Whenever someone asks me who, living or dead, I’d like to have at a dinner party, George Plimpton will forever be near the top of my list.

I always wondered what sort of divine alchemy could lead to a life where one’s accumulated experiences just keep building and building successfully over time in so many different realms and in such extraordinarily interesting ways. I have been exceedingly fortunate to have two friends, Tom and Charles, who have had lives like that - and, from what I know of them, it’s about doing as much as possible to fill life up to the brim with opportunities to expand, grow, and learn; the legend comes after that. It’s impossible to be in the middle of things if you’re only observing from the periphery; you have to actually be in the arena. I always secretly believed, though, that they also had a special sixth sense for recognizing opportunities - like they were born with an internal tuning fork that vibrated violently at a particular pitch to alert them that they had the chance to see history being made, or an internal voice that, when a remarkable opportunity presented itself, spoke through them to say “yes” without a second thought.

And I never felt like I had that in me.

So it was remarkable to suddenly find ourselves flying into Budapest just as history was being made.

We flew from Edinburgh to Budapest in the early morning. On the plane, the boys drew in the new notebooks that the Plane Fairy got them, Alice read, and I went through my flash cards, struggling to learn the numbers one through ten. Hungarian is like no other language on earth, and even after a month of practice, I could barely remember “Thank You” and “Hello” and “How much is this?” - a question that was to prove totally useless, as I would never be able to understand the answer.

We passed through customs, got our bags, caught a bus into the city center, then got an Uber to our apartment, in District VII on Damjanich street. We settled in and then, eager to see what Budapest had to offer, fell into the streets, eager to experience Hungarian life.

But everything was dead. It was ferociously sunny, and about 95 degrees in the shade, but for a capital city in July, the heat didn’t fully explain the eerie silence.

The boys were running around a shaded playground when Alice got a message from her mother. Apparently news stations around the world were covering Budapest; Alice leaned over and said, “It’s Pride here today.”

My brain went through half-remembered Hungarian history and Economist articles I thought I should read but didn’t pay close enough attention to.

“Didn’t Orban…ban it?”

He had.

But it turned out that the repressive Prime Minister and his “laws” didn’t matter.

I didn’t really know about Pride until college. One spring Saturday, and I like to think it was around the time I learned about Plimpton, I was in my dorm room when Paul and Jake, two of my friends, showed up at my room in neon, glitter, and the brightest smiles that I have ever seen - even now, I can’t stop myself from grinning when I remember how happy they were. They were on their way with our friend Shannon to Hollywood for a parade called “Pride.” At the time, I didn’t put two and two together to think that it was a gay pride event; I knew they were all gay, but…well, they wanted to go to a parade. They were there to ask: did I want to come with them? No. I find nothing interesting in parades; it’s mostly just standing around watching other people, and that’s boring to me. They, apparently, enjoyed parades. To each his or her own, I supposed - if a parade was their thing, let them enjoy a parade. Later, on their triumphant return, I remember how light-hearted they seemed - and I still didn’t have any clue what the big deal with this parade was, or why three of my friends would all go instead of staying on campus to study. A few years later in San Diego, I avoided Hillcrest one weekend because another Pride parade had shut down the streets and meant I couldn’t get to the Trader Joe’s; later, after repeated run-ins with Pride in Barcelona, Cleveland, London, Palermo, and Edinburgh, I eventually gathered that it was some massive international event for the LGBTQIA+ community.

And from Hollywood on, Pride was always…well, I always thought it was a celebration. A parade. There were people in neon and glitter, floats, organized groups marching and dancing to music, sequins, leather, and fun. I never had any reason to see Pride as anything other than a good time, a place where people of all stripes and preferences could gather and celebrate themselves.

But this is not how Budapest sees it.

We spent an exceptionally lovely first day just outside of the city center, slathering the boys with SPF50 sunscreen, playing in public water misters to fight the heat, eating paprika-spiced link sausages, and enjoying the quiet streets and playgrounds. Meanwhile, a mile away, virtually the entire city was looking to engage the enemy.

In the late afternoon, we saw what we’d missed - which was, basically, the photo above, tens of thousands of people taking over the city in defiance of the official law. Immediately, I thought:

1. We can’t risk taking the boys there, and

2. I really want to go.

I wasn’t worried about the boys being crushed, or lost in the crowds; I was worried that Orban’s mouth-breathing goons or bussed-in counterprotesters would start attacking the marchers, and we wouldn’t be able to protect the children. But my internal tuning fork rang this time, and I thought: this is important, and I want to be part of, or at least witness to, the arc bending toward justice.

So later, after the kids had gone to sleep, I slipped out the door into a city I didn’t know at all, looking for a story. The streets were still relatively quiet, the sun leaking down between the grand buildings, the Italian restaurant on the corner with two patrons sitting at an outside plastic table, talking over white wine and a pizza. I walked north on the cooling sidewalks and then got on a metro line that promised to take me to the river. I held on to a leather strap while it hurtled through its underground tunnels, a metre or so under the fanciest street in Budapest, stations and people appearing every minute or so in the gloom, with the cool, wet clay smell of all underground tunnels rushing into the car through the open windows.

The stations were busy, and everyone seemed to have been at the march. This wasn’t a parade. Paul, Jake and Shannon had gone to a parade; they were there to have fun, to dance, to drink, to ogle and flirt without fear for their safety. There may have been a political element to Pride in Hollywood in 1998, but their experience seemed to be that politics was mostly secondary after all of that glitter and face paint and CK One. Marchers, though, are standing for something, showing solidarity, drawing lines.

Budapest Pride wasn’t a celebration - it was a statement.

Virtually everyone I saw - from the old women with shopping bags to the children in buggies - had rainbows. At Kodály körönd, a lesbian couple collapsed against each other on a bench, one rainbow flag draped over both of their backs. At Vörösmarty utca, seven men in very short denim shorts and the tee-shirt equivalent of bras, all holding hands, rainbows on their matching cowboy hats. At Opera, a seemingly heteronormative family with two children smaller than Nick, all of their faces painted with rainbows. There were dozens of people standing alone, staring at their phones, with rainbow shirts and buttons, or rainbow tote bags, or rainbow ribbons woven through their hair.

Everyone looked exhausted, ready to keep going, furious enough to never stop.

When I got to the river, all was peace; it was clear that the march part of the day was long over. There was a soft glow from the sun setting over the high Buda hills; tour boats left their wakes up and down the Danube, and lovers - men and women, women and women, men and men, and probably other variations I am too ignorant to recognize - held hands on the riverside parks, held each other on the benches, and said “hello” for the first time. Club music drifted out of bars and restaurants and the docked party boats, wafting through the air just behind the cigarette smoke, and the coolness of the river (and its rotting-plant stench) seeped up as if it was trying to reclaim the city from the sun. I half-expected government stooges to stage a late attack on marchers who remained for drinks; I figured they might want to provoke some sort of reaction, or, now that virtually everyone had gone home, to try to use violence to claim some sort of victory, but they didn’t. It was just the same as any other blissful, eternally peaceful summer night, except this time the world was sprinkled with rainbows.

I still didn’t really know the layout of the city, so I wandered, assuming that I’d be able to find my way home. I walked east a block away from the river, then north, the sounds of gaity following me from the banks, and I headed toward what looked like a park. Then I saw it: a police van, stopped in the middle of the street, its lights on. I wondered if Plimpton ever felt reluctant to step into the ring, approach the line, strap on his skates, approach a bull - or if this was the moment he yearned for, the Rubicon he crossed time and time again, knowing that if he stayed back he would have joined those masses of people who never dared, who played it safe, who lived quiet lives of desperation, but by crossing over he would have a story, something really worth writing about, and I thought: what’s the worst these jackboots can do?

So I walked on, and realized that the car was parked in front of the Parliament.

And I kept moving forward, step by step, feeling my skin tingle and my back tighten.

And then everything happened all at once.

Actually, it didn’t - that was a cheap dramatic trick, and I’m not at all sorry I hit “publish” before I took it out, because you’re obviously still reading this.

As I got closer, I realized that it was a medic van, not a police van; a tool of safety, not repression. A drunk woman was standing next to the passenger side, plastic bags by her feet, talking to the EMTs in the front. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but it looked more like she was trying to get a few Forints for a drink and they were listening to her to stave off boredom, and none of them noticed me as I walked by. The grassy lawn in front of the Parliament building was empty, too, except for the sort of trash that one might expect if a million people moved through - empty soda bottles, chip bags, sandwich wrappers.

Business as usual. No sign of conflict, of insurrection, of a battle over the direction of Hungarian society.

And I thought: peace is dangerous.

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A few hours earlier, the streets had been filled with people who both supported LGBTQIA+ rights as well as those who opposed the government; it was hard to determine who was a friend of Dorothy and who was an enemy of the enemy. The results were the same: as soon as he was even threatened with a political punch in the nose, Orban ran away, and the people won the battle. The thing is, the marchers took the streets for a day. Orban will be here for…well, as of this writing, perhaps just for another few weeks; we can only hope he is put out to pasture by the electorate. But to make progress in gaining rights does not require a parade, or a march; it is a protracted struggle. Just because a dictator crawls back into his hole for a day doesn’t mean he or she is dead; they might simply be regrouping to come back stronger, later.

And that’s why it is dangerous to stop. Some1 humans have a natural inclination toward oppressing others; we must be vigilant against that. We have to continue to resist, to be angry, to protest, if we are to retain our rights against the seemingly natural tendency of some people to try to control.

Jefferson was just reporting when he wrote that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” This isn’t aspirational; people shouldn’t hope for self-sacrifice and personal martyrdom, and we shouldn’t hope for the chance to kill an oppressor. It is, instead, a neutral quote that recognizes human nature: no matter what past generations have done to oppose oppression, we have to remember that freedom must be protected, that the battles should never be considered to be over, and that our generation has to continue to fight for it.

And that means: we need to keep fighting.

On the bus back, I thought: What would Plimpton do?

And then: he’d write.

Plimpton was a storyteller, an observer. He got to see things, but what really counted was that he could tell people what he experienced; it wasn’t so much that he engaged in things but that he communicated his experiences to the public. I’m sure he was a great guy,2 but I’d confused his being witness to great events with being a Great Man.3

The bus trundled through a clubbing district, sweaty people crammed into open bars and kebab shops gyrating their hunks of meat for the late-night traffic, and it hit me: there are some “great men” or “great women” who will be remembered by name, but the really great people are the masses who keep showing up without recognition to fight the same exact fights. Washington could only do so much on his own; he required Hamilton and Adams and Jefferson, et al, but he really depended on the foot soldiers who ate their own horses and each others’ boots at Valley Forge. Lincoln may have been a great president, but he depended on his team of rivals; we have to remember, though, that the real heroes were the soldiers who marched against the Confederates to preserve the union. Martin Luther King Jr would have gone nowhere without the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he really needed the millions of marchers to walk on all of those roads. Orban will never go down in history as a “Great Man” - oppressors may win the day, but they never get a good judgment in the history books. The people around me, though, on the bus and in the metro and in the streets and bars - they will be the Great Group who future generations should be able to look to for inspiration.

And I thought: Plimpton’s great luck wasn’t in participating - it was that he was able to tell the story.

I am no Plimpton. But I hope someone, someday, tells the full story of the people who marched in support of Pride, and who continued the movement that overthrew a would-be dictator in Hungary.4

And that after the story is told, they will still keep marching.

That comment stuck with - not because of sleep training, but because I have been thinking a lot about the idea that kids can’t, or shouldn’t, be trained. At first, that sentiment might make intuitive or emotional sense - maybe we think that kids should not be made to do things that go against their pure, childish nature, or perhaps we shy away from intentionally training them to behave in a particular way and let them grow up naturally, responding to their environment and getting real-world feedback on what works and what doesn’t. But in thinking about it, I now take the opposite view: we train children constantly, whether we intend to or not, and we need to be be intentional about how we train them.

For example, if we teach children to use forks, spoons, or chopsticks to get food to their mouths, we are training them to use tools to eat; similarly, if we let them eat with their hands, we are training them to interact with their food in a more direct manner.1 If we insist that they put their toys away, we are training them to keep their spaces orderly; if we let them leave all of their stuff out, we are training them how to live (and perhaps thrive, or wallow) in disorder. If we read books to them, we are training them to sit still, listen, pay attention, follow narrative arcs,2 and perhaps identify letters and words and sentences; if we put screens in front of them, we are training their brains to constantly search for new stimuli, seek out dopamine hits, ignore the world, and develop in otherwise unnatural ways. Speaking, walking, crossing streets, drinking, sleeping in beds - the very act of “raising” children is training them.

And I was reminded of my friend Mike Pastor. He had a rough youth, but went on to get his black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, become a world-class boxing and MMA trainer, and is a physical fitness genius who, importantly, also raised a thoroughly badass daughter. A long time ago, before we’d had Daniel and Nick, he said something that has informed pretty much everything I’ve cooked for them in the last seven years.

As a trainer, many of his clients could find the time to work out, but found it difficult to improve their diets. The reason: they said that their kids would only eat crap – donuts, chips, fries, pasta, burgers, all day every day. His adult clients felt like if they wanted to cook healthy food, they might cook chicken and broccoli and rice for themselves and then microwave macaroni and cheese or burritos for their kids. This either was too much work, cost too much money, was too complicated to plan, or the unhealthy alternatives their kids were eating were too tempting for them to resist. Mike’s advice to them - that they should compost all the crap and stock their fridges with fresh, healthy food - ran into the seemingly immovable wall of “I would love to, but then my kids wouldn’t eat anything.”

Mike’s response: kids ate crap because the parents had trained them to eat crap; the entire family simply needed to be re-trained. The parents could change their habits, and impose these changes on the kids, and the kids’ habits would change.

This is actually easier with kids because they are mostly blank slates. We, as parents, have little control over the genetic “nature” side of their lives; however, we have a huge amount of direct control, at least in the early years, over how we nurture them. Because we create their environments, we also create and enable their habits and influence their actions and choices, whether good or bad. Unless we intentionally help them learn to make good choices, then we, by default, probably train them to do poorly. If children become used to eating crap, it is the parents’ fault for creating this unhealthy world for them.

