An Italian friend of mine, born near cosmopolitan Milan and extremely well-travelled, used to insist that Sicily is totally unlike the rest of Italy. Gian-Carlo would, if pushed, even go so far as to suggest darkly that Sicilians are not real Italians. So, when I told him I was thinking about going to Sicily for Easter Weekend, he seemed startled, and immediately warned me not too expect too much in the way of ordinary comforts.

"It's nothing like Italy."

"But it is Italy," I insisted. "Right?"

He shook his head. "You'll be surprised."

Gian-Carlo Rota, since deceased, was perhaps the most cultured man I have ever met -- the human being who conclusively set my standard for what is civilized behavior and what is not. When he was still in short pants, his family fled the country because his father, a liberal architect, had been placed on Mussolini's black list. Gian-Carlo kept a copy of this "Lista Nera," with his father's name prominent at the top, framed on the wall of the living room in his Cambridge apartment.

"It's a little bit barbaric," he went on.

"What do you mean?" I asked him, trying to laugh it off.

He squinted at me, pursed his lips -- signs that he was being quite serious.

"You'll see."

***

With my girlfriend, G., I had spent one exhilarating autumn traveling in Tuscany, Umbria, and Venice. But Sicily was an unknown quantity. The sole images I had of it were from films or stories in which it was portrayed as a stark, desolate country, full of mistrustful and poverty stricken people, plagued by outbursts of horrifying violence. While trying to make up my mind about the trip, I rented The Godfather, just to see the scenes set in Sicily once again. I was not encouraged.

On a Sunday morning two weeks before Easter, G. told me, "Decide."

So it was now all up to me.

Do we, or don't we, go?

That morning, I had already begun cracking eggs for a frittata (a slow-cooked Italian omelette I learned to make from that most useful of all cookbooks, Marcella Hazan's Classic Italian Cooking). Tormented by indecision, I suddenly thought, Let there be a sign.

At the same instant, I picked up another egg and tapped it sharply on the rim of a shallow metal beating bowl to crack its shell. When the egg spilled from its shell into bowl, I was startled to see that it had, not one, but two bright yolks.

***

Palermo's airport, I read before we started our trip, is considered one of the two or three most dangerous in the world. As our jet circled before diving for the runway, I saw with my own eyes why. The Falcone-Borsellino Airport is laid out on a thin strip of land between the sea and jagged brown mountains. From above, it almost looks as if you are about to land on the beach.

In the terminal, we rented a car that felt as small as a toy and set out to drive across central Sicily to the Ionian coast, where we had booked a week at an agriturismo guest house.

The sky was flat and gray; the landscape looked bleached of color, slapping at the shore in listless waves. The highway was lined with drab, gray cement block villas. We were stalled in Palermo by rush hour. But even beyond Palermo, the depressing dullness of the sights stretched on and on. The only color was added by an endlessly repeated yellow and red poster pasted onto walls and trees for the circo di Venezia. At one point, we passed a little Romanesque church so blasted, so decrepit, that I imagined it had been bombed and straffed during World War II.

Then we turned inland and, magically, the sky began to clear. The undulating countryside was covered by a light green veil of grass, herbs and wildflowers. I remembered reading that, before the Romans arrived in Sicily, all of the island was covered by deep, dark pine forests. The pine trees had been cut down to build the Roman fleets, and so forest had given way to the wheat fields of vast estates worked by slaves. Many centuries worth of sheep and goats had finished the job of deforestation by eating everything that grows above ground level. In the summer, with oven-like winds blowing in from Africa, the heat would bake the Sicilian interior stark brown and burn all the plants to a harsh stubble.

I was glad we were in Sicily in the spring.

***

After an hour or so, I began searching for the shape of Mount Etna against the sky, but saw only a mist of clouds and sunlight. Then, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of the base of an immense mountain. The summit was cut off by drifting clouds. Before I could tell G. to look, the clouds shifted and Mount Etna, like one of Prospero's illusions, "melted into air, into thin air."

A few minutes later, I saw Etna again. Clouds were streaming down from the black summit. "Look!" I shouted, and this time G. saw before it vanished into graying mist.

