#5 Tempted by Sicily

A travel memoir excerpt

Hello friend,

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Thanks a million for the subscription which will give you exclusive access to my unpublished travel memoir titled Sicilian Descent as well as giving you regular access to my weekly newsletter from Sicily.

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with love from Sicily

Rochelle

P.S: Here is this weeks excerpt from my travel memoir.

It’s the last part of the introductory chapter Inevitably drawn to Sicily.

Continued: Inevitably drawn to Sicily

Nonno and Nonna’s personal history is full of exotic superstitions and ghosts. The island of Sicily is the origin of many mythologies and fairytales. The Greek gods had their roots here; it is the place they chose to inhabit while on this earth. The epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey were acted out in and around Sicily. Often tales of the Cyclopes and the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis are retold and mixed with history lessons. I have absorbed the images of my grandparents’ Sicily, a strange mix of characters, landscapes, history and language, which has blended with my imagination to create my mythology.

Each fable from my grandparents is told with an enigmatic tongue, full of words I find too hard to understand.  They used a no longer spoken dialect, a semi-dormant language, seldom spoken outside Sicily, an idiosyncratic product of their own personal world. The landscape of isolation formed the words, in a succession of endless mountains, which ignited individual creativity to invent.