Mike’s quest was to show his clients that adults can change and kids can change. A new habit like eating healthy might not be comfortable at first, but kids are remarkably resilient and adaptable, and they will adjust - and be better off for it.3

Anyway, I am thinking of these things because we are preparing for yet another very long trip in another country, and a big part of that is preparing the kids for spending five weeks away from their friends, toys, and familiar surroundings to live in a completely foreign culture where they don’t speak the language, won’t know anyone else, and will have to adapt. In other words, our job right now is to train them to be excellent little travellers. I thought that other parents might possibly be interested in how we have learned over the last few years to get small children ready for a big trip. A lot of it might go against current parenting norms, or may seem idealistic, and parents may not want to do some of these things because they feel like their kids would see them as strange.

Perhaps. But parenting norms today often seem to be incredibly poorly thought-out, and are ripe for disruption; good parents always try to improve on whatever their upbringing was, no matter how well they remember it. Also, if we more or less create what our children see as normal, and if they end up benefitting because we their parents create a better world for them, how is that a bad thing?

Let’s start with food…

Train them to eat.

The goal: you want them to be healthy, and you want them to also be willing and able to try new things when the comfortable things aren’t available.

Three observations:

1. When travelling, kids will need to adjust to changes.

2. They can do this better when they are able to regulate their emotions.

3. Regulating emotions is a million times easier when they aren’t filled with sugar-saturated, ultraprocessed food.4

So we start, here, with food.

To get them to eat healthy on the road, it helps to start way before the trip by making sure that they have, and eat, good food. It is easier to get them used to eating well if they are not used to junk food.

The first step: get them accustomed to eating better long before you leave. Give them apples and bananas instead of chips and dip; frozen yogurt and fruit pops instead of creamsicles; vegetable fried rice instead of microwave hot dogs; water instead of soda.

We haven’t had to try to change the boys’ eating habits because they never got used to chips, then had to switch to apples; they never had a steady supply of chips in the first place, but they have always had all the apples they could eat. My suspicion is that it is easier to ease them into the change rather than force them to suddenly go cold turkey on fried chicken; get them eating better little by little rather than all at once. If you are starting with a baby, though, make it easy for yourself and don’t feed them crap.

Sometimes, our kids will ask for chips instead of bananas for a post-school snack, or ice cream instead of porridge for breakfast. I say no. They know my no is no because, unless they can make a compelling and logical argument, when I say no, I mean no.5 For other parents, this may be difficult. If you’ve trained them to think that you no is “possibly,” and that if they can get a “yes” just by whining and complaining, then you can expect a meltdown.

On the road, it helps to pack healthy snacks; this requires a minimal amount of planning. For example, Alice always packs one “travel Apple” per person on any leg of a trip. It is great solution to stave off hunger when there is a delay or a problem. (This is obviously location-dependent; you may need to adjust to mangoes or dragon fruit or blueberries as available.) Healthy food should be available no matter where you are; to make it easy, it rarely comes in plastic bags with a “Best Before” date two years in the future.

Finally, there is a temptation to splurge on vacation, to eat things that are a bit indulgent or simply convenient. This is fine, but kids rapidly get used to the treats that they get. Also, when suddenly given massive amounts of sugar, they seem to react poorly.6 It is better not to go down that road in the first place. The easiest thing to do: train them to eat well, pack good, healthy snacks, and leave out the crap so that there is no choice involved. Fruit is excellent. They can drink water. Not only will they be fine, they will be better travel partners.

Train them to ask questions.

The goal: kids who are inquisitive, notice things, and learn to actively interact with their surroundings.

For some reason, our kids never went through the “Why? Why? Why?” phase, but lots of Nick’s friends are going through that phase right now, all together. When they ask me why 100 times in a row, I always answer; at some point, their parent will eventually step in and say, “hey, stop bothering him.”

I take the opposite approach: questions, even “why? Why? WHY?” don’t bother me. Questions are a sign that the child wants to learn and understand the world, and is trying to actively engage with it. By telling them to stop questioning, parents are telling them to stop learning, to not explore. Asking questions is a good thing - and something that should not be trained out of them, but which we should train them to do more, especially in democratic societies.

This is particularly important when travelling, as kids will be in a new place and culture where things are clearly different and they will want to understand why. If they don’t ask questions, they will train their minds to either ignore differences, to judge any differences negatively without trying to understand them, or to dismiss them completely; their brains and world views will ossify, and they will close themselves off to new information and experiences. If they do ask questions, and feel like they will be acknowledged, they will learn about their surroundings, be encouraged to pay attention, and get positive feedback that helps them further explore their world.

When kids ask questions, answer to the absolute utmost of your ability. Admit when you don’t know something, and then work to get the answers, if you can (preferably without going straight to your phone). To go the extra mile, ask them questions - about what they notice, what they like, why they think things are the way that they are, etc. This is positive reinforcement to help them interact with the world.

I admit that this is not always comfortable. For example, in Budapest, there is a display of brass shoes next to the waterfront. It was created as a memorial to Jews killed during World War II. The Hungarian fascists used to bring Jews to the river, bind a group of them together by their hands, shoot one, then push the whole group into the water; the idea was that the dead one would cause the others to drown, and thus the fascists could save bullets by not having to shoot each person. If you go to see this, and you’ve trained your kids to ask questions, then naturally there will be uncomfortable questions asked. You may decide to tell them that an artist made them (technically true); you may tell them that it is a memorial to remember dead people; you may tell them that a bunch of evil people killed a lot of other people, and this is to remember the innocent victims; you may tell them all the details possible. But imagine the alternative: blowing off their questions, or that it doesn’t matter, or that they shouldn’t ask. What does that train the kids to do? Why would they want to explore the world, if all they got was, “kid, stop being so annoying”?

Don’t raise such children. Questions, questions, questions.

Train them to be comfortable with boredom.

The goal: get them to be OK with boredom and to make their own fun.

There seems to be this attitude nowadays that if a kid is bored, it is a negative judgment on the parents’ ability to keep them entertained as well as a potential lost opportunity for the kids to maximize their time and do something productive.7 Parents are eager to step in with solutions - usually screens - in order to avoid a child’s boredom; brain damage, it seems, is preferable to boredom.

But I take the opposite view. Helping kids to be bored, and working through it, is a critical skill that helps immensely with travel.

Boredom is great for kids. First, the very realization of boredom shows them how to recognize their emotions, name them, and understand what they are feeling. They learn to tolerate less-than-ideal experiences (which is helpful when you are on the road - see below), “develop planning strategies, problem-solving skills, flexibility and organizational skills — key abilities that children whose lives are usually highly structured may lack,” according to Jodi Musoff, MA, MEd of the Child Mind Institute.

The alternative: kids always have something to do, usually provided for by other people - either their parents or Andreessen Horowitz. They don’t learn to deal with and regulate their emotions. They don’t learn to be independent. They don’t get creative with some of the tools you’ve brought (below). Worst case scenario, when they feel a twinge of boredom, a screen is pushed in front of their faces and they zone out, overstimulating their brains and training them to keep looking for dopamine hits.

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So when a kid says that they are bored, instead of providing them with a solution, train them to occupy themselves on their own. Give them the tools to be creative, or simply sit with them and watch the world (some pro tips here). They are kids; this is how they were meant to learn.8

Slowly.

Train them to be comfortable with uncertainty.

The goal: help them be prepared to deal with the inevitable changes that occur on journeys.

On trips, even sanitised trips like cruise ships or resort holidays, things can go wrong, or at least different than anticipated. The more you leave well-worn paths and enter the real world when travelling - a foreign city, the countryside, the jungle - the less certain things will be.

This can be tough for kids. They often like at least some amount of routine and predictability; on the road, though, this is tough.

But you can train them to deal with it by…well, showing them how to deal with it.

It is important to make sure that children are exposed to some amount of uncertainty, to eustress,9 to things not going their way. When something comes up that is unexpected, make sure that they know:

1. You are going to adjust to it;

2. You expect them to adjust to;

3. They absolutely can and should cry, but it won’t change anything, and you are not going to move heaven to change earth.10

The nice thing: kids are resilient, and adjustable. They can deal with change, even if it upsets them. This won’t be what they complain to their therapists about.

Train them to use new words.

The goal: at a basic level, to teach them to communicate; at a deeper level, teach them to get into other peoples’ minds and to accept differences.

Some people throughout the world believe that their way of doing things is the only right way, and any alternative is “wrong.” They seem to feel that there is some sort of moral quandary in, say, driving on the left or right side of the road, eating with chopsticks or forks, wearing jeans or sarongs, or saying “toe-may-toe” and “poe-tay-toe” instead of “toe-mah-toe” and “poe-tah-toe.”11

This is something I absolutely want to train out of my kids. I want them to not be pedantic. Pedantry is small mindedness added to inexperience and multiplied by rudeness. A big part of this training is the simple act of travel - showing them that other people do things differently. A wonderful way to really help kids learn to understand other ways of doing things is to pick up words in another language.

This shouldn’t be terribly difficult, but it is surprisingly uncommon. Kids only need to know a few words – thank you, hello, goodbye. However, naturally curious kids will want to go on and learn other words – police car, poop, punch, dinosaur, excavator, cake, water, giant donut, smilodon. They will start working to understand how other people communicate, and, naturally, this means that they will be getting into other peoples’ heads, and working to understand them.

There are three other benefits:

1. They actually learn parts of the language;

2. You actually learn parts of the language;

3. Old people will love that they know how to say “thank you” or “hello, beautiful.”

Some people argue that if God wanted people to speak Spanish, He wouldn’t have written the Bible in English. Smile, nod, promise to call, and turn away.

Train them to create, play, and read.

The goal: give them things to keep themselves occupied, express their creativity, and have fun.

First off, if the question is “screens?” The answer is “NO.”

Kids love to play. They have imaginations. They love toys.

So pack a few toys - not a lot. We let them fill a kid-sized backpack with whatever they think they will want, but that’s it, because they know we are going to go to flea markets to find new toys wherever we go. We are more forgiving with books - in many places, English-language books are hard to come by, especially at thrift stores or flea markets, so we either bring text-dense books to read to them (it is more efficient, size-wise) or Kindle versions (which have text you can read, but truly suck for illustrated books).

In addition, when packing, instead of picking “toys” for them, select “tools” that you all can use to get creative. For example, if you have a choice between a set of pens and a notebook OR a miniature tractor, go for the pens. The tractor is a toy that can be used for pretending to farm; the pens can create worlds, games, puzzles, or can simply be used just to draw.

For flights, Alice has also invented a “plane fairy” who gives the boys activity books with stickers, coloring-in, etc. These only cost $3-5 each, and can fascinate a kid for hours. When they are done with these, we make sure we have books, playing cards, dominoes, travel chess, and assorted tools for them to create with.

And do they?

Yes. They are fine. Worst-case, they look out the window at clouds and are bored.

We get a lot of feedback from other parents on this policy. It always falls into, “I wish my kids could do that. They go crazy without my phone,” or, “your kids are so well behaved and engaged with the world!” When old people see it, they usually say something akin to, “Now that’s how you raise children.” Of course, I very, very privately believe that my kids are inherently superior (genetically, intellectualy, and morally) to all other living beings who have ever existed; I am a father, after all. My secret fear, though, is that they are actually quite average, but other parents have trained their own children to tune out and only focus on screens, whereas we have trained ours to do things like observe their surroundings, play, and engage with the world.12

Can this engagement with the world exist alongside a phone on a train blasting “Samurai Pizza Cats”? Some people will argue that it absolutely can, and they intend to teach their kids to be able to be able to play endless hours of jewel-sorting games, watch hundreds of dubious healthcare videos and pay attention to where they are walking, all in the way of some sort of “digital learning strategy” to prepare them for the real world.13 I think it can, in theory, but reality is a whole different beast.14 It’s like saying, “you can work a full day, watch the American average of 3.5 hours of TV a day, spend the American average of 2.25 hours on social media, and also be a contributing member of your community, read books, play an instrument, and sleep eight hours a night.” It is absolutely possible, but a well-lived life is made infinitely easier by avoiding screens as a source of distraction from the world; you get your time and attention back to spend it on things that matter.

The same thing applies to kids. Pack some stuff for them to use to get creative when they are bored and train them to help themselves.

Train them to pay attention to screens.

The goal: prepare them for what they will see.

But.

There’s one use for screens (in very small doses) that I think is useful before a trip, and in controlled environments: YouTube.

Kids like learning about where they will be going, and a wonderful way to do this is to show them videos of the destination. Someone somewhere has done an English-language video showing the highlights of virtually every destination; these are good places to start. Then, make a list together of the things they want to know more about or see, and then delve into each. This can be done over months; you don’t need to binge watch them. For example, you might look at a video about Budapest; say your sons notice the food, and want to know more about goulash and sausages. You can find great videos about the food, and the kids get a soft introduction to what they might see, hear, and eat. Then, when you see these things in real life, they will already know something about what they are experiencing.

Can they do this from books? Absolutely. However, we’ve found that travel books are not often written for children (Geronimo Stilton was an excellent exception to this in Italy; we read two of them). Encyclopedias - the print kind - are inevitably 40 years out of date. Plus, if a kid can’t read in the first place, it’s harder to engage with books. Videos are really good for helping everyone prepare.

(Although a contrary view…

)

Another great resource for both kids and adults is transportation videos. There is an entire genre of YouTube videos that show viewers exactly how to use public transportation in other places. Sometimes, these are actually entertaining. Almost always, they are invaluable. There are many regional variations between bus services - from the technologically advanced systems in Milan and Rome to the almost antiquated systems in Palermo; if you expected the systems to be the same, you might find yourself getting fined for not getting the proper tickets.15 It is much easier if you can see the public transportation system in action and know how to use it before you go.

Finally, there are so many food videos from other cultures that teach viewers what to eat and, occasionally, how to eat; these can be wonderful to be able to show kids the variations in cuisines, and they will almost certainly enjoy learning about sweets and pastries that they might be able to taste as part of their cultural immersion program.

So to sum up: when used intelligently, YouTube is excellent for teaching kids about what they will see and experience before they step foot on a plane.

Train them to learn.