Several miles before Acireale, we passed a car dump. The shattered cars -- some crushed flat, others twisted or accordioned -- were piled one on another to the height of a three story building. The sky, which had been so limpid for our drive through the center of Sicily, had closed up and was flat and gray again.

Acireale was a smaller Palermo: endless, seemingly identical, cement-block apartment buildings and villas, streets strewn with trash, traffic following no pattern, garish billboards, a brown haze of gasoline fumes . . . We got lost looking for the coastal road. As we drove in circles through the narrow stone streets of Acireale's centro storico, it began to rain in glassy bursts

At an intersection, as G. turned the car around, I jumped out and dashed up to a covered newsstand where an old man was sitting. I thought it would be rude of me to ask for directions without buying something, so I picked up a magazine and paid for it in coins, then asked him, in stammering Italian, if he knew the way to Schillichenti. He grabbed my sleeve and spoke rapidly, curving his arm several times to indicate a series of left turns. I nodded and thanked him, but he went through the pantomime once more as if to make sure I had grasped his meaning. Smiling and nodding, with drops of rain running down my neck, I said: "Si, si, si."

Finally, I was able to run away from the old man. I jumped into the small car again, soaked from head to foot in the steaming heat, and we drove off, with rain drumming on the roof, through the chaotic traffic in the direction he had pointed.

"Where did he say to turn?" G. asked me, her voice rising. We were approaching a large intersection. "Here? Or further up?"

"I don't know," I said, making the same gesture the old man at the newsstand had made when I had asked him: "Parla inglese?"

G. bit her lower lip.

***

We took the turn, and after driving around in the crashing rain on the side of a hill above Acireale, we braked suddenly in front of a sign at the base of a long gravel driveway. The sign read: "Il Limoneto."

"This can't be it," I said.

G. turned up onto the driveway and we drove through the open gates and came to a stop before a large stone house. We rushed through the rain up to the front door, which was locked, and rang the buzzer. After a few moments, a young woman pushed back the curtain. She was wearing a beautiful cashmere sweater and a short skirt, and her nails shone with dark nail polish. Smiling, she swung the door inward and invited us inside, speaking to us in Italian. We found ourselves standing in an enormous hall surrounded by glass figurines, lamps, shining cooking utensils, and paintings.

"Is this a store?" G. asked. When the young Italian woman gave her a questioning look, we turned to each other and tried to remember, using a form of free association, the word for "store." Finally the young woman understood.

"Si, si," she said.

But her brow furrowed, as if she wondered what we could possibly mean by asking if we were standing in a store when, clearly, we were the ones who had buzzed her out of the back room.

"IL Limoneto?" I asked.

"Si, si," she said.

G. then managed to ask the young woman if we might speak to Mrs. Gabriella Raciti.

The beautiful young woman became even more confused.

I asked her, in Italian, if this was a lemon farm, and if it took paying guests. I used the word albergo, which was close enough although still not quite correct.

"Albergo?" she shouted, laughing. "No, no."

Then G. told her that we were looking for the "IL Limoneto" in Schillichenti, run by the gracious Mrs. Gabriella Raciti.

"Ah, Signora Raciti!" the young woman shouted, laughing.

"Si, si!" G. said.

The young woman led us into the back room, which proved to be yet another showroom for gleaming merchandise of all sorts, and we stood by while she got on the phone. We heard her asking for Signora Raciti, then a burst of high, animated conversation, and when she hung up the young woman told us that Gabriella Raciti had dispatched someone named Bruno to retrieve us from this "IL Limoneto" which had turned out to be an upscale department store rather than the farm. Bruno arrived ten minutes later -- a thin, smartly dressed older man with a wide smile and an intense way of shaking hands. He and the saleswoman chatted happily for another ten minutes as we stood looking on.

In Sicily, I thought, anything and everything may serve as a pretext for ten to twenty minutes of conversazione.

Finally, we all left the shop, G. and I shaking hands with the young woman and thanking her with profuse grazies.

