by Greg Cummings
"Sicily is the clue to everything."
[13 min read]
The Mezzogiorno sun shines relentlessly on Lipari Island. Temperatures continue to climb even as afternoon creeps into evening, and the cry of cicadas intensifies with every degree. I’m where I’m meant to be, in a hammock strung between two olive trees in an outdoor cantina half way up a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and the hazy distant coastline of mainland Italy.
Roberta is making dinner: chopping plum tomatoes and toasting slices of wholewheat bread for bruschetta while at the same time preparing tuna carpaccio. My wife’s friend Antonio is hosting us on Lipari and a culinary treat is her way of repaying his hospitality.
The sea below is a dreamy turquoise. With one eye, I watch the bustle of maritime traffic: hydrofoils ferrying day-trippers between the islands, sailing yachts, pleasure cruisers and zodiacs exploring the sawtoothed coastlines. Fishing happens at night. Imagination runs wild in the Aeolian Islands, the mythological home of Aeolus, god of the winds, as it has done for millennia. There’s literature about these waters written thousands of years ago.
“I’ve come to vanquish gods and monsters,” I tell Roberta.
“Vero!” she says. “Because you are strong, my warrior. You are a monster warrior.”
A seductive sea breeze fragrant with saltwater and jasmine wafts through the cantina, fluttering her hair. Earlier we swam in the Pool of Venus, a crystal clear grotto some sixty metres below the cantina. The climb back was exacting. Now, as I drink rustic red wine and listen to Pino Danielle sing about Sicily — lilting love songs that blend seamlessly with our leafy lair — I succumb to the langue d’amour, wishing this day might turn into a month in the Med.
My mind drifts to mythology. The stage is set for cyclopses, satyrs and nymphs — those lovers of panpipes and Dionysian revelry, those tragic foils of myth and drama. I see them frolicking in the vineyards, rowdy, mischievous, and drunk. I hear their bawdy song. And we shall drink sweet wine and gather grapes and figs and olives in the valley, and we shall satisfy our sexual desires with wanton intercourse and chaos, and then we shall sleep a sleep that endures for eons, never to awaken again, except in your imaginings. Or moments like this.
To the Greeks, who arrived in the 8th century BC, Sicily was a rich source of mythology. Whether out of fear or protectionism, they reserved the island for their most fearsome monsters. Polyphemus, the one-eyed son of Poseidon who first appeared as a savage man-eating giant in Homer’s Odyssey, was said to have lived beneath Mount Etna, the stratovolcano that looms over the island. Cyclopes, makers of Zeus’ thunderbolts, were the assistants of the smith-god Hephaestus at his forge in the Aeolians, the island of Thermessa, renamed Vulcano by the Romans after their own fire god. I’m just grateful to be downwind of that forge, which relentlessly disgorges fetid sulphur gases, a byproduct of the African Plate grinding against the Eurasian Plate.
Trembling islands and burning mountains are commonplace here. As much as the Greeks shaped Sicilian culture (or, for that matter the Arabs, Normans, Spanish, etc.), so have natural disasters. You can hear the volcanoes breathe. Sometimes you feel the ground shake, and wonder. Etna regularly erupts with all the fury and vitriol of a red-headed siciliana. Stromboli, one of the seven Aeolian Islands, has been continually erupting for 5,000 years. Its subterranean grumblings are so much a part of every day life that the locals refer to it as “Iddu” (“him”). Robbi and I celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary on Stromboli, climbed half way up the volcano’s ashen slopes to dine at Osservatorio, a pizzeria with a lava rock terrace some 200 metres below the flaming caldera. There, with ring-side seats to one of nature’s great infernal spectacles, I gave my wife a diamond forged by one of Hephaestus’s cyclopses.
🎥 War of the Volcanoes 🎥
In 1949, two films were shot simultaneously in the Aeolian Islands. Roberto Rossellini was directing Stromboli on the island of the same name, while Vulcano was being filmed on nearby Salina. Both featured fiercely independent female leads, portrayed in raw, neorealist fashion.