The goal: focus their attention on learning about a new place, and help them explore the culture that they are entering.

Kids are learning machines. They will learn. With a small amount of thought, you can turn a trip into a rewarding and enriching learning experience.

The focus here should be on exploring foreign cultures. Kids can learn about dinosaurs, space, or the deepest oceans wherever they are from books. When travelling, they have the opportunity to learn about other people and places, as well as themselves, and they should use their particular opportunities to learn.

There are a few ways to do this:

1. Museums

Many times, local museums have engagement activities for children - quizzes to fill out about exhibits, interactive displays, etc. These are great to visit on rainy or extremely hot days.

One caveat: sometimes a museum visit may seem to be a failure because the kids only engage for an hour or two. It can help to think of these museum visits more as a way to introduce them to museum culture, rather than to keep them looking at the landscape paintings of minor artists for four hours. Eventually, they will be more comfortable with art, and you will be able to justify paying for them to get into the Louvre.

2. Stories

You can learn a huge amount about a culture based on the stories that they tell themselves, and the stories that their children are raised with. Do their fairy tales emphasize compassion or violence? Do the characters treat other people as friends or enemies? Do they work together, as part of a team, or are they ruggedly individualistic? What do the villains try to do that is frowned upon, and what do the heroes do to save the day? These morality tales show what their culture has historically valued. In some places - the UK, Germany, and Denmark, for example - these are more readily available (in English) than in other places like Laos; however, it can be an adventure to find books that you can read together or to search out people who can tell local stories to your kids.

3. Religion

Similar to stories, learning about religious traditions is a great way to learn about a people. This can involve visiting places of worship, learning stories about their ideas of how the world started, or reading what might seem to be acid-trip accounts of past events. Official religions, too, may have local variations, or spirits or saints that matter to a city but are not as prominent elsewhere, and locals are often more than happy to share these traditions with interested children. Like with children’s stories, learning about religion is a great way to discover what people think of as important.

Train them to explore the real world through play.

The goal: help them run their little butts off, and get them used to physical exertion.

Kids, no less than adults, need to let off steam. Daily. Make sure that they explore playgrounds, parks, and anything else that will let them run around and get their energy out.

And who knows? They may make friends.

In Budapest, at a playground, a little girl walked up to me and said, “do your kids speak English?” I said yes, and she said, “can I play with them?” I said it was up to them. Nick, as is his way, said “you can be my friend!” and they played for a half hour together. Her babysitter, watching it all, told me that her parents were Americans who were in Hungary for work, and the girl didn’t have any friends; withing minutes, she was holding Nick’s hand as they ran through the misters to cool down.

You may wonder what you should do while kids play. I try to let my kids play without me being involved; it is a struggle, though, as my natural tendency would be to helicopter. So I try to sit on a bench and watch, from a distance, and let them explore. Some would then be tempted to check email, or catch up on the news, or to go through whatever feeds appear on their phones. I don’t think that this is a good idea. In fact, I think it is a grievous mistake - it takes your mind elsewhere. Instead, take the opportunity to meet other locals, to practice language, to meditate, or to relax.

If you can talk to other parents, it is a low risk and high reward experience - they are parents, right? You can get expert insight and tips from people who have the same concerns as you about things to do with kids, places to go, child friendly restaurants, good museums, or immersive kids theater (seriously). You may even be invited to coffee, tea, or for a play date; other parents are always eager for their kids to be exposed to English.

A plug: in Budapest, I met another father, Marc, who I now subscribe to (and recommend you do as well). He is American, speaks a bunch of other languages, has a handful of advanced degrees, and writes his local observations of international politics as a Hungarian resident (and his work on Ukraine is…well, terrifying, actually). He answered some of my questions about his hometown of Boston, and our kids played a bit in the sand pit. Now, I rely on him for a nuanced (and extraordinarily adventurous) voice from Eastern Europe.

You will never know who you will run into (or what you might discover) at foreign playgrounds, but one thing is for certain: you won’t meet people if you have a phone wall up.

I’m sure there’s more; please add any other advice you have in the comments!

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One of the great tragedies of life is that we are all immortal until proven otherwise.1

We don’t live with death in the same way as people did in the past, as we don’t confront mortality as constantly. For most of human history, people have lived with war, famine, and very few possessions, and they knew that everything was impermanent. Their constant companions were hunger, thirst, battle, exile, conflict, uncertainty. They yearned for the opposite: a state of peace, plenty, where everything they could possibly need was taken care of and they did not want.

So people invented imaginary lands – Heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, Svarga, Jannah, Garothman, Gan Eden, Takamagahara - where things were permanent, and they had all of the necessities they could hope for, and they yearned for these lands, because the world as they knew it was none of these things. In our daily life, we have order and predictability – at least, compared to 99.99999% of our ancestors. What we have today, what we take for granted, is what people throughout history have wanted more than anything else. We live, really, in a world of near-permanent abundance.

And we expect that what we have will last – in a good way (indestructible plastic Nalgene water bottles, for example) and a bad way (plastic, generally). This expectation of permanence applies to everything. We live, really, in a synthetic bubble, where we expect what was here yesterday to be here today and here tomorrow. If anything seems like it might threaten this permanence, we get shook.

But when that happens, when something dislodges us from our reverie and reminds us that this too shall pass, it is eustress - it makes us stronger. We need these reminders.

Travel is a way to impart eustress in an intentional way.

And one of the things about travel is that is so magical is that it reminds us of the impermanence of…well, all of our daily experiences. In a new place, we are suddenly reminded that:

1. There is a world outside of our normal and immediate bubble;

2. Virtually every other person in the world doesn’t know or care about us;

3. Everything ends, and soon, we will have to say goodbye – to people, places, things.
   And life itself.

On our last day in Palermo, we took the 806 to Mondelo Bay. Marcello met us and showed us to our beach umbrellas. We bought roasted corn on the cob from the old man who showed up every morning at 11 a.m. to walk back and forth at the edge of the island, chanting the same words over and over to the sea and the sand, with his 30-something son pulling the giant plastic cooler that left flat tracks in the sand, and we rented a pedal boat from the nice family who always remembered that the boys love wearing lifejackets. I swam around the pier just before noon, treading water 20 yards out to listen to children doing cannonballs from the old wooden beams, then got toasted caprese sandwiches and mushroom arancini at La Lunette, and I thanked the woman who never smiled for always looking after us, which made her smile and call the chef out so that we could shake hands one last time. Under the umbrellas, I ordered a “Birra Messina cristalli di sale per favore,” and the teenager stopped, looked at me through his sunglasses, and said, in English, “You have a really good accent.” We got the 806 home, taking four seats in the back facing each other as the bus picked up teenagers and families until the aisles were Tetrissed with bare shoulders and smelled of sunscreen and sweat, and it would be the same the next day, and the day after that, and on and on perhaps for eternity, but never again with us on board as witnesses.

At the last stop on the line, we got out and walked slowly to Dolce Capo. We got cones and sat on the patio across the street. I went in for a second cone and two Germans with black North Face backpacks were going back and forth over what to get, and I helped them order because the woman behind the counter was getting impatient with them holding up the line.

We packed. As I layered things in my bag, I made a list of souvenirs. They were,

From Milan:

1. Ten Muji notebooks, which became a written record of the trip;

2. One “ABRACADABRA” tote bag (sent to Bianca);

3. Post-Its from a stationary shop, used for planning.

From Bologna:

1. A half-burned candle from a nunnery we stayed at;

2. One corkscrew advertising the “Castellana Grotte” caves in Apullia, which we did not visit;

3. A red “Leonardo” inkwell and a stick of sealing wax, also red, from the pen shop;

4. Two packets of pepper seeds from the botanical gardens, which are growing on my windowsill as I type this.

From Florence:

1. One half-marathon shirt from Lucca, a race that they didn’t let me run;

2. One green Bianchi water bottle, found next to a dirt trail while I was running a substitute self-created half-marathon;

3. A 1963 tourist map of Florence, found in the street on my way back from the gym, showing that there had been no change in the layout over the last 62 years;

4. “Hair paste” from a corner store;

5. Perfumes from a small perfumer to make me smell like a 1972 Fiat 500 convertible driving from Positano to Arienzo in April;

6. A chef knife, purchased when the knives in our kitchen had the sturdiness of paper; Proraso shaving soap; two shoe brushes (one for Daniel alone, one for me and Nicholas to share); burgundy Saphir shoe polish and Saphir Creme Universalle, and a stick of “Victor” deoderant from a general store in Florence;

7. Be like the Fox (a gift from Meredith, a biography of Machiavelli arguing that The Prince was actually a satire.

From Rome:

1. One extra-soft toothbrush;

2. “Several” tubes of Italian toothpaste;

3. One Marconi straight razor (circa 1910) from the Rome flea market, which is now the only razor I use;

4. One small moonstone found in a crack near the Spanish Steps in Rome;

5. One silk pocket square, found in the Borghese gardens in Rome;

6. One sailcloth backpack from the Trastevere flea market;

7. One bar of Trader Joe’s soap, brought by my dad as a present from California.

From Sorrento:

1. MyPompeii annual pass from Pompeii;

2. One spatula, as the apartment had brand-new pots and pans but no cooking utensils;

3. Laundry soap, because our apartment didn’t have a washing machine;

4. Three Roman coins and one Roman nail, found in the dirt near the swing set in a playground;

5. Three wooden wine crates, found on the side of the road during a short run;

6. One chunk of marble, found on the side of the road during a long run.

From Palermo:

1. Assorted nautical strings collected from the bottom of Mondello Bay;

2. Two pearl earrings (unmatching) (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) from the bottom of Mondello Bay;

3. Two friendship bracelets from the shore of Mondello Bay (one sent to Bianca and now lost forever, one which is still on my right wrist);

4. Assorted seashells from Mondello Bay;

5. One Speedo-style bathing suit, purchased as a replacement when my old suit ripped obscenely during a swim;

6. One brass belt buckle, found floating with a pair of Levi’s size 38x32 in Mondello Bay;

7. A box of marzipan fruit from the convent bakery, sent to my sister;

8. Two bottle openers from a flea market, one advertising a San Pelligrino drink that was only made in the 1950s (which we use almost daily) and one advertising what appears to be a fake business set up as a mafia front (sent to my sister);

9. Four 1920s school dip pens from a flea market (two sent to my sister and Bianca, two kept);

10. 1930s English pen nibs from the flea market, €5 for a box of about 100, which are incredibly frustrating to use;

11. One shoe horn from a 1930s shoe store that appears to have been bombed to smithereens during the war, bought at the flea market;

12. Persol glasses frames (in honor of Sonny);

13. One stick of red sealing wax from the stationer run by the three septuagenarians who never seemed to have any other customers;

14. Two litres of vino sfuso - one red and one white - from Palermo and Mondello, which nearly sent me over my luggage weight limit;

15. One green shopping token from the Famila grocery store that someone had left in a trolley, and which we used every day;

16. Two meters of Sicilian fabric from the cloth market, to be made into lampshades and napkins and patches for ripped garments;

17. Two Morretino coffee cans, purchased from the puppet museum, one which still holds espresso beans, one given to my brother-in-law;

18. One extremely long rolling pin from a flea market.

Plus:

1. Eighteen plant cuttings, carried home in a water bottle and propagated;

2. Stickers from every city we visited, all mosaicked on my water bottle.

If anyone asks you if you would rather take a bus or a train from Palermo to Catania, take a train. The bus is hot, crowded, and has a toilet that, while technically functioning, smells so strongly of month-old sewage that nobody will use it after the first person opens the door and floods the cabin with the stench. You do get to see the center of Sicily, though, which, at the height of summer and under a cloudless sky, is a manifestation of Eliot:

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

The middle of Sicily is like the Wild West – small villages perched on far-off hilltops separated by a Hobbesian hell. I grew up in Southern California, where the “reclaimed” desert was so parched that my friends’ homes burned in our near-annual wildfires, but Sicily made our San Diego sagebrush suburb look like a rain forest. Occasionally, we’d catch a glimpse of livestock huddled in the shade of an orangebrown sheet of corrugated iron, or a shack (not mudcracked, but not far off) that looked uninhabited save for the tricycle laying in the dust outside of an open doorway, wheels still spinning, but other than that, it would have been hard for anything but lizards and snakes to survive. Between the rare outposts, everything seemed subject to rapid desiccation.

And then you enter Catania, at the base of Etna, and it is beautiful – like a wealthy, non-bombed Palermo. There are tiled squares and air conditioned cultural centres, gushing fountains, a stunning cathedral, reasonably good gelato, the most elegant jewelry store I’ve ever seen, extraordinarily narrow streets, tiny restaurants full of plants, and encampments of refugees hoping to make it across to the boot.

On the morning before our flight, I went for an early walk. I passed Roman ruins waking up to their 730,544th (or so) morning, and followed a group of middle-aged construction workers into a posh bakery and waited while they flirted like school boys with the shop attendant. I ordered twice as many pastries for breakfast as we needed, but it was the last meal before our trip died, and I carried them in their fancy box down Via Alessandro Manzoni with Etna smoking behind me. I picked up a succulent with purplegreen leaves that had fallen from a planter and put it in my water bottle with the others - a final souvenir. I stopped at a caffe for an espresso and stood next to a man with a thin moustache and light sunglasses who seemed as if he was trying to be seen.

The taxi arrived. The driver took us around the gardens, then through the suburbs to the terminal.

And then we were passing through gates that testified silently that we had nothing to declare.

Our apartment was the same, just dustier. We unpacked, and I sorted all the plants into their new homes and souvenirs into their new places. I sent packages to Bianca and my sister. I brought the fabric to the tailor, who made a set of napkins. We searched through Italian cookbooks for Cacio e Pepe and Porchetta recipes, got books on pizza and pasta, and learned to use an ice cream maker. I stopped drinking Americanos and only drank espressos.

And got restless.

We have the tendency to look at trips as separate sections of our lives. There is a beginning – a boarding time, say – and end: our ETA, or perhaps that first moment we walk back into the office. And before and after these times, we experience the rest of our lives. The vacation is the fun part; the day-to-day part is drudgery, what we try to escape.