The rain had stopped. Bruno pulled out of the gates ahead of us and we followed him on narrow roads to a shuttered shop. I wondered if this, then, was "IL Limoneto" -- but the sinking feeling passed when he got out of his car, came over to our rolled down driver's side window, and explained to us both, again in Italian, that he thought we might want to purchase some groceries while the stores were still open.

Once we were inside the store, Bruno had an excited conversation with a half-dozen people. I could not tell by looking at these people which of them worked at the store and which were merely visiting. I strode through the aisles picking out mineral water, tomato sauce, cartons of milk, and espresso -- as well as a few bottles of impressively cheap wine.

When I got back to the front of the store, a young man was telling G., in thick English, that he had recently been inspired with a wonderful idea for a product to sell in the United States. He described the product as a hand held instrument for using dental floss. G. laughed.

"E vero?"

"Si, si -- E vero."

He demonstrated with gestures. Then he began to speak about how certain he was that this product would make him and whoever helped him to sell it a lot of money.

As the young man, with passionate gestures and sharp emphasis, described the brilliance of his business idea, which he seemed certain would make him and us rich, others -- including the white-aproned young woman behind the counter -- kept breaking in to contradict or to qualify or merely to query, and the conversation swept back and forth, all of the Sicilians declaiming or shaking their cupped hands or gyrating their arms in space while G. and I looked on from the sidelines.

Finally I stepped forward and cleared my throat. The young man went on speaking, but Bruno and the girl behind the counter both turned to look at me, and Bruno held up a hand to silence the young man. Mingling English and Italian words, I said that we would be happy to talk over the business idea at some future time, but that we were fatigued from our trip. Would it be possible to cut this discussion short and get going out to the farm, wherever that might be?

Bruno grabbed my arm and said, Of course, of course, we must go, but G. was bending to look at the meat and olives in the glass case, and the white-aproned girl asked her if she wanted something. G. pointed to a bowl of olives in brine, and the girl picked out on olive on a toothpick and handed it over the counter for her to taste.

"Mmm," she said.

They were fat dark Sicilian olives. The girl packed a plastic container full of olives. As she added up what we had bought on the cash register, I held out my Italian notes fanned like a deck of playing cards. Smiling, she selected several of the notes and gave me change. Bruno and the young man were speaking emphatically. We walked to the car holding the plastic bags full of our purchases. Bruno got into his car and pulled out on the road. The young man got into another car with two men who spoke no English and pulled out after Bruno. We followed the two cars on slick, winding roads between stone walls. At first, I tried to memorize the turns so that we would be able to find our way back to Acireale, but I finally gave this up. The route was too complicated.

***

Bruno stopped his little car at a high iron gate and got out to unlock and swing it open. He then drove ahead of us, the young man's car following and our rental car taking up the rear, down a long graveled driveway between rows of lemon trees on which bright yellow fruit hung. He pulled up in a courtyard between low stone buildings and got out of the car to speak to a short woman who had emerged from one of the doorways. G. and I got out and walked over to where she was standing, and Bruno introduced Signora Gabriella Raciti. We all shook hands.

Mrs. Raciti spoke to us in rapid Italian. Bruno motioned to me and gestured as if to say that I spoke no Italian, but I said, "No, no, io parlo Italiano un poco."( I speak a little.) Then I tried to add that I comprehended more than I spoke but stumbled over the words. G. laughed. She and Mrs. Raciti spoke briefly, G. using her college Italian. The young man and his friends joined us in a little group. I couldn't keep track of all of what was being said, but there was a sense of easy familiarity and a great deal of joking and gesturing.

They made us understand that we were to park over to the side among the lemon trees. G. got into the car and pulled cautiously out of the courtyard and drove down a rutted track to a place where two or three other cars were parked. She pulled into a narrow space and I opened the trunk and got our plastic bags. Bruno and the young man came over to take our luggage. Mrs. Raciti, walking ahead of us, showed us into a stone building with a reed curtain hanging over the doorway which she lifted first by pulling on a cord. We walked into the large, brightly lit apartment. It had twenty foot ceilings and highly polished tile floors. Except for a sleep sofa and a kitchen table and chairs, the living room was bare. Our shoes clacked on the tiles.

