I haven’t seen as much of Italy as I had hoped to by now. Recent visits to Tuscany, and Lake Ledro & Lake Garda, motivated me to make more of an effort to explore and learn more about the country. Increasingly, I found myself relishing Italian food, despite being the only person I know who avoids pasta and sweets (something I had always attributed to Italian cuisine). That’s just to say that I’m having a fun time figuring Italy out, bit by bit. What has kept my attention most is the regional differences. Italy feels bifurcated between north and south. In Sicily, a tour guide told me that Sicilians see themselves as Mediterranean, rather than just Italian. The divide isn’t hostile, just deeply ingrained, which might be similar to the divide in the USA between the North and South, or the East Coast and the rest of the country. This dynamic has reminded me a bit of Germany’s regional diversity with different spoken dialects (Sicily has its own regional dialect) I only had a week in Sicily before meeting my sister at a yoga retreat in Sardinia, and Palermo felt like the right place to spend it. Just enough time […]
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