But it would be good to remember that what we experience in our every-day lives is a dream vacation to other people. I’m not just talking about living in San Diego, Miami, Boston, Paris, London, or Rome; plenty of people would love to get to someplace “normal” like Des Moines, or Buffalo, or…well, even Salt Lake City has a certain je ne sais quoi.

St. Augustine didn’t actually say, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page,” but someone did, and it now seems to be generally accepted. If we assume it is true, and we can agree that books teach us, assuming we can learn, and if we learn, we grow as people, then travelling, too, helps us to learn and grow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson also apparently wrote, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” This, too, is often accepted as wisdom. But I’d argue that it isn’t about either the journey or the destination, because that is external; the real value is about who we become in our travels, both at home and abroad. Maybe we should focus on the journey, of course, but we need to be grateful for the product: ourselves.

And if Carlyle was right that we should not rely solely on formal education to learn, but that “the true university of these days is a collection of books,” and that it is important to continue to learn/read long after our formal school days are done, let’s push this further: if reading is critical, and the world is like a book, and to read the world we need to travel, then we need to keep travelling (and reading!) in order to keep learning and growing.

We wanted to find a capital city that would offer the kids a lot of places to play and give the adults a lot of culture. It needed to be cheap enough for us to stay a month, have a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club and a gym, good public transportation, good day trips, and bodies of water that the boys could play in to escape the heat. It would ideally have amazing food, a history of good coffee, a unique indigenous fermented beverage, a strong sense of history, beautiful architecture, a zoo, multiple museums, a brilliant literary tradition, good parks, and be a direct flight from Edinburgh.

And so we beat on.

Next stop: Budapest.

But are they the right words?

The words that tell you what is actually happening?

They capture physical objects at a single moment in time, but do they explain history, emotions, the future?

I was looking for photos of Cefalù in order to anchor this piece, and found very few of any interest or use. The thing that struck me is that photographs are really so limited. Let’s assume every photo actually does speak a thousand words. A thousand words is fine if you want any thousand words, and oftentimes it seems like any unselected, haphazard thousand words will get a thumbs up, or a heart, especially if the thousand-word photograph says something about a slim 20-year-old white woman in a bikini. But for the real story of a place or time or people, are those thousand words appropriate? Enough? Do they convey the right information? What do they actually say that is important? A photograph can direct our attention to a single scene, but you don’t get anything outside of the frame, beyond the borders, to the left, right, above, below, or behind the viewer, and they won’t communicate what a bowl of bibimbap’s steam smells like, how a honeycrisp apple cracks, the flutters of the muezzin’s voice, the hard coldness of a glacier-fed mountain stream (or how a rainbow trout, taken from it by a fly and cooked over a campfire, tastes after a day-long hike). The best photographs can tell a pretty good story - about the subject, or perhaps ourselves. But the best stories still tell the best stories, and oftentimes, the real stories aren’t photographable, because photographs can’t actually tell the whole story - they can only tell a small part.

Photographs are short stories for lazy people who don’t want depth.

And for those stories that are far, far larger than photographs, we still have words.

I think that's the difference between Substack and other social media, and why I am trying to train the algorithm to stop adding photos to my notes feed: here, the thousand words do not need to be scattershot, or random, but can be chosen, selected, intentional.

And that makes a real, valuable, difference.

Anyways, here’s a photograph Alice took in Cefalù.

What is there to say about Cefalù? It is as inoffensive a place as is possible to imagine, nestled between volcanic cliffs and the tranquil Mediterranean sea. The tourist shops are full – of tourists, yes, and bottles of mass-market limoncello, paper-thin shawls, straw hats with vaguely nautical ribbons, polyester beach towels, racks and racks of postcards and fridge magnets and, incongruously, an impressive variety of plastic snow globes. There are long, rambling single-lane cobblestone streets spilling over with caffès and trattorias, and an antique cathedral with a huge square in front of it surrounded by caffès and trattorias, and a sandy city beachfront that curves along a cove with a boardwalk lined with caffès and trattorias. Potted plants spill out from windowsills and line the sidewalks, and a three-wheeled truck, outfitted to display a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables from its back, crawls through the streets, a forlorn voice calling aging dowagers from their ground floor apartments to top up their pantries for cena. The sun shines here but, unlike Palermo, the streets are arranged so that they are mostly shaded by the buildings, and with the breeze dancing between the lava cliffs above and the blue brine below, one could spend a genuinely pleasant afternoon here.1

The thing is, on this particular Tuesday, I couldn’t stay in this part of Cefalù.

Twenty-six years ago, on a similarly pleasant spring day in Los Angeles, I’d climbed into my car with a guy I didn’t really like and two complete strangers. I was a sophomore at Pitzer College; the guy, Dan, was my former roommate; the strangers, Bianca and Cindy, were first-years and, in retrospect, it is remarkable that they both decided to go on a ten-hour car trip with two strange men. A few days before, I’d sent out an all-campus email: I was going to San Francisco for spring break and I was looking for people to share the ride and help cover the cost of gas. Dan, Bianca, and Cindy were the first three to respond. For some reason, Bianca got shotgun for the first leg of the trip. Seconds after pulling out of the parking space, and before we’d even exited the lot, she said, “I never thought I’d spend New Years naked, tied to a pole, getting whipped by transvestites in a basement in Oakland.”

I stopped at the intersection leading out of our college, looked at her, and said, “We’re going to be friends.”2

Dan and Cindy stayed in the back of the car for the rest of the trip; I don’t remember them talking at all.

Bianca and I have been friends ever since, despite the fact that we never lived in the same place after that semester. I studied in Wales for a year; when I returned, Bianca was off to do the same in Japan. I moved to Portland after graduation, then San Diego; when she graduated, she moved to Berkeley, then back to Japan. I moved to Barcelona, then Cleveland; she moved back to San Francisco, then Chicago, then Bloomington, then Chicago, then Las Vegas. She came to see me in Ohio, and I visited her in Illinois.

And we had adventures. For her birthday one year in Los Angeles, her boyfriend ditched her to do something else, so we spent most of a Friday drinking champagne and gluing googly eyes on Birds of Paradise flowers - hundreds and hundreds of them, so many that a college class came out to discuss what the “artists” intended to communicate with their unauthorized installation project. In Cleveland, we smoked Cuban cigars on Rockefeller’s grave and drove through the back roads of Ohio Amish Country, blasting Tupac to the cornfields and eating burgers at roadside stands. We danced obscenely with each other at Mickey Avalon concerts, clearing floors and going backstage to meet the Dyslexic Speedreaders themselves. We ran a 5k nearly naked in frigid Bloomington, Indiana, where she got her Masters; she wore a tutu, I wore a silicone horse mask.3 Instead of going home to see her family for Thanksgiving, she took a six-hour Megabus to stay with me, and we lounged around in pajamas, drinking Alizé and cognac and eating Cuban pulled pork instead of turkey. For Halloween one year, we dressed up as Die Antwoord; we started at a bourgeois house party and, after drinking a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red by ourselves, somehow ended up in a dungeon where, trying to pretend I was not out of place at all, that I was completely comfortable, I tried to make small talk with a lesbian couple, one of them wearing a black leather dog collar and unable, by agreement with her partner, to speak without permission.4 Once, knowing I’d been through a bad breakup, she invited me to stay for Labor Day; she made a joke that we should wear coveralls for the weekend, but I didn’t get the joke, so I said I could bring my Amish hat, too. She did a “Yes, And” and immediately told everyone that her Amish cousin was visiting on his Rumspringa, which led to one of the greatest weekends of my life.

For most of this time, and especially during the pandemic, we wrote each other letters. Bianca's were always long – she would fill a bound notebook with her thoughts over the course of months, then send it whole, and every package was like receiving a small personal book, written just for me. Over time, she got more and more into spirituality, and her letters began to detail her journey and explorations, culminating in her deciding to get into a group known as OTO. As she wrote to me later:

Ordo Templi Orientis (or O.T.O.) is Aleister Crowley’s co-ed sex magick focused initiatory occult order founded on the principles of a religion called Thelema and vaguely related to Freemasonry.

I had been saying that I needed a social outlet, “something like Church, but not Christian,” and an acquaintance invited me into the local chapter, which was in desperate need of female members to fill the Priestess role in ritual. I was obsessed with the lore of Jack Parsons, a polyamorous occultist Rocket Scientist who pioneered O.T.O. in the USA in the 1940s, and wanted to follow in his footsteps.

A week before we went to Cefalù, I sent Bianca a message that we'd be going, and that there was an abbey there she might be interested in:

I had no idea what I was in for.

Everything I knew about Thelema had, so far, been from her letters. I started doing research on the abbey, and on Crowley, “the wickedest man in the world,” and then went down the rabbit hole of Thelema. In short, Crowley had moved to Cefalù in 1920 to start the abbey, which he wanted to grow as a school of “magical devotion,” and he had planned to support it using tuition from students. However, just a few years after it started, one of the students died; the student’s wife blamed the death on a ritual that involved drinking the blood of a dead cat and, as an international furore grew, Mussolini himself demanded that Crowley leave Italy. After that, the abbey was abandoned. The dilapidated remains are now in the shadow of a local stadium, and they are a pilgrimage site for devotees of Crowley and Thelema (like Bianca), or their unwitting and susceptible proxies (like me).

But I’d made a promise to Bianca so, after most of a day seeing the pretty parts of Cefalù, I said goodbye to Alice and the boys at a tree-shaded playground and started up the hill. When you have a family, and two young boys, and you are all on vacation, and suddenly you have alone time in a completely new city, there is a sudden adjustment: you go from being a 60-year-old shepherd to becoming a 20-year-old pioneer. There is a reversion, a youthing and immaturing process, that might take a moment but needs to be acknowledged. Suddenly without responsibilities to be an adult, one’s first instinct might be to find a bar and drink a pitcher of their cheapest chianti, to go to a corner shop and get a hundred euros in lottery scratchers, to pick up smoking. I wasn’t walking with my back hunched over to make it easier for Daniel to hold my hand; I wasn’t pushing Nick along steep stone streets that weren’t even designed for cars, much less buggies. My eyes weren’t darting every which way to search for speeding cyclists on the sidewalks, dog shit smeared into pungent landmines, drunk urine puddles, anklebreaker potholes, shattered beer bottles, pedestrians watching TikTok on their phones; I could wander, light-footed and carefree.

So I straightened up, my legs taking longer, faster steps just because I could. I had a job to do.

After walking along the picture-perfect Via Giacomo Matteotti, I turned right on Via Giuseppe Mazzini, and I was suddenly in a different part of Sicily. It was like going backstage, behind a play set, and seeing the well-used ropes and painted sheets and actors without their make-up on. Cefalù is topographically deceptive; because of the way the streets slope gently in the main town, and the buildings are packed so closely next to each other, it is impossible to really get a sense of how close to vertical the surrounding landscape truly is. Once you get out of the city center, the streets become two way and two lane, and the buildings start spreading out, and you can see that the terrain climbs at a remarkable angle upwards - you can see it in the first photo above, the steps rising up and up and then the apartment building and then, just behind it, a cliff, demanding attention. Also, because of the shade in the streets and the breeze near the sea, it is easy to forget that 99.99% of Sicily is oven hot and desert dry, and once the ocean is more than a few blocks away, the sun seems suddenly so much closer.

So just as suddenly I was sweating, and climbing uphill at what felt like a 45° angle. If it had been cool, it would have been tough; in the Sun, it was murder. Cars zoomed past, kicking up dust and spewing diesel fumes, and a visible layer of filth built up on my clothes and on my skin as it mingled with my sweat, which, despite how dry the air was, seemed only to accumulate, soaking my shirt and boxers and shorts and backpack in dark, sour-smelling patches. I stopped twice and drained my water bottle. Sweat collected in my eyebrows and, when I went to squeegee it toward my temples with my fingers, a drop escaped and cleaned a line down my dusty sunglasses lenses.

I had a vision: Crowley and his followers on this road, the women in layered dresses and hats and the men in loose suits, descending into town to secure supplies, or to ceremonially bathe at the waterfront, then returning up the hill in this same unrelenting heat.

I was out of breath when I got to the stadium parking lot entrance. I stopped, my boatshoe soles barely insulating my feet from the volcanic rocks and molten sand. Except for a rhythmic metal clanging, the only thing I could hear was the low howl of the wind, and suddenly I was in the opening scene of an exceptionally violent western movie. Rather than a cooling breeze, though, it seemed to be bringing air from the sweltering inland toward the cooler coast, and it brought no relief.

I took a deep breath and tried to slow my heart down.

The clanging was coming from men working on the stadium bleachers. They were wearing orange vests and white hard hats, and I could see them see me and then turn away. I wondered how much they knew about where we were.

The abbey ruins are just inside the entrance, to the left, sandwiched between the stadium parking lot and some apartment blocks. "Ruins" is generous: there was a vacant lot, overgrown with dense weeds and bushes that were growing between trash that would never be collected.

As I looked at it, I slowly realized that I was staring into a hole.

In Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series, and in many of his stories, there are places of evil: single points where anyone walking by would feel a heaviness come through the ground, places one would expect small animals to suddenly fall dead, without explanation, and scavengers wouldn't go even for an easy meal. Kids tell stories about these spots, and dare each other to go closer, but they never do; bad things happen to the ones who venture too close. Maybe their elders cross themselves when passing to ward off the evil eye; maybe young and ambitious priests attempt exorcisms in order to show their faith to their superiors and to test their faith themselves. These are wicked places, evil places. Perhaps, when designing the stadium and the apartments, the architects and planners saw that building here would be a bad idea; maybe something in the topography or the soil indicated that any edifice above would ultimately fall, and the land was skipped over. Maybe the Mussolinis still owned the land and refused to sell. Whatever it was, though, it was here, overgrown, empty, abandoned, dead. I wondered if it had always been this way – if the Romans, landing on the beach and wandering the hills, had felt it, and if the natives, for thousands of years, had stayed away, keeping their sheep and goats from grazing here, tasting a sourness in the milk of the cows who had nibbled the grass growing between these rocks. I wondered if the people whose apartment windows I could look into had any idea what had happened here, if they knew of the orgies, the ritual violence, the sacrifices, the characters with worldwide reputations who had lived here 100 years ago. Was this a place that the neighbourhood kids thought of as haunted, and then, when older, if they came here to smoke cigarettes and talk? Maybe nowadays, kids don't do that sort of thing – they just sit on their phones, their attention consumed by Chinese technology vying with American technology to degrade their dying attention spans. If they looked up, they might feel like I did: as if a tiger was crouched, ready to pounce on top of me and drag me to my death.

