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I have only a week left here. I’m planning to go back to America for Christmas before flying
to India, not only because I can’t stand the thought of spending Christmas without my family
but also because the next eight months of my journey—India and Indonesia—require a com-
plete repacking of gear. Very little of the stuff you need when you are living in Rome is the
same stuff you need when you are wandering around India.
And maybe it’s in preparation for my trip to India that I decide to spend this last week trav-
eling through Sicily—the most third-world section of Italy, and therefore not a bad place to go
if you need to prepare yourself to experience extreme poverty. Or maybe I only want to go to
Sicily because of what Goethe said: “Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what
Italy is.”
But it’s not easy getting to or around Sicily. I have to use all my finding-out skills to find a
train that runs on Sunday all the way down the coast and then to find the correct ferryboat to
Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded
doors, “It’s not my fault I’m ugly! I’ve been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the
Mafia, too!”) Once I’ve arrived in Messina, I have to find a bus station (grimy as a smoker’s
lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the ticket booth, mourning his life, and see
if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs
and beaches of Sicily’s stupendous and hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina, and
then I have to find a taxi and then I have to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of
whom to ask my favorite question in Italian: “Where is the best food in this town?” In Taorm-
ina, that person turns out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things
anyone can ever give me in life—a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant
written on it, a hand-drawn map of how to find the place.
Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting
ready for her evening’s customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet, trying not to
knock over the Christmas crèche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I don’t
need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this is my
first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in Sicilian