44 TRAVEL+LEISURE | OCTOBER 2019
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San Giovanni
Evangelista, a
Baroque church in
Scicli, Sicily.
summer torpor, and our former
toddler affixed posters to his college
dorm room, we were suddenly free to
go...anywhere. Anywhere our tuition
bills would allow, anyway.
We fled to Sicily, which reaches its
true, full-throated glory in September.
At Segesta, bleached temples stood out
against brown fields and a cerulean sky
that had shed its summer pallor. The
tomatoes and eggplants were at their
most succulent. The restaurants always
had a last-minute table for two. Young
Sicilians had ebbed back to northern
jobs and universities after the summer
holidays, while Airbnb helped their
families extract a trickle of income
from farmhouses and inherited
apartments. Ariella and I took mom-
and-dad selfies and shot them back
home to prove that middle-aged
parents can have a life of their own.
After nearly 30 years of marriage, in
which our New York apartment has
doubled as a work space for two
overlapping careers, we didn’t need to
go abroad to spend time together. We
had also never stopped traveling; when
our son joined the road show, he
proved to be game, observant, and
curious, and we learned to
accommodate the natural needs of a
non-adult. His tolerance for hunger,
boredom, uncertainty, and discomfort
changed as he grew, and didn’t always
sync up with ours. Now, though,
Ariella and I could revive old rhythms
and practice the kind of
improvisational two-step we had
developed early on. We encouraged
each other’s sense of adventure and
placated each other’s anxieties, just as
we’d done as newlyweds.
If we had those first years of
marriage on our minds, it was partly
because September is wedding season
in Sicily, or so it seemed from the
ceremonies and photo shoots we
stumbled on nearly every day. In
Scopello, a seaside hamlet west of
Palermo, a groom reached for his bride
through layers of frothy tulle,
incongruous against the sere cliffs. InM
Y WIFE, ARIELLA, and I had lived and
traveled by the rhythms of the academic
year virtually our entire lives. So it came
as a cognitive shock a few Septembers ago to
realize that, even as yellow school buses emerged
from hibernation, campuses shook off theirLOVE AT ANY STAGE
When you become an empty nester, is it once again possible to travel with
the same spirit of curiosity you had as a young couple? JUSTIN DAVIDSON
and his wife head to Sicily to discover the joy of making it up as you go along.