Mrs. Raciti motioned me on ahead and I stepped into the bedroom. It, too, was enormous, with a large, dark armoire in one corner and a wide bed. I turned to her. She was looking at me expectantly. I said, "Si, va bene," and she said, "Bene, bene." G. stepped in and Mrs. Raciti turned to her. "Che bella," she said, looking around, and Mrs. Raciti smiled and said, "Bene, bene."

Mrs. Raciti was beautiful, with red hair and high cheekbones, and was carefully made up and dressed chicly in a sweater, skirt and high heels. As she spoke, she gestured sharply, often hugging her body with one arm. She emanated a sharp, nervous, self-aware intelligence. I was not surprised when I found out, a few days later, that Mrs. Raciti was a mathematics teacher.

We all went out and stood on the broad stone terrace. The young man was joined by a lovely, slender blonde woman and by a little boy in fat diapers who dashed back and forth, his bare feet slapping the flagstones. There were more introductions and a prolonged, animated conversazione. Every few minutes, the young man with the idea for a dental floss holder turned to us and translated the gist of what was being said.

Mrs. Raciti told us in Italian that she had received my fax asking her to reserve a table for us at a local restaurant -- I had been worried that otherwise we might not eat, on the Saturday night before Easter Sunday -- and had made reservations for as at a restaurant called Al Molino.

"For tonight?" I asked, turning to the young man.

He said, "Tonight. Yes."

Bruno handed me a business card that read: Al Molino, Ristorante. There was an address and a phone number on the business card.

I knew it would be terrifically impolite to say, No, we just want to go to bed. Mrs. Raciti had gone to the trouble and we would have to go eat at the restaurant, no matter how much we wanted simply to rest.

"Is it near?" I asked, with hope in my voice.

"Yes, yes, is near," the young man said. He pointed at some dark hills. "Over there. In St. Maria della Scala." And he began to try to explain how we were to get there on the narrow, dark winding roads.

I turned to G. with a despairing look. But already Bruno and the young man were talking rapidly in Italian, with Mrs. Raciti interjecting every so often, and the young man finally said, "Come on, we'll go. Follow me."

He drove his car ahead of us up out of the driveway. He had to get out to open the massive iron gate. We drove through it and parked just beyond. He drove through it, then parked and got out of the car again -- his wife and child and the two other men were packed inside -- to shut and padlock the gate.

As we had walked off toward the cars, Bruno had handed me a set of keys and had pointed to the one that, I now realized, he must have meant worked on the gate padlock, but how would I remember which one that was?

We followed the small, white car on the twisting road. The young man stopped suddenly in front of us and got out, leaving his door open, and came over to the window, which G. rolled down, to explain that this turn we were about to make -- he pointed to a yellow sign -- was a one way road, so we would not be able to use it on the way back, but that we should instead go straight into Schillichente and turn at another road opposite the church. It would bring us to the same place.

He jumped into the car again and we followed him. At times his tail lights vanished, and G. gripped the wheel harder and peered ahead into the dark. He repeatedly slowed down to let us catch up to him, then sped ahead. At the top of a steep hill, he stopped and jumped out of his car again and pointed to a steep road going down, between stone buildings. He came over and said that if we stayed on this road we would come to the center of Santa Maria della Scala and that Al Molino was where the road ended at the sea. We thanked him and he said, "I will see you tomorrow morning, yes?"

I realized that he wanted to discuss more business.

"Yes," we said.

He pointed to his watch: "What time?"

I shrugged.

G. said, "Ten o'clock?"

"Good," he said. "Goodbye."

"Buona notte," G. shouted after him. "E grazie mille."

He honked his horn and sped off.

G. cautiously pointed the nose of the car downhill and we went down slowly around steep turns through a little town that seemed entirely closed up into itself, the shutters of the stone buildings shut so that only gleams of light escaped. We came out on a small open plaza with a large church at one end. The plaza was full of cars. Several cars were trying to leave the plaza, and G. had to back up into an alley order to let them go up the street we had just come down on. We drove slowly through the plaza down a street lined with parked cars.

