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Even though I'm not a native, each time I go visit the family back in Sicily, I feel like I'm going home. My first visit to the historically rich island was at three years old. My father had been away from his immediate family for seven years; my mother was as green as a tourist. But there was enough family around to keep us feeling comfortable.
While the towns and countryside were antique, to me it was all new. The beauty of the language that I barely understood, flowers and plants that I had never seen, foods so rich in aromas and flavors that you never wanted to stop eating--all these gave me the sense of a comfortable excitement. While everything was new to me, it was ok to relax in it.
Returning at age six without any English-speaking relatives, forced me to no longer be a visitor. These were my people now--cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. And it felt like my town, too. With relatives all within walking distance, it was easy to feel like I was home.
As I grew older and visited more frequently (7 times over the next 30 years), I developed a deep appreciation for the antiquity of it all. After all, in my hometown of Chicago, the oldest standing building is only about 125 years old. Some of the family homes in our town in Sicily are much older than that! It was something to realize that hundreds of years ago there were people living in these towns and that a lot was still the same.
Cobblestone streets are still found in the older neighborhoods. Houses were built one immediately next to the other, no space in between. The homes were all made of cement; it held in the heat in winter, and kept things inside cooler in the summer. If you had money and you wanted to expand, you added another floor to your home. In the older homes you can tell the electricity was added later. In some even the water pipes were added much after families took up residence.
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