I thought: did Crowley see the same thing? Is that actually why he came here, to this very spot?

I took a step backwards. It stayed, the darkness, stuck in place.

I took another deep breath, this time to try to slow my heartbeat down.

There was a line of low concrete blocks, which I stepped over, but that was as far as I dared go. What was wrong with me? I didn't believe in this crap. Darkness. Spirits. The evil eye. All nonsense. It was a vacant lot, with dark green plants filtering the life-giving light, returning nutrients to the fallow soil, and I, a nonbeliever, could enter at will without being troubled by these superstitions. I thought of the line from The Sun Also Rises, where the upset narrator, Jake, says that it’s easy to be hard-boiled during the day, but at night it’s another thing. Boy, he hadn’t come to Cefalù.

And I thought: there was starlight here, once.

Gin in tall, cool glasses, sipped by people with big plans.

Lights flickering out in the town below.

The tweeting of birds, lizards rasping, insects buzzing, rodents rustling through the brush. The neighbors, after dinner, washing metal pans, and perhaps a waltz from a distant radio.

Yellow gas lights, not enough to read by but enough to light the way.

Laughter.

And someone was watching me.

I took a step forward, then another, then tried for a third. I was not welcome here. I knew it.

I put a few of the coins on a broken down stone wall, and flung the rest into the tall weeds and grass that had been growing there for 100 years, that very well may have been the direct descendants of the clover and dandelions that were sprouting during the death. I raised up the bottle to the sky and said, “this is for Bianca, who asks for your blessing,” and then tipped it over, watching the purple Chianti stream out onto the dirt, being sucked up into the dry ground as soon as it struck, barely even splashing, so thirsty was the soil. Maybe the workers fixing the stadium were watching me; I didn’t turn my head to see. The eyes I felt on my face weren’t theirs anyway.

Sometimes, when you are watching a cat sleep, they suddenly exhale loudly, forcefully, and they relax even more, and you realise that even though they looked as limp as an old sock before, there was a hidden tension in their muscles that was just released. Now the wind came up from the whiteblue Mediterranean and the leaves of the trees shook as the last few drops of wine dripped off the lip of the bottle, and then the leaves settled back, for all appearances exactly as they were before, but something was different, as if the cat had relaxed, as if a debt had been paid.

I pulled out a plastic bag and scooped up dirt for Bianca.

One step back, and a vine caught my ankle. I had the feeling of being at the edge of a tiger’s cage; as long as I kept my distance, I was almost safe, but any further and I would be consumed.

I got back to the parking lot. Suddenly, I realised how loud the plants were; here, just over the concrete blocks, the wind was blowing and the clanging was coming from inside the stadium again.

I took one last deep breath, turned on my heels, and walked away.

I walked quickly, at some points almost trotting, slowing down when I was in the shade of a building and speeding up in the sun. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone in a car; I passed two pedestrians, and nodded to them, and I have to hope that all they saw was a sweaty, smelly tourist. It was in one of these sunny spots that I suddenly felt something on my legs. I went back and knelt down next to an open grate. A tiny spray of mist was coming up out of a cracked pipe; the droplets evaporated almost as soon as they hit the concrete, but I had not imagined it - it was a tiny spring. I passed my hands through the spray, rubbing my forearms down, and then stood over it, angling my legs, calves, and feet, trying to cool them down. The water collected on my leg hairs, and the larger droplets trickled down, collecting some of the dust as they went, leaving dark trails.

I got to the playground. The boys ran to me, and I lifted them both, laughing. Nick asked where I had gone, and I told him that there was just something I needed to do. Then I went over to the water fountain. I filled my bottle and drank it, filled it again, and then put my head under the stream of water, trying to wash it off of me.

When I got back from Italy, I sent Bianca a package. It had the long letter I had started in Milan and finished in Catania, candles from a convent we stayed at, a 1920s dip pen with a nib from a flea market, some sailing line I found on the beach, a pearl earring I found at the bottom of Mondello Bay when I was swimming, a moonstone I found on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a silk pocket square I found in the Borghese gardens, a friendship bracelet, a tote bag that said “ABRACADABRA” on it, and the dirt.

The package never arrived.

I had sent it tracked, and it was marked as delivered, but she got nothing. There was no photo confirmation, and no way to collect insurance on it. It had simply disappeared.

Then, two weeks later, Bianca sent me this photo.

She was in the alley behind her building taking out the trash, and she found the letter. I had written it with a fountain pen, using blood-red Italian ink, and since it had rained the ink had run. It seemed as if the package had ended up behind her apartment, and had been opened. She had the illegible letter.

Everything else was gone.

And this, to me, is the most enduring image of Cefalù - a photo actually taken in Chicago, of a letter written over months traveling the entire length of Italy, to a wonderful friend I’ve had for decades, for whom I would stare down darkness and pour out perfectly good wine as a sacrifice to supplicate the angry spirits.5

And while I love the photo, that love comes from knowing that the more important thing - the entire 26-year story behind it - is something no mere thousand-word picture can ever capture.

3

We also got in the newspaper:

In the center of Palermo, there are the four corners, Quattro Canti, where Via Maqueda and Via Vittorio Emanuele collide. This is where the old city divided itself into quarters; now, it is a square where opera singers compete for spare coins and pickpockets bump into inattentive lovers.

We are staying about 50 yards to the east and, on this day, we invite you to come with us for a treat. We will ciao Giuseppe, the doorman, sweeping the stoop slowly as he listens to a morbidly obese man in a chocolate-stained chocolate-colored polo shirt, then go right on Via Vittorio Emanuele, past the Wild West bar, which is successful enough to sponsor the local football team but suspiciously never seems to have any customers, and then we cross the street. The hot street. It is midday in Palermo, and the sun is on top of us, and the heat has settled onto the city, not ricocheting from every surface so much as infused into every molecule of air, every atom of stone wall and car window and sidewalk slab. It sears us as soon as we step out of the short shadow of the apartment block, and we scurry across the black asphalt like mice trying to escape a cat’s notice until we get to the narrow marble stairway cut between the buildings. Here, the walls provide some relief (come in under the shadow of this white rock), but only temporarily.

This is the last point when we can put on our sunglasses before we really need them.

The steps have been worn by 500 years of penitent feet and, like everything else in this city, they are covered in pollution, dirt, filth. They smell like layered deposits of wine urine and beer urine and the fried food that still sits in the discarded takeout boxes that have been kicked into the corners, waiting for the trash collectors to make their daily rounds. There is a glare from up ahead, like the sun just about to rise above the horizon, but it is wider and brighter and angrier. With each step up it gets more intense until we reach the square. In this place, at this time, the heat is as intense as it was in the street, but what now overwhelms us is light, light, all-encompassing light, as if, in Genesis, God’s first action had been to let there be this piazza, and there was this piazza. Because the marble is white, and the sun is directly overhead, the rays attack from every direction; sunglasses can help a bit, but we still have to squint, and Nick, in his buggy, just leans back under the visor and covers his eyes with his chubby little fists. To the right is the Pretoria fountain, best visible in the early morning and at night, when it isn’t so violently and aggressively radiant.

This is the Square of Shame.

We scurry towards the staircase on the left wall, stumbling up it, grasping our way to the unmarked door. The best and most famous bakery in Sicily is a signless holy speakeasy, and the only reason to think we might be able to enter is the young person standing duty outside, welcoming everyone who approaches with a smile. There are perhaps five people who rotate through this job, and they are all so similar that you get the sense that they might be related. Their main job, rather than welcoming people in, seems to be to warn them about the steps inside, and it is not because this place would violate pretty much all ADA regulations. No matter how quickly you can get through the glaring square, your retinas will be pinpricks, and entering the cool, dark doorway is like being swallowed by a whale. Suddenly all is darkness, and where we were blinded before by the light, now we are merely blind. A moment in the vestibule will reveal vague shapes, and we will fall up the stairs. Now, too, our senses change priority. On the surrounding streets, the sounds and smells assaulted us: the clip clop of horses hooves pulling carriages, arancini frying, hoarse-voiced waiters calling for customers in a hundred different tongues, Vespa engines gunning, unfiltered cigarettes, unfiltered exhaust, 11 am drunks shrieking over their Aperol spritzes, horse and human urine boiling on the stones, the hiss of espressos. Here, there is the smell of dusty rugs, and

Silence.

Five hundred years ago, this might have been why people might have given up sex and society: for the peace of these rooms against the sensory maelstrom outside.

The museum at the top of the steps is interesting, but we will see it later. Now, like most other people, we pass through the rooms with barely a glance on our way to the inner courtyard. The sunshine is bright here, but instead of the exposed marble covered like a smoker’s lungs in sticky black filth that we just passed through, this courtyard is a facsimile of Eden framed by a covered walkway and filled with trees and plants and a fountain in the middle, and the light is diffused, subdued, calm. We follow the walkway to the left, then right, and then up to the door, where another young person is smiling and beckoning us in. We take a numbered ticket from a little machine. On a weekend, the line of customers outside of the door can stretch the length of the covered walkway as the greeters limit how many people go inside; on a weekday, we always walk straight in. Let’s pretend this is a weekday and we part the clicking beaded curtain that keeps the flies out to enter a massive, almost imposing hall. In my memory, it is colored terracotta with exposed wooden beams and white walls. Photos tell me that it was much more modern, almost like a high school cafeteria, with metal refrigerators and efficient workspaces everywhere.

The cannoli station is in front of the left wall; the round brown shells, the bags stuffed with filling, the toppings in their individual bowls, symmetrically arranged as if they were on an alter. The cases with pre-made pastries and cakes are straight ahead, displayed simply, without any need for earthly adornment, with small signs saying what they are, and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of any Latinate language will smile and consider getting nun’s breasts or chancellor’s buttocks. The marzipan display and checkout are on the right, the fruit-themed diorama looking like a Renaissance still-life and the cash register reminding everyone that yes, this is a commercial enterprise, and a successful one at that.

If we didn’t have numbered tickets, we would have to line up in order as if we were waiting to check our bags at the airport. When we got to the front, the woman behind the counter – and they are all women – would ask us what we wanted, and then, suddenly able to roam about and actually see their offerings without fear of losing our place, we would make our decisions. Instead, the tickets give us the freedom to wander, browse, decide what we want, and when our number is called, we can order and be served more rapidly.

So with this freedom, we wander, making our choices.

“Trentatrì!” We approach the counter. Even though there were at least five women serving customers at any given time, Maria served us every time we visited. She had glasses and brown hair and, after our first or second visit, always a warm smile for the boys.

There are three steps to ordering. First, the cannoli – and we must get the cannoli here. Second, any supplementary pastries, like a slice of cake, intricately decorated cookies, marzipan fruit, or nun’s breasts. Third, we take our receipt to the till in the northwest corner, and then bring that receipt back to collect our treats.

On some days, we took the pastries home. The superior way of experiencing them, though, is in the courtyard, so let’s go there. If we earlier entered on a weekday to avoid waiting, now, let us imagine that we exit on a weekend, our hands full, because while hunger may make the best sauce, there is still something uncomfortably and sinfully delicious about having what everyone else wants and is waiting for. So now, we walk out past the long line, our pastries in hand, and back into the sun, which is not as bright here in the garden, even if we are closer to it. Here, orange tree branches bend low with their wombs, roses offer themselves outrageously to anyone passing, and bees helicopter between the perfume blossoms, inhaling the fragrance with an intensity we humans could only dream of. Today, as with every day, we find the bench in the far corner gloriously unoccupied, and we bend to blow away the fallen brown flowers before sitting on its paintpeeling slats. Unfolding the paper is an unboxing ritual Apple could only wish it had designed, and, once undressed, we see the colors of our sacred sweets – colors that have been muted inside the hall but here, in the leaf filtered sunshine, seem to breathe life within an intensity that only God could have given to these breasts and bottoms.

The pastries here are not often available elsewhere, so it is difficult to say that they are superior to their competitors, since direct competitors often don’t exist. There are plenty of places to get cannoli, though, and one may be tempted to ask, “well, why shouldn’t I just get cannoli elsewhere? What is special about this?”

For a purely objective answer, imagine you are given two tortilla chips and two bowls of salsa, as identical as possible, and you have to eat and compare both chips with salsa. The difference: the chip on the left can be dipped in the salsa and eaten immediately, while the chip on the right has to be left in the salsa for at least four hours before it is consumed. The natural result: the salsa-marinated chip would be soaked and disgusting. Something similar happens with cannoli. You have a hard, fried shell, with a crunchiness somewhere between a chip and a graham cracker, and it is filled with sweetened, flavoured ricotta cheese and assorted extra bits. Consumed immediately, as you can do here, a cannoli is a multi-sensory experience: it is soft, sweet, and crunchy, all at once, and the shell will flake where your teeth sheared off chunks. If it is consumed four or six or eight hours later, though, the shell takes on the consistency of a day-old shrink-wrapped grocery-store croissant, and the flavours that were so distinct when it was fresh have melted together. Because cannoli are most efficiently produced at scale in a factory or at least an assembly line, 99.999% of places that serve cannoli will either buy them from a factory or, at best, make them in the morning, then let them sit in refrigerated glass pastry display cases for hours until someone orders one, and the server will then pick the oldest one to send out.

So yes, you pay for the story here, and the atmosphere, and the ingredients (but even then, the higher price is so slight as to be negligible). However, unlike so many luxury experiences, fresh cannoli here is one instance where a 2X or 5X or 17X increase in price would be justified, simply because the quality difference is so dramatic as to be easily recognised by anyone.

Finished, the boys watch the bees among the rose petals and trace the patterns on the shattering blue-and-white tiles, but other pilgrims are eyeing our bench, so we release it. On the way out, we pass the confessionals, and then go through the museum, looking at the sceptres and gowns and other status markers of long forgotten days.