Anna Magnani, darling of Italian cinema and Rossellini’s lover, was on Salina playing a woman hardened and heartbroken — pouring her rage into every scene. On Stromboli, Ingrid Bergman was isolated, disoriented, and increasingly fearful — both on screen and off. Magnani suspected Bergman was having an affair with her man. It’s said that at night she called out to him across the water, begging him to return to her. (Sure, if her voice could carry for 40 kilometres over rough and windy seas).
The love triangle erupted. Tabloid photos of Bergman and Rossellini holding hands circulated around the world. The press swarmed. Life magazine reported: “… in an atmosphere crackling with rivalry… reporters were accredited, like war correspondents, to one or the other of the embattled camps…“
At the premier of Vulcano the projector broke down irreparably and Magnani’s film was quickly forgotten. In the edit suite, RKO butchered Stromboli and Rossellini sued the studio for a breach of contract. Bergman left the islands pregnant with Isabella Rossellini. The scandal torpedoed her career and the door to Hollywood slammed shut.
The volcanoes had spoken.
At last Antonio has joined us, shaken from his afternoon slumber by my impatient wife. They drove up the steep path from his house together on his motorbike and Robbi complained the whole way about the precariousness of the ride. Aromas of virgin olive oil pervade as we enjoy her bruschetta with a glass of vino rosso. “Salud.” The wine here is cheap and cheerful and goes down like silk. Indeed, Bacchus is said to have brought the first vine from Sicily.
Food is the most common topic of conversation among Italians. Take away pasta, pomodori and parmigiano and they’re helpless. When Robbi speaks about food in her native tongue, her words resonate like smooth stones cascading down a granite escarpment. I get the passion if not the meaning.
Tuna carpaccio was the first meal she made for me, in November 2016 in Malindi, Kenya. We had just met. She offered to cook for me at our mutual friend’s oceanfront villa which I was housesitting. She picked capers from the garden. We ate outside under the stars, serenaded by the Swahili Coast: rhythms of waves upon beaches and reefs, and warm sea breezes blowing through palm leaves and Casuarina trees. I can still feel the morsels of freshly-caught tuna rolling around my tongue. I was smitten. She excited me.
“I’d been single all my life, till I met Greg,” she tells Antonio. “I always wanted to meet somebody that had the same passion as I have for Africa and after few months together with him, I knew that after a very long wait, I’d met my soulmate. Yes, we came from different continents, but what really matters is that we share the same love for Africa.”
Every year, Robbi and I try to rotate through Canada, Italy and Kenya – our trinacria of nations – staying for a few months in each to rekindle old friendships and look in on family. My parents have passed on. Robbi nursed my mother through her final months. Now her own genitori need her tender loving care. Her father, Pietro has developed breathing and mobility issues and her mother, Pina is showing signs of dementia. I’m sorry I didn’t know them when they were spry restaurateurs — proprietors of Pietro and later Galleone, two of Sicily’s most celebrated restaurants — and were the talk of the town. Pietro used to fill every moment of our time together telling me about those halcyon days. Now he struggles to remember who I am.
We’ve come to Lipari to escape the melancholy of those long goodbyes. Antonio’s house, perched on a sea-facing eyrie and only accessible by motorboat or motorbike, is an ideal retreat. Its traditional Aeolian style incorporates E pulera architecture: white stucco pillars, cane roofing and blue Persian doors. The rooftop is reserved for sunbathing but at night, the views of the coast of Sicily are stupendous. If I ever become a bestselling author, we’ll charter a yacht and spend our summers sailing in and out of mythology around the Aeolian Islands.
Antonio makes jewelry with obsidian, 
a hard, dark, glasslike volcanic rock formed by the rapid solidification of lava without crystallization. He finds it by looking in the right places and has some impressive samples. He made me an obsidian necklace. Lipari has been a source of obsidian since 1500 BC when it was traded indirectly with Cornwall in southwest Britain for tin, and a key resource for prehistoric people. Lipari still thrives.
Last time Antonio and I went into town we got caught up in some infectious public dancing in the main square. My suggestion that we go again before dinner is met with contempt, however. “I’ll smash on your face,” cries Robbi, I smile, sigh sublimely and say, “Va bene.” She’s Etna to my Stromboli. Not a day goes by when I don’t pat myself on the back for marrying her. She is the only reason that I’m being sensible about my life again, for the first time in a while. I want to give her all she ever dreamed of. I don’t want to let her down.
