I was 20 when I planned my first trip to Europe, and it was only natural that I would seek her out. Even though she was bedridden from a series of strokes, Margarett remained glamorous—yellow sheets, a hot pink coverlet, the walls crowded with paintings and drawings. “Go to Florence,” she told me. “Make sure you see the Donatellos!” My eccentric grandmother was teaching me to travel like an artist, to find in what I saw something I could carry away with me.
Now I was following her lead again. My trip to Sicily would not be about the food, the Mafia or the sea, but about ruins and architecture, landscapes and traces of Magna Graecia, as ancient Sicily was called when it was colonized by the Greeks. It was a familiar feeling, being led by Margarett’s imagination, although I am no longer 20 but in my early sixties, close to the age Margarett was when she went to Sicily. Earlier in my life, it had been easy to identify with a young woman who had her life ahead of her, but how would I, for decades a working writer, connect with the grandmother who had left her art behind?
My sister Rosemary is my traveling companion, and since this is my first trip to Sicily we’re spending a couple of nights in Palermo before setting off to see the ruins. We hire a guide for a day, and as she navigates the narrow streets in her small car, she gives us a summary of Sicily’s history, the indigenous Sicans and Sicels, and the waves of invaders and colonizers Sicilians call the strangers: Greeks, refugees from Troy, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs and the Normans who crowned an emperor named Count Roger.
We’re on our way to the Cathedral of Monreale, on the outskirts of Palermo, and as we drive, the landscape opens to a valley that is now part of the city; I’m imagining it thick with orange groves as it was 50 years ago when Margarett’s driver took her up this very road. When she reached Sicily, Margarett had not painted or traveled for 20 years. She was looking for a new life, whereas I, depleted by a year touring for a successful book, am wondering how to make my way back to writing.
