Sicily: Pleasure Island

Trapani, Sicily | BCBusiness

In Sicily, the food and vistas are so good it’s almost criminal.

My first evening in Sicily, I park my rented Fiat in the town of Francavilla. My first stop is a little produce store where I buy a paper bag full of beautiful red tomatoes and a little plastic dish of strawberries. “One euro,” says the lady at the till. Damn that Cosa Nostra. Must they get their cut of everything?

Poor Sicilia. Forever associated with organized crime, its Hollywood-fed reputation can give a highly misleading impression. This large and largely rural island is a food-lover’s paradise, where quaint rustic tableaux and wide, gorgeous vistas threaten to become almost commonplace. Given a rental car and a footloose agenda, Sicily can offer you a taste of Italian life as comfortable and familiar as old men in front of a coffee bar.

And yet, my first evening eventually proves ominous. When I arrive at my destination – a B&B in the lovely hilltop town of Castiglione di Sicilia – I immediately meet two young travellers from London: Kunal and Karuna. “Our car got stolen yesterday,” Kunal tells me.

In fact, my own car is parked right beside a telltale pile of window glass that is the familiar scat of car thieves. Yet there we are, bunked in a peaceful country village. Is Sicily really the hotbed of crime its reputation implies?

You might get a different answer from Kunal and Karuna, but based on my two- week stay, Sicily seems like the kind of place where you’d have to beg someone to steal your camera. Although the Sicilian Mafia is no cinematic creation and the struggle against its corrupt influence is ongoing, crime is no more a daily issue for tourists in Sicily than in any other place – less so if you avoid major centres like Palermo. And there, local business owners are usually the ones who suffer, forced to pay protection money, though there is a growing Sicilian movement against that old corruption.

I skip Palermo, not so much to avoid criminal behaviour as the oft-reported nightmare of negotiating the city’s traffic and trying to find one of the near-mythical parking spots. Instead, I drive gorgeous back roads, finding postcard-perfect vistas in places like Taormina in the east and the laid-back beach town of San Vito Lo Capo on the northwest coast.

At another small produce store in the town of Valderice, I ask if the tomatoes are Sicilian. The aproned proprietor throws me an incredulous look, and gestures his arms at the entire store. “Tutti di Sicilia!” he insists.

Well, maybe not the bananas. But you don’t find shelves full of baseball-flavoured California tomatoes. You do get fresh figs, local melons, peaches, pears, strawberries, a small orange fruit called nespole, bunches of arugula and salad greens you’ve never heard of – stuff that would set you back plenty at Whole Foods. Not here.

In the coastal city of Trapani, I wander into an unremarkable-looking deli called Gastronomia di Sicilia. A restaurant should not be most memorable for its name, nor its dinnerware – in this case plastic plates and cutlery – but the food? Calamari stuffed with breadcrumbs, pine nuts, raisins, garlic and olive oil; sautéed peas and mushrooms; fried breaded sardines; a potato, tomato and caper salad called pantesca; plus, roast potatoes to take home. Eight euros, that sets me back.

I start to get genuinely concerned for the local crime lords. With prices like that, their percentage will barely keep the lights on down at the gang clubhouse. And the car is always right where I left it. Sicily is starting to get a reputation with me.