At the bottom of the stairs, just before exiting, we put on our sunglasses again. It is time to re-enter the world. I realise that perhaps this particular door had been designed 500 years ago as a metaphor, and that with the heat and sensory overload of the city, with its grime and trash and the omnipresent smell of animal waste, one might be forgiven for imagining that this was an almost literal descent into hell. If that is the case, it is still nice to know that heaven is just a cannoli away.

###

For more, Gambero Rosso has an excellent writeup here; National Geographic had a wonderful history of cannoli here; and for more about the actual convent, see:

Shop Rat by Emilia Petrarca

The Holiest Cannoli Is Inside a Convent

Ciao! I’ve been traveling alone in Sicily for the last five days and, wouldn’t you know it, I’ve become obsessed with a convent…

Read more

2 years ago · 128 likes · 7 comments · Emilia Petrarca

"Just to be crystal clear, I've never met an American I didn't like, but I absolutely hate America."

He went on to explain that in his view, America was an imperialist cancer that had shown an historical eagerness to use unrestrained violence to achieve its own ends, trampling on the rights of millions of people in foreign countries, solely after wealth and plunder without concern for others. A diplomat even at 20, I smiled and decided not to point out that every criticism he had of America could also be levied against his own beloved UK, as well as France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Russia, China, Japan, and many other countries and peoples, and would be true for every other country if they could only gain sufficient power and military might. But his words and sentiments about my homeland have stayed with me ever since, and I’m reminded of them now more than ever.

Because now, America - or, more specifically, the American government - is causing all sorts of international stress. Europeans in particular are looking at America and feeling a mixture of anger, rage, and fear. The majority of Americans seem to be feeling the same things about their own national government.

But just as he recognized that the American people and the American government are different, people elsewhere know the same thing: that America is different from Americans. And for any American readers of this little note who are thinking of travelling abroad, but are worried that they might face discrimination or attacks because they are American, I want you to know: however people abroad might be feeling about America is probably not how they will feel about you as an American. They will, more than likely, see you as an individual, and interact with you as one.

A few years ago, I was in a store in London, and after some small talk the owner asked me if he could ask me a political question. He said that he knew, factually, that millions of Americans had voted for Trump, but, in hundreds of interactions with Americans in the UK, he had never met a single person who was a Trump supporter. Did I have any idea why that might be? I made an offhand comment that Trump voters usually didn't leave their own counties, much less the country, but to me, it proved the point: people over here know that most Americans that they will encounter don't necessarily support the policies of the government. Actually, an American in a different country will probably be opposed to many of the government’s actions. People here know that Americans generally tend to be good, principled people, and if we are travelling for either work or pleasure then we are probably interested in the world and don't share the "America first" philosophy – that we have international and worldwide interests and sympathies.

But there may still be some fear about travelling abroad right now. You may be thinking that you want to go to Paris, or Budapest, or Prague, or Copenhagen, but you fear that you will not be welcomed, that people will be openly hostile to you because you are American.

Let me write this as firmly and with as much conviction as I can: people will not hate you just because you are American. The vast, vast majority will judge you not as an American but based on your own individual merits.

There are, of course, things that American travellers can do to ease their travel abroad. Most of these things are common sense: be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone,1 don't shout at people (and, in fact, talk more quietly than you would normally; Americans, myself included, tend to be very loud). In short, be a good citizen of wherever you are going. (If you want tips on how to be a superior traveller, here you go.)

Actually, the American brand is still highly popular abroad. No matter what people might think about the government, people abroad love the idea of America, and the symbols of our country and way of life. If you were to walk down the street in any British city or town, it would take you less than five minutes to see a New York Yankees baseball hat (and it always amuses me that so many British people love a team named after a group of people who beat them in a war). The same goes with the American flag: when I was studying abroad, I was told by the foreign studies department at my college that I should consider putting a Canadian flag on my backpack, so that nobody would know I was American and attack me, but as soon as I got to Europe, I realized that wearing an American flag - the bigger the better - was probably the single best way to fit in, because so many locals have American flag sweaters and tee-shirts. Walking in any city here, you’ll see people with Ohio State and University of Michigan shirts, or Harvard2 and Yale sweatshirts, and shirts that advertise made-up baseball leagues (the 1974 Sacramento Mid-Atlantic Hardball Championship League is still my all-time favorite). People still love the idea of the United States, even if they, like that professor, hate what the government is doing.

Again, everyone in their right mind is on edge right now. There are things we can do and things we can't. If we only focus on our fears, or our inability to act, then these fears and inabilities will grow.

Instead, we must do what we can do, right now. At home, protest; the more people around the world see that there are decent, good people in America acting to oppose the American government's actions, the more people around the world will see that many Americans are still decent and good. And the more they interact with decent, good Americans travelling abroad, the easier it will be for them to know that we Americans are not all neocolonial monsters. (And, if you have read this far, I think it is safe to say you are not in that camp.)

The worst thing that we can do is stay at home and let the people with official titles act as the sole representatives for our country. The best thing we can do is lay the groundwork for future international peace by becoming ambassadors ourselves – ambassadors of decency, goodness, and peace, on behalf of our fellow Americans.

So: if you are worried about how you will be treated if you go abroad this summer, don't worry. People won't see you as an American, but as a human being first.

And the more we do now to lay the foundation of a peaceful, mutually respectful international world order in the future, person by person and relationship by relationship, the easier it will be to make that future a reality when things change.

David Sedaris wrote about the same thing almost 30 years ago, where he differentiates between “Hard French” and “Easy French.” Hard is when you actually try to learn the language, and Easy is when you just say things more loudly and slowly, expecting people to eventually understand.1

But Stina’s post got me thinking a lot about communicating in other languages. Perhaps that guy had studied Spanish, or had done twenty minutes of Duolingo a day for six months, and then found that it was insufficient for his purposes. Maybe he knew the difference between tú and usted, and ser and estar; he may have been able to talk about the weather, about handbags and gladrags, and about permaculture gardening based solely on his in-app studies. But in that moment, suddenly face to face with the real world, he couldn’t communicate.

What to do? Well, let’s start with a well-noted fact: Duolingo doesn’t work. For anyone trying to learn a language, just like with socializing, there are myriad better ways to do it than through a gamified app designed more to capture your attention than to actually change your life.

As an experiment, I downloaded Duolingo and went through a lesson on Romanian. Here are the things it taught me for the first lesson, then tested me on:

1. Boy

2. Girl

3. Woman

4. Man

5. I am a boy.

6. I am a man.

7. I am a woman.

8. I am a girl.

9. a boy, a girl

Are these words and concepts important in a language? Of course. I could tell that it was introducing gendered nouns, sentence structure, and verb conjugation. However, I highly doubt that the vast majority of Romanians ever have to say “I am a man” in order to communicate anything. Like many middle managers, these particular words are not worthless, but they are not worth much. Landing in Bucharest, will you need to clarify that you are a man or a woman right off the bat? If you said, “I am a woman,” would the immigration officer look at you, confused as to why you are offering her this information?

The problem, I think, is that Duolingo teaches nouns and verbs, adjectives and participles, but they somehow miss the most fundamental goal that people have in learning languages: the ability to communicate. They might be able to teach you how to structure a sentence, but they aren’t teaching people what they need to send or receive critical information. Because lots of people are using these apps, though, then tourists preparing to go to a foreign country will also use them to try to learn how to speak the language, not realizing that they will not learn how to communicate.

It’s well-known that the Pareto Principle operates in language: most communication occurs with relatively few words, and the vast majority of words are used infrequently, if at all.2 I suspect that, for people travelling, the vast majority of words that they need to get by is even smaller; thirty words, fifty at the most, will serve you indefinitely, and anything beyond that is wonderful to have, but not critical.

Imagine, instead, a language boot camp for - in Stina’s honor - Spanish, or any other language. The instructor has one hour to teach the students core, basic words that will get them most of the way through their stay in Guatemala. What are the ten or twenty words that they should they know?

Well…I actually asked a few extraordinary travellers that very question. Their answers fell into a few categories.

Etiquette

Dale Carnegie would love this: the vast majority of words that people think are absolutely critical to know are words that grease the wheels of human interactions. Stina herself provided a good initial list:

• Hello

• Goodbye

• I’m sorry

• Thank you!

• How beautiful!

• I love your country 😎

Gunnar Miller added these, with explanations:

• Hello / Hi – For greetings; a friendly opener goes a long way.

• Thank you – Politeness opens doors and often earns patience.

• Please – Shows courtesy when asking for things.

• Yes / No – Crucial for basic responses.

• Help – Can be lifesaving in emergencies.

• Bathroom / Toilet – One of the most practical words!

• Water – Staying hydrated is critical.

• Food / Eat – For ordering meals or asking where to eat.

• Where? / Location – Helps with directions (“Where is…?”).

• Excuse me / Sorry – For getting attention politely or apologizing.

The last one is critical: in English, you might get away with saying “excuse me” to someone you have bumped and to get the attention of a bartender; in many languages, you wouldn’t say “excuse me” when “sorry” is more appropriate.

And the ever-brilliant Hamish added:

• Other good options include:

• “Nice to meet you” which starts you out on good footing

• “I don’t know/understand” is another good non-committal phrase when you’re in a difficult situation

• “Good” and “very” have many uses

• “I’m hungry/thirsty” are both useful phrases to endear yourself in an otherwise English conversation.

• “Beautiful” is rarely a bad thing to say.

Personally, I’d add:

• “Is it possible…?” This often leads to an opportunity to use basic nouns (“Is it possible a cornetto?” for example) or charades/miming (“Is it possible (brushes teeth)?” Miming will actually spur people to tell you the word you want (toothbrush, for example); if you write it down, they will have the good feeling that they helped you learn.

• I would also add, “I’m very sorry, but I don’t speak (language).” This fact is probably obvious to anyone who looks at you, but it shows humility and an understanding of one’s own limitations, and does a huge amount to generate sympathy.

It can also get you drunk.

To wit. I was in Paris once with my girlfriend at the time, and we went into a bar for a drink. The bartender looked at us very, very suspiciously; it seemed he was having a bad day. I gave my “I’m kind of embarrassed…” smile and started with my standard phrase, which translated to, “I’m very sorry, I don’t speak a lot of French…” The man smiled and said, in English, “You have an excellent acent! And I lived two years in Minnesota.” That led to a fifteen minute conversation about how the hell he ended up in Minnesota for two years (school, then a woman), why he came back (school ended, and then a bad breakup), what he thought about America (much nicer than France), what we thought about France (much nicer than America), and then free cocktails. I can’t promise that you will get the same response whenever you use this phrase, but it is a great way to show your own humility, admit that you are at a disadvantage, that you recognize your position, and that you aren’t going to be linguistically imperialist on other people; they will, more than likely, do their part so you can both communicate.

Human needs

A general consensus is that the most useful phrase you can travel with is: “Where is the toilet?” This is, in my opinion, where Duolingo should start for every single language; it should be the most commonly-learned phrase in the app. The fact that it is not is, I think, a failure of nearly Biblical proportions. It is something you might use immediately upon disembarking from your flight all the way to boarding to go home. (Even better may be “Toilet, please,” because you get the requirement across and you learn how to say “please.”)

Commerce

You’ll need to exchange money for things no matter where you go, even Communist China. Stina suggested “I want to buy this”; Hassan added:

• How much is this?

• Do you have…?”

• May I have…”

Gunnar suggested knowing the numbers 1-10. I would actually argue that it is critical to know 1-1000, and perhaps even more, depending on the value of the currency. Knowledge of numbers also scales; if you know 1-10, then 20, 30, etc., and then 100 and 1,000, then you can probably figure out how to get up to a million just based on how the language structures numbers.

Directions

Right, left, and straight. Even in the age of Google Maps, an incredible amount can be communicated by asking, “Excuse me, (PLACE)?” and then listening when they say “straight” and then “right.” At worst, you will get closer to your destination before you ask again.

Safety

Stina also said that she has found that “stop!” and “leave me alone” were useful. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where that is the case. Gunnar also suggested “help!” which, along with “emergency!” can save lives.

Do Not Learn

Hamish recommended against learning how to say “Cheers” when drinking, with a really solid justification:

When you have a new friend at a bar, there’ll undoubtedly be an opportunity to clink glasses. You probably already know the word for cheers, but pretending you don’t gives you the opportunity to ask. Most people actually like teaching others, as it makes them feel both useful and superior. But most people don’t have the willingness to waste their time teaching others. However, in this situation you’re both sat with a full pint and it can help move along a sagging conversation.

Based on this reasoning, I’d add that many languages have something that they say before meals that equates to “Bon appetit.” (Many people think that English doesn’t have a standard pre-eating benediction because, historically, English food has been so terrible.) Not learning this, and then paying attention to what people say before they eat, offers a chance to connect.

And this leads to another opportunity. In Stina’s note above, the guy clearly didn’t want to compromise his ego by either learning the phrase, consulting Google Translate, or charading his way through (imagine acting out “oat milk” with a barista!). If you clearly don’t know the words for something, acting it out and working together to get to an understanding can lead to a hilarious time for both of you and, if you can get some understanding, it becomes almost a bonding exercise: you have worked together to overcome a challenge, and you both benefit.

This actually happened to me recently in Budapest, when I went to get a haircut. I went to the highest-rated barber shop near me that was open late (after bedtimes) and didn’t cost $50. When I walked in, it turned out that it was run by two Vietnamese guys in their early 20s who had just moved to Hungary. Negotiating a haircut with a new barber without a common language was fun, and I got perhaps the most carefully detailed haircut I have ever had. The best part: when I paid, I said one of the few things I knew in Vietnamese: “Cảm ơn,” or “thank you.” It took the guy a second to realize that I was speaking Vietnamese, as he’d expected Hungarian or English, but when realized what I had said, he was so touched that he stopped the other guy in the middle of a haircut to tell him that I had spoken Vietnamese, and they both bowed and shook my hand.

Perhaps transmitting information is the base level of communication; touching hearts is next gen shit.

