Sicilian Splendors

June 11, 2018
Keahey (Seeking Sicily) is a congenial host in this sunny and inquisitive memoir of his three-month excursion to the least-visited parts of Sicily. He shows up in a town of a few hundred or a thousand people with a loose plan that is almost always guided by the locals (“I come into a village unannounced, ask questions, usually at a bar, where someone almost always knows the answers or knows somebody who knows”), who eventually show him around. Keahey interweaves Sicily’s history of invasions (Greek, Roman, Norman, and Arab) and their cultural and culinary legacies into his story, between getting sidetracked by a conversation with a new Sicilian friend or a delicious local pasta dish (while visiting Calascibetta, Keahey ate “some twisted noodles I had never seen before with ricotta and a tomato sauce”). The book has an air of melancholy to it, as well: Keahey notes how emigration to northern Italy or abroad has left an interior filled with empty buildings, some of which are now being rehabbed into B&Bs by those trying to make a living off the growing tourism industry. This is a wondrously joyous account of travel as it should be.

September 1, 2018
A vivid Sicilian travelogue from an experienced traveler.If you believe Hollywood, Sicily is little more than the birthplace of the Mafia. Enter Keahey (Hidden Tuscany: Discovering Art, Culture, and Memories in a Well-Known Region's Unknown Places, 2014, etc.), who first traveled to Sicily in 1986 and is now an expert. "Despite my having no known ancestry here," he writes, "Italy and Sicily keep summoning me." In his latest book, the author takes armchair travelers on an enjoyable adventure through Sicily's back roads and tiny towns. At times it can feel like a diary, a play-by-play of a man roaming the countryside: "Afterward I honored the ritual of riposo. When I awoke, it was time for the evening service at the cathedral," Keahey reports of his time in Piana degli Albanesi. But for all the banal details of naps, espresso runs, trips to the bakery, the author packs the narrative with plenty of pro tips and pleasant insider tidbits a future traveler could use. For instance, Keahey is a strong advocate of getting off the highway and on to provincial roads. "Many times," he writes, "I have stumbled into a really small place with only a few streets lined with medieval structures and sat down to a remarkable meal in a tiny trattoria with perhaps three tables." At his best, the author makes a charming case for the benefits of travel. In the afterword, he writes of getting a bloody nose in a cafe in Santo Stefano di Camastra. Noticing his plight, women from another table jumped up to help, an older woman tilted his head back, and a third ran across the street to procure gauze to staunch the bleeding. "Sir, this is Sicily. We help," one of the women explained. "Tell people that Sicily is not the Mafia."Keahey provides a solid argument for seeing Sicily not for its stereotypes but for its surprising hospitality.

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September 15, 2018
In his latest Italian travelogue, Keahey revisits the land of his Seeking Sicily (2011), this time immersing himself in the history and culture of a diverse group of small villages not usually found on tourist maps. In the northeastern village of Novara di Sicilia, he is proudly shown Bronze Age structures dating to 1600 BCE. During Easter week, he visits two towns, one celebrating in the joyous Orthodox Greek tradition, the other with its somber Spanish influence. Keahey's goal is to connect with locals wherever he goes, learning their history, hearing tales passed from generation to generation, and tasting the local food specialties. He finds beauty everywhere, which makes one forget the sometimes awfulness of history. In Riesi, villagers opened up to him about the rough times when the Mafia was deeply entrenched there and how the population has decreased since WWII, when many townsfolk emigrated to the U.S., their children never returning. This insightful book, with its unique portraits of historically diverse small villages, should be a must-read for everyone interested in Sicily and Mediterranean Europe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)