Sicily: The Cursed Paradise

At 19, I participated in a school project that allowed me to live for a month in England for free, visiting the most famous places with a fearless group of people, or at least almost all of them. In the first week of the trip, one of the boys realized how much he missed home and wanted to go back immediately. I had just experienced my first teenage heartbreak and, with it, had also lost all my closest friends at the time. I was in no hurry to go home. Upon my return, I still thirsted for adventure.

At 24, I moved to Tuscany for my university specialization. After experiencing a chaotic, sultry space arrogantly stuck in the past, I found myself in a more central, cosmopolitan, and vibrant world. In my life away from home, I only had time to return once every 3-6 months, and I didn't particularly miss it because I could enjoy the best of the South (in the people I met) and the best of a more modern and connected position. At the end of this experience, I still thirsted for adventure.

Cala del Leone, Tuscany, June 2018 (personal archive)

At 30, I decided to push myself so far as to completely change countries. Enough: enough waiting for opportunities that never come, enough feeling isolated and distant from everything, enough dealing with all the limitations of living in the South and having no weapons to fight the hunger for ambition. It's no coincidence that since the 1800s, Southern intellectuals have migrated North to pursue careers, but even this is now almost entirely unsustainable.

Vienna immediately captivated me with its infrastructure, greenery in every neighborhood, and vitality, which, though perhaps not as warm as the places where I grew up, is certainly more efficient. Here it is perfect, I thought! For nine months, I had nothing but a thirst for adventure!

View from the Tonnara di Avola, Sicily, September 2023

And then, one day, when nine months had passed and I had overcome many of the limits I had always seen in my Sicily, enough to allow me to enjoy the visit, almost with the eyes of a tourist, I realized that I had been cursed.

I had been cursed, like every Sicilian, to grow up in a land that possesses the beauty of the Garden of Eden but where you cannot survive; and its beauty is such that it makes you love it, pushes you to resist for years, until you decide it's time to leave; and the bitterness remains in the awareness that you are leaving behind all the wrong things you had to endure but also all the mysterious beauty of a land that has been contested by dozens of different peoples since the beginning of world history.

Experiencing the places where I grew up with the eyes of an unaware tourist is a difficult contradiction that made me feel angry because it made me feel powerless. And from that moment, I understood that my forbidden paradise would soon be missed.