Personal

Sometimes, there are things that you need to know just because it’s you. “Oat milk latte” counts for our friend above, and it is very unlikely that Duolingo knew him well enough to include this in his first month of lessons. Stina included “I don’t eat meat,” which I’m going to guess she was smart enough to memorize ahead of her trip.3

Hamish came up with a list of some really interesting ones that he has thought about over time, with his trademark solid reasoning:

Delicious

Locals will generally be impressed by any knowledge you have of their language, but nothing will cause them more surprise or delight than coming out with a word they never expect you to know. In a restaurant you’ll already have shown your lack of language skills from the moment you walked in and confirmed that whilst ordering from the English menu. When the waiter/ress checks up on you or hands you the bill, pat your belly and exclaim “Delicious!” It will cheer you both up.

Maybe

A lot of the time you won’t understand what folk are saying. Even if they’re speaking English. We’d all love to be confident, secure and blunt enough to say “I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re on about”, but a “maybe” normally gets you through. If it’s a situation where someone is trying to sell you something, then it’s good to have a word of slightly more advanced local language to show that maybe you know the fair price and won’t be so easily ripped off.

Later

Useful as a phrase on exiting, especially to the receptionist in your ho(s)tel, or at the nearby cafe you liked and plan on returning to. It also doubles its usefulness when combined with the above for a “maybe later” aimed at a pushy salesperson.

Wife/children

Some words you need to know in order to say them, some you need to know in order to understand. That woman next to you on the train is probably asking you if you have a wife or children, but it’s good to have the knowledge to know that’s the case. Also useful: “Where are you from?”

I’d add “Perfect.” Similar to Hamish’s “delicious,” “Perfect” is something that nobody will ever object to hearing about themselves or their work - particularly when you pair the word with a contemplative nod of approval.

And really, the most important part of communication…

Exact percentages differ, but people seem to agree that most communication is non-verbal; it comes in facial expressions, body language, hand gestures, tone. In Stina’s example above, one can almost see the guy’s body language as he specified his oat milk latte - shoulders tensed, face serious and almost angry, eyebrows perhaps showing exasperation. It’s almost painful to think about how the barista must have felt.

Imagine, instead, if he had been smiling, or if his face had betrayed his humility at being so incompetent in another language. What if he had asked for an “oat milk latte?” hesitantly and apologetically and questioningly? Imagine how she would have responded; instead of simply not understanding him, and hoping he’d get out of the cafe as quickly as possible, she likely would have tried to point to different drinks, or, ideally, brought out a carton of milk, then soy milk, then oat milk, and perhaps mimed steaming it, maybe even with sound effects for a laugh. Maybe she would have asked him if he spoke French, or Mandarin, both of which she studied. Perhaps she would have brought her phone out to try to help.

In short, a confrontation based on his ignorance would have been turned into a linguistic adventure that benefitted them both, just based on body language.

So along with words, I’d add:

• A smile. Like Dale Carnegie advised, this is one of the most important things you can bring with you into any foreign country.4

• Talk hesitantly. Show that you are unsure. The only thing you will get is help and sympathy.

• Talk quietly. Very few people like being shouted at. If you are shouty, then you may inspire a Substack note and/or post about how much of a dick you are.

• Use facial expressions that show you are struggling, are unsure, and that you are trying.

• Don’t be afraid to make it clear that you are consciously incompetent. (This is also a good life skill.)

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The how

So…how to learn these words?

I’m a huge fan of flash cards. I don’t mean apps; I mean physical flash cards, pieces of paper or 3x5 cards, with the English on one side and the translation, along with its phonetic pronunciation, on the other. I learned this from Mr. Bosworth at Granite Hills High School: take a set of flash cards, then pick five of them. Go through them until you know them all. Then, flip them over so you are looking at the translations; make sure that you know what they mean if someone else were to say them. Shuffle them and go through them again. When you know those five, add a few - three, or five more. Do the same thing with the whole stack, and add more cards every time you can show full mastery of the deck.

This doesn’t have to be done in private. Indeed, making it clear that you are trying to learn a language on a bus is an excellent way to meet people. This is especially true of children with very specific interests who want to learn, for example, how to say “dinosaur” or “police car” - nobody in the world (save perhaps Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump) will object to a three-year-old repeating “dinosauri” on an Italian bus.

Going Pro

It’s pretty easy to google the “top 200 words in (language).” In this list should be most of the words you already know, and you may see 20-30 other “must know” words that you didn’t think of. Prioritize these, and, if you want, add the others; there is little downside to knowing an extra 150 words in a foreign language, and there is potentially huge upside, if it helps you understand other people or communicate concepts more readily.

In addition, after these, you may consider Duolingo et al. You’ll have enough of a foundation that, when the little bird teaches you how to say “Do you have an extra catheter?” in week four, you can re-work it to say, “Do you have a toilet?” and thus appear more fluent then just gasping “toilet!” with your legs clenched together.

If you can, immerse yourself.5 Bring post-it notes and write the local word for common items - book, closet, bed, freezer - on the items themselves so that you see them every day. Find someone local for an exchange; speak English to them for a half-hour and then speak the local language for a half-hour. If you can, date a local; it’s an incredibly useful way to learn how people really speak, you’ll have an incentive to learn more if you meet their friends and relatives, and you will probably learn creative cursing and sharply-tailored insults - which, let’s face it, is 75% of most language these days.

Finally, carry a notebook around with you. You can write down words that you want to know the translation to, or words that you see or hear that you don’t understand. In addition, it can be useful when negotiating the price of something in a marketplace, and you want to communicate the exact offer in very clear, unambiguous terms.

Objections to this approach

There’s a New York Times piece on Duolingo that argues that “Using a phrase book to memorize…phrases in another language is a quick and dirty way to get the job done, but that’s not really “learning” the phrases, it’s just memorizing them.” The obvious answer to this incredibly astute analysis: no shit, Sherlock. But it is a far more effective way to learn how to communicate with the people you will encounter, and will lead to far less frustration on both sides of the language barrier, than perfectly conjugating the verb “to suck.”

And again, I do think that Duolingo has a function. Similar to how all human beings pick up languages, once you have the basics down - toilet, water, overproof rum, etc. - you can move on to more advanced structure, if you want. However, I think that Duolingo should not be the way people start to learn a language; there are better, easier, more functional ways to learn, and they all come from the paradigm that you shouldn’t be learning so that you can speak another language - you should be learning so you can communicate.

Does this take time? Yes. Does it take less time than 20 minutes a day using your phone? Yes. Will you learn how to say “I also like to water house plants” with more or less comprehensible pronunciation? No. Will you actually be able to communicate your needs to people? Yes.

All in all, this takes less time and effort, and offers greater rewards than traditional options. It is easier to remember words and concepts, will help you understand more, and will smooth over any rough spots that may come up.

Now, please excuse me. I have six months to really nail 200 words in Romanian, and I still have to make my cards.

, this one’s for you:

If you ask Google Maps how to get to Mondello Beach from Cafe Latino, it will tell you to walk down Via Vittorio Emanuele to Via Roma, cross past the corner that always smells of horse urine (which is not a detail Google seems to care about or track). Then, cross the street, turn either left or right, and take the 101 or 102 bus north to the stop just outside Giannettino, the little food stall on Liberta' Notarbartolo. From there, get on any 806 bus to Mondello. This will absolutely get you to the beach, but if you follow these directions, especially just after the high schools get out for the summer, you will arrive at Notarbartolo and see at least 37 other tourists standing around, waiting for the 806 in shorts, flip-flops, sunglasses, and overstuffed backpacks. When the 806 arrives, every seat will already be taken by locals, and your children will need to stand or be held for the 45-minute ride - and the bus will get more and more crowded with people and things, more and more uncomfortable with proximity, and hotter and hotter with bodies at every stop. Italians love children, but they will not give up their seats for a mother holding a two-year-old, and people standing in the space marked for buggies will not move out of the way for an actual buggy. Any parents in this situation, particularly Germans and Australians, will get visibly and vocally frustrated, and the Sicilians will not care. At some point during the trip, at least two teenagers in the back will start playing tinny dance music through their phones or bluetooth speakers; a few of their friends will start vaping, knowing that the conductor will never come back to stop them because he - and all the conductors we saw were men - can't get through the mass of bodies crowding on the bus hurtling towards the cool beach breeze.

The better thing to do is to have an adorable five-year-old who wants to learn Italian. Make some flash cards of words that the five-year-old is interested in - ambulanza, macchina della polizia, impalcatura - and, while standing with him on the 102, go through the cards to distract him from the fact that he is standing on a bus, which he hates. Do it quietly, and, if anyone else looks at you, smile at them. An Indian guy next to you may ask if you are going to the spiaggia; say si, and he will suggest that you get off with him, this is the stop. Google Maps says he is wrong, but he is insistent.

And it is actually not your stop. You will get suspicious, and keep your wits about you as you follow him across two blocks, past a vacant lot, in generally the right direction but just...a bit off. He will say very little until you turn onto Via Alfonso Borelli, which spits you out onto a large square, all pavement and plants, and you see the statue of Francesco Crispi that you passed before, on the way to the Giardino Inglese, and his reticence may be that he doesn't speak much English, or it could be more sinister. You look at the back of his neck, thinking of the violence you could inflict upon him if your family is threatened. But then he will walk with you to what is actually a bus stop, and explain that it is the inizio de the bus. The 806 will arrive, completely and totally empty, ready to start its journey, and you will line up with him and a handful of others, all speaking Italian or Hindi, and join them on the extraordinarily empty seats in the back. You will ask, and he will confirm, that he works on the beach, with a hundred other Indians, selling food, trinkets, blankets, bluetooth speakers - a low-paying job that must, somehow, be worth it to him, must allow him to send something back home to a family who are worse off than he is here, but now better-off because of his labors than their neighbors. When the seats are full, the bus starts up, drives ten meters, makes a right, drives another ten meters, and you recognize that you are at the same exact stop in front of Giannettino with all of the Germans and Australians, who will grumble as they stand. When your savior gets off near Mondello, you grazie him a mille, and promise, in your mind, to buy whatever he is selling if you ever see him again, but you never see him again, which makes you sad.

You use his route to the beach for the rest of your stay - and, luckily, you have almost a month left. Twice, you see other families waiting with small children, and you try to tell them to come around the corner to the beginning of the line, but both times they demur, they look at their Google, they say "it’s fine, we will wait here," suspicious, not trusting a stranger, and then a few minutes later, when you are sitting with your beautiful family, with leg room to spare, even with your four bags and butterfly nets and arrancini in greasy paper bags, and they are standing, you will make eye contact with the fathers and they will look quickly away, perhaps ashamed at the discomfort that their distrust has caused their children.

And now the 806 crawls along Via della Libertà until Piazza Vittorio Veneto, with its Statua della Libertà in the huge empty circle, and then up Via dell'Artigliere to the most complicated intersection in Palermo. A teenage girl gets on with her friends; she sees Nick and gasps and says, "ciao, bello," and spends the rest of the trip sneaking glances at him, trying to touch his hand to get him to smile, which he does, readily, because he likes girls. Once you get through the intersection, it is as if the bus has released its brake; it shoots up Viale Diana and then suddenly there is a campground and scrub and you are in the dry Sicilian countryside. The brush is dense, and tinder-dry, and, on the right, Monte Pellegrino rises so steeply that you can't see the top from the bus windows, even if you press your face to the glass. You continue on, cruising now, until the road opens up again into residential neighborhoods, and the first stop in the vicinity of Mondello comes. Two or three beach-bound tourists will get off, thinking it is the beach, not knowing that they will now have to walk five more blocks to see the sand. You'll go around Piazza Valdesi, then up Viale Principe di Scalea, one block from the beach, a stop every block or two, until the very last stop on Via Teti. You'll be the only one to call back into the bus and thank the driver, who will look up, smile, and wave, not used to appreciation from his passengers. Marcello will meet you on his scooter, walk you to your umbrella, give your kids a treat, and then shake your hand; as he turns, he will see someone he needs to talk to, and you'll see him shaking hands up and down the beach like a politician. The people he knows, having seen him with you, will look over and nod and smile, and you think that you might now have people here, a community. For the rest of the day, if you make eye contact with someone, your default will be a familiar smile and a nod, which will always serve you well.

After a few trips, the beach routine will be established. The stuff is dropped between the two chairs, the backpacks are opened, and the tote bags - one each for bathing suits, sunscreen and beach toys, water bottles and snacks - will be hung up on the very convenient hooks under the umbrella. A quick trip to the changing room, which is pitch black compared to the million suns of the sand, and then the slathering of sunscreen, with a 15-minute timer set; the boys will play in the sand, and then, when the timer goes off, there's a race to the water, a quick splash, and then the unrestricted play of youth.

Once settled, there would be one or two hours before lunch, and then we would go to Le Lunette Mondello, getting a Caprese sandwich for Alice, a sausage and chips sandwich for Daniel and Nick to share, and a couple arancini for me. Because the beach chair rental place had a "no outside food" policy, we would take the food to the edge of the water and eat it there, throwing any crumbs to the fish or the birds. There would be an hour to digest, and then we might rent a paddle boat for the kids from the family that ran the first stand south on the beach. They would remember that Daniel was insistent on having a life jacket, and Nick would give them high-fives, and they would tell us we had an hour, but would pat me on the shoulder to let me know that they were flexible. We would paddle out, me and Daniel on the paddles, or Daniel and Alice, and look at everything we could see that was fascinating. We’d go to the pier, and then the docks, and circle around the teenagers who had stopped their boats to dive. When we returned, the men would make a big production about Daniel and Nick getting back from a voyage, and there would be the shaking of hands until the prossima, and we would walk back to our umbrella.

Then I would go for a long swim. The water at Mondello is the clearest water I have ever seen, perhaps matched only by Pereybere in Mauritius. I would wade out to my waist, then turn around to wave to Daniel, who would be watching me from just past the waterline, amazed that I could do something so brave. I would flip my goggles down, start my watch, wave again, and then fall forward, feeling the sea suck me in. I'd crawl out 20 meters, around the most adventurous paddlers, then turn right, down toward the giant restaurant on the pier, and then start really swimming.

