A few months ago we finally made it to Sicily, after years of wanting to but being intimidated by the sheer size of a region larger than many countries. My prevailing observations:
Where are all the lemons? One of the culinary delicacies I had looked forward to was the Sicilian lemon, which sometimes appears in BBC travel shows as a lemon the size of a rugby ball. This citrus, which lends its name to half the yoghurts and desserts in your supermarket, is (in autumn at least) nowhere to be found on the island, at neither the famous markets nor the most Waitrosey of supermarkets, and we were reduced to using limes as salad dressing. Is it extremely seasonal, or are the Sicilians reduced to exporting the whole lot?
The clichés are quite true. Sitting in the centre of the Mediterranean, Sicily has belonged to Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French, Spanish, Bourbons and Italians, and yes, as no visitor fails to observe, all of them have left their mark and contributed to the feel and flavour of the place; the history, the buildings, the food. The long-unified south merged with the rest of Italy over a century and a half ago, and Sicily is recognisably Italian to me, but before that came several centuries as a remote outpost of the Spanish empire, and perhaps this gives Sicily its subdued character. I expected Palermo to be a loud and chaotic second Naples, but the island’s capital feels eerily quiet a lot of the time.
Everywhere is getting increasingly similar. Wherever you go these days, the unique traits of that place are getting ironed out as people merge into an international style that presumably pleases the greatest number of Easyjet punters. The decor of the apartments, the winsome easy-listening covers of the pop, rock and punk canon that get played in all the wine bars, the new custom of serving spritzes and cocktails in jam jars… not that it isn’t nice, but you wish places would stay true to themselves a bit more. With everyone criss-crossing Europe all the time, this cross-pollination is perhaps unavoidable.
It’s not that cheap. I’ve travelled through most of Italy and I had hopes that Sicily would be a mecca of fabulous, dirt-cheap food, but if it’s not as well-trodden as Venice or Rome, it is a pretty big hit with tourists, and priced accordingly. My wife wondered if the restaurants are passing on the cost of Mafia protection money to their customers, I think they probably just know how much Americans and so on have to spend on their holidays (or are passing on the costs of transporting produce from Italy to their island). We were touring all the famous artistic and historical hot spots on the northern and eastern coasts, I imagine it is a very different story inland or on the other side of Sicily.
There are a hell of a lot of stray cats. Every town and city seems to have a remarkably large population of stray cats, who will meow at any passing stranger of an evening in the hope of food. The further you delve into the backstreets, the more of them you see to the point where it feels unnerving. The cats tend to all be very skinny and very young, so one suspects that their story ends badly in almost all cases. In fact, on leaving the quite nice street we stayed on in Palermo on our last morning, there was a dead cat stretched out on the corner of the street and the main road.
The Baedeker Raids 