The sea was on our left. On the right hulked a steep, dark mountain with houses sitting on the terraced slope. I saw, on the right, the sign for Al Molino, Ristorante, and we pulled into an open space across the street and parked. A few yards away, the sea was beating against tumbled black volcanic rocks. Surf flew up.

We could see a lighted kitchen entrance to the side with its own flight of steps and a small garden covered with a wooden grape arbor from which vines dangled. We went up the flight of stairs to the front door of Al Molino, and just inside were met by Signore Molino himself -- an old man in a red sweater, smiling, with white hair and lined, slightly hollow cheeks. He had a distinguished aura about him and seemed very happy to be greeting us at the door of his establishment. He waved his hand at a tilted wooden tray of different types of fresh seafood held in place by dividers.We saw shrimp and squid and other fresh fish on pieces of ice, shining under the lights.

Signore Molino, who spoke or perhaps chose to speak no English, asked us in Italian if we wanted our seafood grilled, broiled or fried. He illustrated with gestures. We answered, "Alla griglia, per favor," and he smiled so that all the lines broke out on his sun-weathered fisherman's face and said, "Bene." Then Signore Molino motioned to the shining tray of seafood, some of which I recognized, but most of chichi couldn't have identified even with the help of a microscope, and suggested that we point to those things we liked to eat and he would take care of everything. G. told him that we liked everything, all kinds of seafood. He laughed, clearly pleased, and summoned over a boy with slicked down hair, wearing a stained white apron, to take us to our table.

As we sat, the boy flapped open a napkin smartly and spread it over G.'s lap, then proffered us the menus he had been holding under his arm. He asked in Italian if we would like some wine, and when I said, "Si, certo," he asked, "Rosso o bianco?"

"Let's do white," G. said.

"Bianco," I said.

He shaped his hands into a small carafe, then a larger one.

I asked, "Ha una bottiglia?" (Do you have a bottle?)

"Si," he said.

"Ha una lista di vini?" (And do you have a wine list?)

"No," he said, pursing his lips. "Secco?"

I turned to G.

"Secco is dry, right?"

"That's it."

"Si, si," I said to the waiter. Then I asked for a bottle of aqua minerale, frizzante (with gas) also and he went away. He came back a few moments later with the bottles of wine and of mineral water. After opening the mineral water and pouring it into our glasses, he picked up the bottle of white wine and showed me the label, which had on it a small painting of a sailing clipper.

I said, "It looks wonderful."

G. laughed.

He pulled out the cork with a pop, set the bottle on the table between us and went away. I picked up the bottle to pour our glasses. It was cold against my palm and sweating moisture. Suddenly I was starting to feel alive again. We were having an adventure in Sicily, and we were going to drink some dry, cold white wine with our unfamiliar seafood.

We touched our glasses and drank.

"Mmm," I said. "It's good."

"Well, of course it's good," G. said. "Why wouldn't it be?"

I looked around the small room. There were only a few other tables full. The other people looked to be all Sicilians. It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday, and the mood was muted. All of the decorations were nautical. We had been seated under a polished teak steering wheel for a large fishing boat or a yacht.

After a few minutes, our waiter came out of the kitchen with a large white china platter, which he slid between our plates. On this platter were sardines, octopus, shrimp and some sort of crayfish, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with vividly green chopped parsley. Deliciously aromatic steam rose from the platter. As I squeezed the lemon wedges over the fish, I wondered if this food would raise my sense of taste to the same pitch as it had my sense of sight. And it did, in fact. I picked up a large, spiny crawfish with tiny black eyes on my fork and bit into it, and the salt water and the savor of the olive oil burst onto my tongue at the same time. The combination was so surprising, and so apt, that it brought tears to my eyes.

G. pointed with the bright tines of a fork at the tail of a sardine, its silvery skin hanging in strips and grill marks on the pale flesh.

"What's this?

"Eat it," I said. "Don't ask, just eat."

