Sicily - between two worlds

Just beyond this old tuna fishery at Scopello, a village west of Palermo, a track leads to Sicily's first nature reserve. Picture / Peter Calder

The man alongside me at the coffee counter wasn't drinking coffee. But he was interested in my stuttering attempts to explain to the barista that I wanted a "caffe latte senza schiuma" - without the foam that fills half the cup.

"Where are you from?" he asked in Italian and, getting the answer, slipped into English to explain that he'd spent 10 of his much younger years in Britain. His name was Lorenzo and he'd worked, among other things, as a university porter in Norwich and a bricklayer near Leeds.

I had come to Piazza Armerina, a small town in southeast Sicily to see the ruins of a fourth-century Roman villa at nearby Casale. Buried for 700 years under mudslides, it was unearthed only in the 19th century and is celebrated among art-lovers and scholars of antiquity for its multi-themed mosaic flooring - including the world's first pictures of bikini babes.

Having played tourist for the morning, I'd just stopped in town for lunch. But in Sicily, if you find a legal parking place in one of the narrow hillside alleys of any given town, you don't push your luck - you stay the night.

That's how I ended up talking to Lorenzo. He had come out for breakfast even though he couldn't afford to buy a coffee and he stoutly resisted my attempts to shout him a cup. "I just come out because I like it, to have a talk," he said. In a few minutes he would go home to wake his sleeping 9-year-old son and get him ready for school. As for the rest of the day ... he shrugged.

"I get some work in the forest," he said, "but that's only a couple of months of the year. When there's some building around, maybe I get some labouring job. Maybe not. I would like to go away again, go back to England. There's nothing here. But my wife won't hear of it, of leaving her family."

The single nation of Italy was created from a patchwork of principalities, duchies and ancient republics more than a generation after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. Sharp regional distinctions - not to mention rivalries - remain but the sharpest differences are between the prosperous north and the languishing south, which the Italians call the mezzogiorno.

Life is tougher in Naples than in Milan and it's tougher still in Sicily. Unskilled work is scarce, conspicuous wealth scarcer still. And as a result, Sicilians are among the world's great emigrants. As many Sicilian natives live overseas as the five million still on the island. A million emigrated to America (where there are now 18 million people of Sicilian extraction) after unification left them no better off. Another million left in the 50s and 60s.

I drive through villages in which whole streets are deserted, the unglazed windows of the houses gaping after their absent owners. They've headed north into the cities of the mainland or further still, to Switzerland and Germany and Scandinavia to look for work far from the dusty, sun-drenched hillsides where they grew up.

This underpopulation makes for an economic conundrum. A shrunken economy has always struggled to support a decent programme of public spending, and the resulting shortages were exacerbated by the Mafia's skill at diverting public funds. But it makes life easy for visitors.

Italians will tell you that Sicily is what Italy used to be. Globalisation hasn't yet ravaged the place the way it's dealt to so much of Europe. Specific dishes are specialities not of regions, but of villages. Local wines outnumber "foreign" - read Italian - on supermarket shelves. And if you steer the car off the autostrada, the 21st century - and much of the 20th - disappear before your eyes.

The landscape is far more dramatic than the postcard-picturesque countryside of Tuscany and Umbria. Mt Etna, which dominates the horizon down the east coast, is Europe's largest live volcano and one of the world's most active and is the most striking natural feature.

But elsewhere towering bluffs loom over tiny fishing villages; dry, white hillsides are combed by rows of olive trees; round-bladed cacti sprout on the roadsides to remind you that the island is closer to Africa than to most of Europe. And from almost everywhere, the sea stretches into a hazy distance; only at Messina, where the mainland, across the narrow and turbulent straits, seems close enough to touch, does Sicily not seem a land apart. Goethe, in An Italian Journey, may have overstated the case when he said that "to have seen Italy without seeing Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all", but it's certainly the case that a trip to the island at the toe of the boot reveals an Italy few travellers in the north will have seen for 50 years.

From June to August, the place is heaving with Germans and pinkly sunburned Britons and temperatures can top 50C in the narrow alleys of the hillside villages but in the northern spring and autumn, before the tour buses growl into life, the place is a dream trip.

Set deep in the southern Mediterranean (southern Sicily is several degrees further south than the northern tips of Tunisia and Morocco), the island lies at the epicentre of ancient and mediaeval history. It has been occupied, at some time or another, by every civilisation in the neighbourhood - the proprietors have included Moors from what is now Libya, Carthaginians from modern Tunisia, the forebears of the French, Spanish, Germans, and Austrians, and the Greeks and the Romans, both republican and imperial.

Each of these invaders has left an indelible mark on the landscape: the finest Byzantine mosaics west of the Hellespont gleam in the gloom of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo or the Basilica at nearby Monreale; at the Greek theatre near Syracuse on the island's southeast coast, Aeschylus' last tragedies, including The Persians, had their first performances when Sicily was part of a larger Greece; and that Roman villa near Piazza Armerina gives you a pretty good idea of how the other half lived in AD400 or so.

Such a long history of invasion ought, perhaps, to have made the locals suspicious of outsiders but Sicilians are famously friendly. You may not be admitted deep into this people's unique world - Sicilians have their own language, strikingly different from Italian and rich in regional variation - but you will be welcomed. That said, single women are often harassed and Palermo is not a city where you walk the streets alone late at night.

History's visitors have left their mark on the bloodline, too. Ginger-haired, blue-eyed Sicilians mingle with the olive-complexioned, raven-maned beauties; Arabic-looking faces are common, particularly in the west and south. These diverse cultural heritages can be seen in the architecture, sometimes of single buildings: mentally remove the Norman towers from the cathedral in Palermo and you will discern the outlines of a palace of Araby or a magnificent mosque.

The cuisine reflects Sicily's history as a cultural crossroads. Good food is almost tiresomely common in Italy, but gastronomically - as in many other ways - Sicily is another country. Caponata, a warm salad of baked eggplant, laced with tart capers, is a speciality, as is the pasta with fresh sardines and wild fennel, though you're as likely in some places to be offered couscous as pasta (the local inflection, served with pesce spada or swordfish, is to die for), deepening your sense that you're far closer to Africa than Europe. You wash it down with very quaffable vino della casa by the $5, half-litre jug.

Sicily's two sides - the east reflects the Greek and Roman heritage, the west and south the Arabic - are within easy reach of each other.

The whole island is less than twice the size of the Waikato and major centres are linked by excellent motorways, which are good when you want to cover some territory fast although the secondary roads are well-paved and, being less travelled, more interesting. In a rental car - a necessity, really, unless you want to spend several weeks there - you can cover much of the island very quickly.

With that in mind, and reluctant to pack up and move on each day, we based ourselves for a week in a small semi-detached apartment near Scopello, a tiny village on the Gulf of Castellammare, west of Palermo. Beyond the town, at an abandoned tuna fishery, the road ends and a walking track leads around the coast through Sicily's first nature reserve.

Environmentalists fought hard to save this coast from exploitation by developers who wanted to line it with holiday condos, and their achievement speaks for itself.

The path snakes around the hillsides high above little bays where the peacock-blue water laps on to steep pebbled beaches. It's the very image of a Mediterranean holiday, and, outside the peak of the season at least, it feels very far from Europe.

GETTING THERE

Cathay Pacific flies daily from Auckland to Hong Kong, with connecting flights to Rome, daily (except Mondays and Wednesdays). Economy-class return fares start from $2449.

* Peter Calder flew to Italy with assistance from Cathay Pacific.