-cities-for
Addison: is the link to Annemarie’s earlier piece correct? (Doesn’t seem so). Please check.