"Hmm. But I don't like sardines."

"You'll like these."

She cut a sardine in half with her fork and put it in her mouth and chewed.

"Um," she said.

"Good or bad?"

"Excellent."

Quickly, she downed the other sardine half.

I finished crunching on the crayfish and washed it down with a swallow of the wine, which was astringent enough to clean my palate, yet supple and round enough to have been interesting to drink all by itself.

Some thirty hours before, we had eaten supper at Legal Seafoods in Logan Airport. That was nothing compared to what we were eating now. The freshness and saltiness of the seafood was dramatically enhanced by the earthy tasting olive oil that had been drizzled over it, with fresh chopped parsley adding vibrant alto notes.

Signore Molino bent over our table, smiling. to ask if everything was good, and G. and I practically shouted our appreciation.

"E belissima." Etc.

He went away to stand by the door gazing out into the darkness at the sea bashing against rocks just a few yards off. G. placed a hand on her stomach and said,

"You know, I don't think I'll be able to eat the second course."

"Don't have any more of this."

"I don't want to leave it -- he'll think we didn't like it."

"Well, then I'll try to eat as much as I can."

"All right."

I started eating faster, washing the bites of sardine, shrimp, octopus and crayfish methodically down with gulps of wine, but there was too much on the platter for me to finish, and I was curious about what was coming, so finally I set down my fork and G. and I stared at each other and laughed.

"It's amazing," she said. "Do they really expect us to eat all this?"

The waiter came over and, spreading his hands with the palms downward, said, "Finito?"

"Si."

With an expression of disbelief, he swept the plate from the table and carried it into the kitchen. I heard voices, one of them raised, and wondered with a shiver if the cook was asking what the Americans had found wrong with his food, and I imagined the waiter making the sign for crazy.

"God," G. said. "We're not really getting off on the right foot here, are we?"

I looked over to see if Signore Molino had taken notice of how much was still left of our antipasti platter when it made the return trip to the kitchen, but he was standing impassively, his arms folded, gazing outside.

The waiter emerged with two bowls, which he placed before us. G. gave me a helpless look as he explained what it was. Signore Molino, he explained, had chosen for our primo piatto a Sicilian specialty called pasta con sarde. (Pasta with sardines.)

"Buon appetito," he said, walking off.

I touched it with my fork. There were strands of linguini coated thinly with tomato sauce and sprinkled with parsley, and silvery bits of chopped sardines. When I rolled some on my fork and tasted it, I realized that the dish was suffused by a licorice-like taste -- of course, fennel. (On returning home, I looked up this dish in a Sicilian cookbook. The recipe began: "Boil one kilo of mountain wild fennel. To find it, it is necessary to go to Sicily, as it doesn't exist anywhere else." [Antonio Cardinella, Sicilia e Isole (Bologna: Edizioni Mida, 1989]].

"It's amazing," I said to G., who looked skeptical. "Try it."

She did.

"It's good, but it's too much," she complained.

I said, "Well, let me finish this and then I'll try to eat some of yours, so we don't offend our waiter."

"Okay."

I ate with vigor, smacking my lips and taking small sips of the wine. There was only a glass or so left inside the bottle.

"This really is an astonishing concoction," I remarked, pausing with my fork raised halfway to my mouth. "Fennel. Who knew?"

"I can't believe we've still got another course coming."

"We can just sit here and take our time. Or do you have to be somewhere?"

The main course proved to be a bigger version of the antipasto: large, grilled fish in lemon juice and olive oil, sprinkled with chopped parsley. It arrived again in a halo of aromatic steam. But this time we could barely manage a dozen listless bites. The wine was gone, and we were too full to wash down the fish with sips of mineral water.

When our waiter took away the almost untouched platter, he seemed embarrassed for us. But Signore Molino beamed as we left the restaurant.

Outside, an almost full moon shone over the surging black Ionian sea.

***

It was a few minutes past midnight: Easter Sunday

Read more of Andrew L.
Wilson's work in TPR:

Novel Excerpts The Dead Flood (1.2) Feature Article