Eat, Pray, Love

dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of twenty minutes
I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I’ve eaten yet in all of Italy. It’s pasta,
but a shape of pasta I’ve never before seen—big, fresh, sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into
the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope’s hat, stuffed with a hot, aromatic puree of crus-
taceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of
julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey, oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit, stewed
in thyme.
But Syracuse, the next day, is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here
in the cold rain, late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand years
of history under my feet in Syracuse. It’s a place of such ancient civilization that it makes
Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that Hercules once
slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called “a city not in the least inferior
to Athens itself.” Syracuse is the link between ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Many great
playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato thought it would be the ideal location
for a utopian experiment where perhaps “by some divine fate” rulers might become philosoph-
ers, and philosophers might become rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syra-
cuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.
I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can’t
answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he has
stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in her
mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly, I ask this
fisherman where I should eat tonight, and I leave our conversation clutching yet another little
piece of paper, directing me to a little restaurant with no name, where—as soon as I sit down
that night—the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks
floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges
tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari
house specialty.
“No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens... do
nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.”
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of
one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next
lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases
your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right
next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?
Of course, one can’t live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortality will
interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty, real life is never far from anyone’s