May 20, 2010
Shoes wear out fast in Sicily, and so do feet.
I buy every Dr. Scholl’s pain relief product on the market. I slather callus goop onto the soles of my feet. I wrap them in moleskin. I’m gellin’.
But I gladly suffer the pain. Because nothing can beat the sheer romance of old cobbles.
When your heels hit these medieval stones, they sing! (The stones that is, not so much the heels.)
I love the texture of cobbles under my toes, and the shine rubbed in by generations of hooves, wheels, and feet.
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Readers, can you help me? Will you consider voting for my Sicily photograph in the Islands poll? Here’s the link. The link will bring you to a photo I shot of a Sicilian woman in Capo Passero (in the extreme southeast corner of Sicily). You can vote by clicking on *My Favorite* underneath the photo. (I could win a photography course and you could win a camera!) GRAZIE MILLE! (To see thumbnails of all 22 photos in the competition, click this link.)
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May 17, 2010
Doing the bathroom twice was not fun.
In the aftermath of Round One, I was tempted to give up and flee Sicily for good.
 Results of Round One “You get no respect from your crew,” noted a friend. She persuaded a local bigwig to throw his weight around, Sicilian-style, as my proxy.
That did the trick.
Early one morning a new piastrellista, tile setter, showed up on my doorstep smelling of cologne and rubbing sleep from his eyes. He toiled away in a no-nonsense fashion, furiously attacking his predecessor’s work. Glass shattered kaleidoscopically.
“Io sistemo tutto,” he kept repeating. I systematize all. (Sistemare is one of the highest Italian virtues.)
To fuel his fury, I ran to the local bar for tiny cups of thick black coffee and sweet ricotta tarts.
Round Two produced an apple-green bathroom. The tiles are ceramic and plain—not the pricey designer ones of yore. But you know what? Good riddance to those fancy-pants glass tiles. I like the brighter cheap-o ones better.
 Results of Round Two I hate to trivialize Andre Gide’s words by using them in this mundane context, but I’ll do it anyway: “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
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May 13, 2010
Of all the things I love about living in Sicily, at the top of my list are the venditori ambulenti, roving vendors.
Can you believe a produce market comes to me?
All I have to do is hang around the house in my sweats and wait for the vendor’s croaking call (Carrote! Asparagi!) to get a garden-fresh lunch. Sometimes, when I don’t appear in the street fast enough, he rings my buzzer to announce his arrival. I shuffle out in house slippers with the other Sicilian housewives.
The back of his truck overflows with floppy lettuces, cauliflower the size of your head, ripe tomatoes, wild artichokes, and just-plucked oranges—their green-leafed stems still attached as proof of freshness.
He never weighs anything. The total price is always €1.50, no matter what. Today I chose some fat fennel, wild strawberries, and a kilo of plump tomatoes. He smiled and tossed in two unexpected cucumbers “for the tomato salad.”
He shows up a few times a week, always chomping a toothpick. He flirts like crazy with all the housewives (Sicilians never outgrow this game). He shares his recipes, and I pretend to understand his rapid-fire Sicilian.
Then there’s the hawker with a megaphone who pulls up in a white van. He carries around a whole mini-market: tomato paste, biscotti, lentils, toilet paper, you name it. He saves me a trip down 100 steps to the nearest little Alis market.
I ask you: is this not a beautiful thing?
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Thanks everyone for your recent comments. A big CONGRATULATIONS to Christine Hickman for winning the random drawing on May 10 for Toni Lydecker’s Seafood alla Siciliana. Christine lives part-time in Perugia (Umbria), where she runs cooking classes. What a perfect fit for the book! Check out Christine’s website at sonomarcella.com.
May 9, 2010
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link that binds us to duty and truth…
Francesco Petrarch (Italian poet, 1304-1374)
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Buona Festa della Mamma!!!!!
May 6, 2010
My kitchen sink arrived from Tuscany in a beat-up truck with a blue plastic curtain. The truck came to a halt in front of the house. A burly driver got out and slowly slid open the curtain to unveil the sink as if were an opera d’arte.
Which, in a way, it is.
Having walked into my renovation blind as a bat, I’ve been, generally speaking, a catastrofista. But not this time. The sink is perfect. It’s made of graniglia—whatever that is—and is supple as silk. I run my hands over it the way you’d stroke a cat.
It awaits a backsplash of colorful Caltagirone tiles.
I no longer need to bathe from two old buckets or stoop over an old shower drain to brush my teeth. I have a sink!
I’ll be washing dishes in this sink soon. That’s right: No dishwasher.
My life in Sicily is all about getting into the rhythms of a slow island life, stepping back into another century, learning to dawdle. Less is more is my new mantra. This does not mean that I’ll give up my computer and subsist on snails and wild chickory, but it does mean I’ll forgo a dishwasher. A dryer, a freezer, a car. Even a TV. I’ll start savoring the way stars light the night. The way vines drip with grapes. The way doves strut and coo on bleached terracotta roofs.
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You can win this cookbook!
Toni Lydecker’s Seafood alla Siciliana is somewhat smaller than coffee-table size, with thick, glossy paper, wonderful recipes, very pretty photos, and stories about Sicily’s cuisine. All you have to do is leave a comment on any of my blog posts between now and May 9, and I’ll enter your name for a random drawing on May 10, 2010. (You can enter one comment a day, max.) The only hitch is that you must provide a US or Canadian address for the shipping, so my apologies to readers on other continents.
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All photos and text on BaroqueSicily are Copyright of Jann Huizenga ©2009-2015, unless otherwise noted. Material may not be copied or re-published without written permission. All rights reserved.
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