Medusa, the snaky-haired she monster of myth, is stitched into the cultural fabric of southern Italy — a.k.a. the Mezzogiorno — where Greek ideals outlived Roman. 
Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, and the only one who was mortal. Unlike her sisters Stheno and Euryale, she started out as a beautiful woman. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Roman poet tells us she was a priestess of Athena, known for her stunning beauty and long, flowing hair. Her transformation is the result of divine punishment. She was raped by Poseidon inside Athena’s temple. But instead of punishing Poseidon, Athena punished Medusa, transforming her into a monster. Her hair became a nest of venomous snakes. Her gaze turned anyone who looked at her to stone.
Idea for a sitcom: Polyphemus and Medusa are running a pizzeria in Napoli, bickering the whole time. He lost an eye in a street fight and is forever stoned. She’s haggard, ill tempered and constantly hissing insults at him. It’s a grimy yet wildly popular pizzeria tucked into a narrow Napoli back alley, somewhere between Mount Vesuvius and sheer madness. The walls are cracked. The oven is lava-fuelled. The health inspector has stopped coming.
It’s myth in a modern setting. Polyphemus, turned pizzaiolo after losing his eye in a brawl over anchovy toppings, is perpetually high on “herbal infusions” from Mount Etna — claims oregano is a portal to divine wisdom. He wears a leather eyepatch, smokes hand-rolled cigarettes shaped like scrolls, makes epic pizza dough but regularly forgets orders and names. And he keeps trying to play his lute and sing ancient epics between orders. “Medusa!” he cries, “I put love into that quattro formaggi — why you gotta hex it with your rage?”
Medusa is the brains of the business, running the front-of-house with a temper sharper than her knives. She has snakes for hair, all of them bitter food critics. They hiss constant insults: “You call that a calzone? I’ve seen better folds in a napkin!” and, “Is this pizza or a burnt offering to the gods of mediocrity?” They hiss anytime someone asks for pineapple on pizza. Medusa’s impetuous. She keeps turning waiters into statues — they now form an elegant patio arrangement. She dreams of earning a Michelin star and escaping to Capri. “Minchia! If you didn’t roll dough like a blind goat, maybe we’d have a star by now.”
The health inspector comes in, sees the statues, turns around silently and leaves.
Images of the Aeolian Islands
As I swing in and out of sunbeams in my letto pensile, I marvel at the sagaciousness of the Ancient Greeks. In his Bibliotheca historica, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who was born in Sicily and lived in the first century BC, writes about the origin of life on earth. He tells of “the Power of the Earth to produce living Creatures at the first Origen” and that “out of the Earth when it’s hardened, and the Air changed from its due and natural Temperament, Animals are generated.” It’s rare to find even a pseudo scientific explanation of the Earth’s origin story that predates Christendom, but then the Greeks were a damn prescient lot.
Still, how did they manage to dream up a monster with a single, orb-shaped eye in the middle of his forehead? One theory is that an early colonizer — let’s call him Achaeus the Fanciful — while exploring a cave, found an enormous skull with one big hole in the middle. It was too big for a human, too ugly for a god, and it lived in a cave. His conclusion: “Obviously, a one-eyed giant who forges thunderbolts and eats sheep.” And with the stroke of his reed pen, he turned that skull into a head-bashing, son of a god with a dim worldview. In this case, myth filled the gap left by science. Palaeontology had yet to be invented, so Achaeus had no way of knowing that what he had mistaken for a monster’s eye socket was in fact the nasal cavity of a dwarf elephant.
Sicily was once home to dwarf elephants, most notably Palaeoloxodon falconeri, which roamed the island during the Pleistocene epoch. Standing barely a meter tall, these pint-sized pachyderms evolved from mainland giants, adapting to island life by shrinking into adorable megafauna. Their evolution is part of a broader phenomenon known as island dwarfism, wherein large animals evolve into smaller forms when isolated on islands with limited resources. The island’s ancient ecosystem also included giant swans, dwarf hippos, and other island-adapted oddities. Fossils suggest they lived tens of thousands of years ago but became extinct before humans settled here. Greek mythologists might have had an even bigger field day if they’d known about the giant swans and pygmy elephants. Truth is stranger than fiction. Today remains of Palaeoloxodon falconeri can be found in Palermo’s natural history museum, or hidden in sea caves where their bones still whisper stories of a forgotten island world.
