“Travelling makes one modest – you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” — Gustave Flaubert
I’ve come to Italy for a month. It was envy that led me here. Two young relatives were studying in Italy, and I was filled with a deep restless – at times even seething – envy that they got to live in a country I have always had an affinity with.
I studied in Florence at age 20 and it was the making of me. It was the first time I was in a country where I knew absolutely no–one and thus could be exactly as I was then, not boxed and labelled by the old shape I’d been before. The immense trauma of my earlier years was wiped clean, at least while I was there. I came into my own self.
Without any baggage of who I was expected to be, or who I thought I should be, I discovered what I truly loved. This included: going everywhere on foot, trying new things including those I thought I wouldn’t like, being independent, a community of like-minded oddballs, and hearing the Italian language. (The food was spectacular but I was not then and still am not a foodie; I ate the same (excellent) panino for lunch at my local, and the same pasta – 22 pieces of penne, I kid you not – for dinner at home every single day.)
I kept a sketchbook diary – ink only, no watercolour in those days – where I jotted down my daily adventures. It’s since been lost but I still remember scribbling down Italian phrases I overheard, notes on what kind of coffee to drink at what time of day (very important to Italians), and drawing little details I found charming, with every corner holding a fascinating or amusing discovery.
Five years later, I returned to Florence to work for a year as an assistant teacher in film and in photography. My romance with Italy grew even deeper. I also loved teaching and adored my students. Once more, after some very rocky years in the interim, I finally breathed easy again. I found what I still consider the most charming place I have ever lived in – a tiny L–shaped studio with a skylight over my bed and my own staircase leading to my own private rooftop terrace with terracotta tiles and rows of potted plants one street away from the Duomo. It was so close I felt I could reach out and touch it.
Over the last 25 years, I visited Italy for weddings, to meet friends, and most recently for a film festival. I travelled quite a bit around the country – I gasped at the rustic, historical beauty of Assisi and Lucca; Naples thrilled me, Venice enthralled me, the Aeolian Islands charmed me.
I continued to study Italian on and off (and yet I’m still appalling; I seem to suck at languages). I felt drawn to their rich history, architecture, art, landscape, and their unwavering devotion to uncompromising quality in food (appreciated even by non–foodie me), in design, in living life well.
I liked it even for the reasons that many continue to leave it – a filmmaker in Split once told me that anyone with grand ambition had already left Croatia for London or New York; I would say this could be applied to many Italians as well. But I liked Italy for its slower pace, and what I saw as its lack of ruthlessness. I appreciated its family–oriented culture, where multiple generations gather and mix. I liked its good–life–first ethos, instead of the work–until–you–die one of the UK and US.
Moving to Italy wasn’t a practical option. My film life kept me mostly in India, another country I had met in my third decade and co–opted as my own. When I left the film industry altogether some years ago, my anchor was released and I could be based anywhere. Indian bureacracy pushed me out. And so I roamed, looking for a home.
I’ve spent a lifetime moving. Even now, as I arrived in Italy, it’s the fourth country and third continent I’ve been to in three weeks (this hectic travelling was for family emergencies, but it’s not that far removed from how I usually operate). It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted.
Sicily greeted me with sunshine and a genial vibe. Even with no history to this part of the country, it felt familiar as soon as I landed. The bright blue sea glistened next to the airport. My darling camino friend Nik – whom I met only four months ago, but camino friendships run deep – met me at the airport. How lovely he is! How kind Italians are. I forgot this.
Within Italy, Sicily has always called to me. I thought this was because I like warm climates. Or because its history has truly been a melting pot of many cultures and races over the centuries. Or because northern Italians have always been snooty about the poorer, scruffier south where Sicily is, and I do so admire the underdog (they’re not entitled and they’re ingenious about surviving).
I’ve come to Palermo to see if I like it enough to consider living here. I keep checking in with myself to see how I feel throughout my first day.
I’d forgotten how sincere and considerate Italians are; everyone is so friendly. The guardedness I carried over from London melts away; I am swiftly disarmed. My big city pulse can slow down; nobody’s in a rush here.
Nik takes me walking around the city centre, and I admire all of it – the crumbling facades, the centuries-old architecture, the tucked–away parks, the stupendous food (we eat spleen, a local favourite, and I am ready to become a foodie).
Palermo 2023 is very different from my memories of Florence 1992. People are respectful, nobody is snobbish, and everyone is wearing trainers. Like everywhere else in the world, the same global brands depressingly take up most of the big streets, and everybody is glued to their phones. Palermo is Italy’s fifth biggest city, but it feels cosy and walkable, buzzy in the way I love, and large enough to contain multitudes. It reminds me quite a bit of Bombay, with families and friends out late into the night, really claiming their public spaces, not just using it as a means to travel between private huddled pockets of work and home.
Though it’s very early days, I’m cautiously loving it. After I left Italy all those years ago, it had seemed a wistful and fantastical idea to live here again. Even contemplating it now feels like the way a holiday would to a workaholic – long–awaited and almost guilt–inducing in how pleasurable it feels.
My UK passport prevents me from simply moving in. (Every time I think of Brexit, I am filled with rage – who votes to make their world smaller?) And if Indian bureaucracy overwhelmed me, I’m not about to have it any easier with its Italian counterpart. So I don’t know if it’s even feasible on a practical level.
But this I do know: it’s good to follow our envy. Envy, that dark emotion so easy to snuff down or disown, reveals what our hearts truly yearn for. And it is there where we store our light.
“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” — Hannah Arendt
Recommendations:
BOOK
Andrea Camilleri’s detective novel, set in a fictitious town in Sicily, The Shape of Water introduced us to Inspector Salvo Montalbano. I’ve read enough murder mysteries to usually predict whodunnit but this one surprised me. I’m looking forward to reading the remainder of the 28 books in the series (Camilleri died in 2019). Nik said the TV adaptations are such a success, they’ve started a prequel too.
FOOD
For visitors to Palermo, try the pane con la milza (spleen sandwich) at Nni Franco u Vastiddaru on via Vittoria Emanuele, 102. You can have it schietta which is what our waiter recommended, with a squeeze of lemon over the organ meat, or topped with cheese, maritata, which Nik says is more decadent.
FILM
Not for the first time, and because I do it at every chance I get, I highly recommend one of my favourite films, Italian or otherwise, Pane e tulipani (Bread and Tulips). Directed by Silvio Soldini, it stars Licia Maglietta as a housewife who takes an unexpected turn on her way back from a family holiday. Funny, thoroughly charming and life-affirming, I watch this when I need a boost, and to enjoy the delights of Venice on screen.
So looking forward to reading about you and all your adventures in the quest of finding a home.
So lovely. Vani and I got to spend a month in Italy in 2011, between the Locarno film festival and the Venice film festival I’ll never forget our time there.