Elephants may have returned to the island in the 4th century AD, though not of their own accord. Villa Romana del Casale, mentioned only once in the pages of the Itinerarium Antonini, a Roman travel guide, was said to have been located halfway between Catania and Agrigento. But sometime in the early Middle Ages, the villa was consumed by a massive landslide and buried beneath the sands of time, until it was rediscovered in the 1950s.
It is a masterpiece of antiquity. Excavations revealed 3,500 square meters of polychrome Roman mosaics, some of the finest found anywhere. They feature detailed menageries of wild animals, including elephants, being hunted or captured and dragged onto ships. Although nothing is known of the villa’s owner, these themes imply he may have imported the creatures from Africa for venationes — the staging of exotic hunts for public entertainment. Judging by the style and tesserae used, the mosaics were almost certainly handcrafted by African artists. And because the tiles are made of stone, the colour has not faded in any way since 400 AD.
The mosaics in the Sala delle Dieci Ragazze (“Room of the Ten Girls”) are startling. The scene is strangely contemporary, seemingly depicting girls in skimpy two-piece bathing suits — actually sportswear not swimwear. Gymnastic trials were likely held at the villa. Still, I’d say we can add bikinis to the list of what the Romans did for us. It was all fun and games before the Fall of the Roman Empire.
“Well the danger on the rocks has surely past / Still I remain tied to the mast / Could it be that I have found my home at last / Home at last.”
I identify with Homer’s hero. Like Odysseus, I’ve wandered far from home — crossing continents instead of seas, trading Homeric tempests for tangled visas, ornery border officials, and death-defying bus rides. Where he faced sirens and cyclopes, I’ve navigated cultural labyrinths, bureaucratic delays, and the slow unspooling of language in distant lands.
Both of us are shaped by the journey as much as the destination — accumulating stories, scars, and wisdom from every stop. And just as Odysseus carried Ithaca in his heart through every storm, I’ve carried a sense of global purpose — not to reclaim a throne, but to learn, to serve, to understand.
I am a modern-day Odysseus, with sandals worn thin by decades of travel — and feet wise enough now to know when to pause, and when to press on. But where there was danger on the rocks, I’ve succumbed to the siren song and made a home. As poetic as that sounds, it’s actually true. Not far from where Odysseus faced the perils of Scilla and Charybdis — the Strait of Messina — Roberta and I inherited a ground floor garden flat from her aunt.
A short video - 'Between Scylla and Charybdis' - with Italian subtitles
We’re where we’re meant to be. Sicily’s storied past is profoundly inspiring and satisfies a burning curiosity, and there is still so much more to discover. Granted, Robbi and I could be anywhere and feel almost as satisfied. We have a big beautiful love that transcends the seven seas. I’m not a flag waver. Nations are constructs. Borders are artificial. But Sicily is family. Sicily is dramatic. I can sit in a teatro antico on the same stones that Ancient Greeks sat upon, take a front row seat to history, or watch Robert Plant belt out Led Zeppelin standards as a full moon rises over Etna. Sicilians can help us navigate the future – how to adapt cash-crops to climate change, overcome religious intolerance, vanquish corruption for the sake of coming generations, and eat well.
Yes, it’s all coming together nicely in the Mezzogiorno. In my scintillatingly sagacious 60s and 70s, I’ll be my best self, my most powerful, making smarter decisions and doing smarter things that will continue to resonate long after I’m gone. Sicily’s where I’ll sing my swan song. This ancient land and I share some characteristics. We’re both charming, worldly and old yet still possess bags of potential. And, insofar as I’ve lived in eleven countries and Sicily’s been ruled by nine, we’ve both been shaped by a dizzying array of foreign cultures. We’re mongrels.
“La cena è pronta,” smiles Roberta. Supper’s ready!
Robert Plant performing at the Teatro Antico, Toarmina, Sicily
“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood. Their only expressions were works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind."