Because it was so clear, I could see four or five meters to the bottom, which was mostly white sand, with occasional dark spots of seaweed bubbling over with fish. Because it was so clear, and the sand was not rocky, not dirty, I saw everything. Once, from the paddle-boat we rented, I saw a flash of light that was not quite natural; later, I swam back to the spot fifty meters from shore and dove down and found a pearl earring, fallen from an empty ear. I found friendship bracelets dropped by the sellers who plied the waterfront, one of which I have on my right wrist right now, its rainbow coloring a reminder of the Sicilian sunsets. Once, swimming past the restaurant, I saw something almost human floating in the water, swaying with each passing wave. Getting closer, I saw that it was a pair of Levi's, the cuffs bobbing at the top of the water, the waist weighed down by a leather belt, the pockets empty. I pulled the belt off and let the jeans float away. On that southern side of the bay, there is a giant sandbar rising up fifty meters from shore that is so shallow that you could stand up and the water would only go to mid-calf; I took the belt to the sandbar to examine it, then wrapped it around my waist. North-west of Mondello, there is a ridge of high, steep mountains, so steep that only a few roads switchback up their feet a bit and then end, as if defeated by the brutality of the Sicilian stone. While I was standing on that sandbar, a belt incongruously wrapped around my waist above my Speedos, I looked up to see the beach and the mountains. Clouds were pouring over the tops in a rapid stream, floating like a waterfall down the rock face, and then disappearing into the air. I took my goggles off, not fully understanding, and even without the goggles I saw that yes, the clouds were appearing over the mountains, then disappearing into nothingness. I could only reason that they were coming off of the cool Mediterranean or Atlantic, then, as soon as they got over the mountains, the Sicilian heat caused them to instantaneously dissipate. I watched for probably ten minutes, stunned by nature, and then swam back, past the jetty with the restaurant, listening to children playing among the pylons. When I got back to our AirBNB, I cut the buckle off the belt with a chef knife and attached it to my own Amish belt from Eli Miller, which is where it is now, reminding me every day of the way the clouds evaporated in the heat.

I found other things at Mondello. Walking back to the bus, I found two clippings of jade plants on the sidewalk; I looked around, and there were no jade plants anywhere else, so someone must have tugged them off of a plant, brought them to that point, and dropped them. It reminded me of my first real girlfriend ever, who worked for a congresswoman in California, canvassing door-to-door. One day, she was having a really tough time, and she got to one home with a friendly family who said they would support her candidate. She noticed a huge jade plant, and asked if she could take a branch to grow to remind her that there were good people in the world; that was the first time I had ever heard of propagating plants from clippings. She kept it alive for years; I wonder if it is still alive now, 27 years later. I hadn’t thought of her in years. I picked the clippings up from the sidewalk, put them in my water bottle, and brought them back to Edinburgh, where they are growing on my windowsill.

And Mondello provided some challenges. Back in 2001, Patagonia was just getting a purchase on the small, private liberal arts college market, and a few people had Patagonia clothes. In the spring, my suite had a party; when I woke up in the morning, and went to the bathroom, I saw that someone had torn apart a small pile of beef jerky and left it on the top of the toilet. I looked behind the closed door and saw a Patagonia jacket on a towel hook, perhaps from the jerky shredder. Nobody ever came back to reclaim either of these items, and I was a vegetarian, so I kept the jacket, and still have it; I don't know what happened to the beef jerky. Later, I somehow came across this video of a man who had bought some Patagonia board shorts and then kept repairing them until they were like the Ship of Theseus.

And in 2012, ahead of a family reunion in Mauritius, I got a pair of Patagonia board shorts to swim in. In 2022, they ripped really badly, so I repaired them; the fabric felt delicate, though, and I knew they would be damaged again. I brought them to Italy, and, on a swim in Mondello, they ripped again - a huge gash down the butt, obscene in virtually every culture. I brought them to a tailor in Palermo, who said that it would take a week to repair - she was absurdly busy. I wanted someone in Palermo to repair them, but that meant that I would not be able to swim...without another swimsuit.

So I went to a sporting goods store just north of Parco Piersanti Mattarella. Growing up, the stereotype was that Europeans and Australians wore Speedos, while Americans wore more conservative shorts; I thought, "I am never going to be able to do this again," and, almost in Rome, I got my first pair of swimming briefs. I never actually wore the shorts again; while Europeans wore far more shorts than Speedos, the briefs were easier to swim in, and that made the difference. The board shorts now have a beautiful blue-and-white piece of Sicilian fabric covering the tear, and, while I want to wear them, the sky-blue briefs really are nicer in the water.

On the last day of our stay, we went to Mondello. I started my swim, and was immediately diverted by something that looked like a robot face on the bottom of the bay. I dove down, and pulled up a combination mask/snorkel that turned out to be just the right size for me; someone must have dropped it off the side of a boat. I looped my own goggles around my wrist and put the snorkel mask on, and decided to just go as fast as I could, able to power through and breathe hard without turning my head. I found another pearl earring on that swim, and, at lunch, bought two litres of white vino sfuso, some of which was consumed and some of which was brought back to Edinburgh and turned into white wine vinegar. I sent the first earring to my sister and the second to Bianca; Bianca's package was stolen, so she didn't get the 1930s Italian school pen with its English nibs, or the Abracadabra bag from Tigota in Milan, or the friendship bracelet I found on the beach and sent to remind her that we have been friends for 25 years.

And those are the souvenirs of Mondello.

6. Feltrinelli Librerie

I was on the bus this morning, on one of those elevated seats in the back, above the wheels. In front of me, on the lower level, an older man was playing a game on his phone – one of the games where you tap the screen, and birds or treasure chests seem to explode, and a number appears with some number of points that you just got, and it tells you how great you are, at the game, and obviously in life, as a human being, and it implies that you’re so good at tapping the screen and getting these points that it’s surprising that you’re not the king of the world. He had the volume up high so he could hear it without his hearing aids, and was playing this complete waste of time game, and I looked back at my book.

Books. Throughout history, they have been luxuries – entire worlds, objects that speak of beauty, symbols of leisure. Windows to the world. The word. What is more important than the word?

While Zacco is great to patronise if you want to support the local literary scene, why would I add a chain book store to the list? Well… They have more books, including children’s books and some in English. But also, they have pens, and a manager who believes that the word is so important that she will give your children pens so that they can write, they can be encouraged in their literary ventures, and who has earned my gratitude when we didn’t have pens to fill out the mother’s day cards that the boys got for Alice.

Luxury Ephemeral Experiences

7. Dolce capo

Over the months that we spent in Italy, we had a very strict ice cream schedule: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and no more.

No more, that is, until we got to Palermo.

Of the Palermo gelaterias, Gelateria Ciccio Adelfio is undeniably excellent. So is Gelateria da Carlo, across the street. Ruvolo Gelati e Granite, Primo Canto Gelateria, Gelateria Ciuri Ciuri Palermo, Cafè Latino di Vincenzo Stira - all have good ice cream, made better by the searing Sicilian sun.

But by far, the best ice cream we had in Palermo, and the best ice cream I have ever had in my life, can be found at Dolce capo.

I’m happy to say that I’m not alone - with 4,905 ratings on Google as of this writing, they have a score of 4.9 out of 5, and lots of other people echo me in saying that they’ve had none finer anywhere in the world.

Unlike handbags, where a cheap one can be far better made than an expensive one, or suits, where it is hard for most people to tell the difference between one that costs $200 and another that costs $2,000, or wine, where even trained experts can’t tell the difference between red and white, there is a clear, easily discernible difference between normal and exceptional gelato.

And trust me, Dolce capo is exceptional. It will also likely ruin ice cream for you forever, or, like it did for us, inspire you to get your own ice cream maker.

There was the mango, that tasted more like mango than mango. Rum raisin, mint, strawberry, lemon, tangerine, caramel. Mixed berries. Wine and peaches. Watermelon. Cantaloupe. Fig. They probably have a hundred more flavors that they trot out with casual ease, showing that they, more than anyone else, have mastered making the ice cream version of anything taste more vibrant than the actual item listed on the label. Their presentation is also extraordinary: the tub of peach wine gelato is adorned with a bottle of wine and peaches; the tangerine with tangerine branches; the cantaloupe with rinds, implying that the ice cream has exploded, fully-formed, out of its tan-green shell.

The gelatos are beautiful to look at, and they are also fleeting. You can’t take this home with you; you can’t even take it around the corner. A better writer than me might make some analogy with life itself – that really, life is the beautiful thing, the luxury, that life is something that has been denied to too many. A better writer may point out that, like visitors to Palermo, most of whom won’t taste perfection like this ice cream, most people will similarly never live, never fully be alive, and it is only those who reach out and embrace these beautiful, transient experiences, these fleeting opportunities, who can rightly be said to have lived - and really, our time here on earth is fleeting, is temporary, and we should be willing to embrace every experience that is presented to us, to celebrate our lives, moment by moment, sip by sip, lick by glorious mango lick. A better writer than me may point out that yes, life is like a box of chocolates sometimes, and yes, perhaps sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get, but that a better analogy might be that life is like an ice cream cone on a Wednesday afternoon at the corner of Via dei Candelai and Vicolo Travicelli - that you often get what you order, what you ask for, what you deserve, but also that no matter what you do, you have a choice: you can lick the ice cream or let it drip away, and if you lick it, if you take advantage of having a life to live, if you pay attention to it, you will probably get to the end and have an enjoyable experience to look back on, but if you let it melt, it will slip through your fingers, it will drip away with predictable determination until you are left with nothing at all to look back on but a mess.

I’m obviously not that writer. But I can say that Dolce capo makes beautiful ice cream, and it deserves a visit. In fact: I predict that, if the Michelin guide ever has an ice cream section (and perhaps it does – I know virtually nothing about how food criticism works), Dolce capo would have the requisite number of stars (five? ten?) that indicates that Palermo is actually worth a visit just to taste this ice cream, because it is that good.

8. Olive Oil from the Vino Sfuso shop

I was at lunch recently with a guy who ran a hedge fund in London – let’s call him George. George had “fuck you” money, and had brought a couple of bottles of wine to this lunch – one was 17 years old, the other 38. George said he was really excited about drinking both of these – he drank a lot, and his parents have been collecting wine for decades. Our host and mutual friend piped up and said that George had excellent taste in wine, and could always be trusted to have good bottles.

Once opened, George swirled them around in his glass and tasted them and was satisfied. I tasted them and…was unimpressed. I mean, it was wine. As I often do, I doubted that anyone could taste anything interesting in them – they were flat and dull. The only thing we knew was that they were old; that was apparently enough of a story to make them valuable.

Wine is a story, of course. Actually, I should rephrase that: a wine bottle is a story. Stories are exactly what the labels strive to communicate: they tell a tale of a particular plot of land, region, country, grape, blend, year, family. Sometimes they will have a turn-of-the-century style Toulouse-Lautrec painting of a cat, or a pencil outline of the château, or simply words with no other adornment. The designers had to ask themselves: should they write the label in serif or sans-serif? Should the label be white, off-white, or black? Do they have a real cork, a plastic cork, or a screw type? What would it say if it was all in French, or all in English? All of these tiny details contribute to the story that the consumer is able to interpret, what they can tell themselves and others about their taste - or, rather, the taste of the wine and their personal taste, generally.

But these bottle-label stories can be told anywhere – at least, anywhere you can get a particular bottle. In other words, a bottle of wine will tell the same story in Santa Ana, Santa Fe, or Santa Barbara, provided that the bottle is brought to these places to be consumed; it’s like reading a book.

But: what if getting the wine is, itself, the story? What if you, the consumer, are part of it?

I think this is what I keep trying to say about vino sfuso in Milano, Bologna, Firenze, Pisa, Rome, Sorrento, and now here in Palermo. The magic of vino sfuso, the story, is in getting to the shop, talking to the owner, learning about the wines, picking one, two, three, filling the bottles, taking them home, and then and only then finishing the story by drinking them. These are far more interesting and personal stories than anything they can ever appear on a label affixed to glass. Actually, short of pressing the grapes oneself, this is about his personal story as one can get with wine.1

So, in Palermo, get vino sfuso. I liked Lucchese Vini, but there are a few shops around, and you can get bottles at some fruit and vegetable stands around the city for a few euros.

But, if I may: an additional benefit of Lucchese Vini is is that they have olive oil. This isn’t the olive oil produced for tourists to pack away in their suitcases in 250mL bottles, intended for flying and then consuming over a few years on extremely special occasions or while very, very drunk. This is olive oil for people in the neighbourhood - people who have been consuming amazing olive oil for decades, and know what they are tasting - to buy and to use and enjoy. It is olive oil for people who know what good olive oil tastes like, and let’s face it, people don’t really get good olive oil in America. Olive oil in America is often fake, for starters. Because we have been consuming fake olive oil, we therefore have no idea what olive oil is supposed to taste like; because we have been consuming fake olive oil for decades, we have come to expect that this stuff is what olive oil is supposed to taste like. It’s not our fault – the marketplace has been giving us crap for years, so when we get flavored vegetable oil instead, we think it’s good because that’s what we expect.2

This, though…this is the real stuff, the good stuff, pressed yesterday and delivered this morning to be in your mouth this afternoon. And when you consume it, it’s like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes color. Imagine that moment, in 1939, when the first audience was watching what they thought was a normal film, and then the screen exploded in life; imagine the gasps, the awe, the “anything can happen” astonishment that must have rushed through those watchers’ minds and hearts, and know that that sort of experience is still available - you just have to make your way to Lucchese Vini on delivery day, and make friends with the owner, and get a bottle of the good stuff.

And if this doesn’t count as beauty, as luxury, I don’t know what does.

Experiences

9. Cammarata Sport Palermo Duca della Verdura

Years ago, Patagonia released a short film about a pair of their swim trunks. This wasn’t about a model of swim trunks, or a line of swim trunks; literally, the video was the story of a single pair of swim trunks.

I remember being impressed with their philosophy, their ethos. So when I needed swim trunks for a family reunion in Mauritius, I got a pair of Patagonia ones off eBay for $10. I used them for 12 years; when I tore them swimming off the coast of Wales, I brought them to my tailor in Edinburgh and gave him instructions: repair them, and make sure the repair is visible.

I brought them to Italy, and on our first day in Mondello Bay, they tore again. I guess, after 14 years of heavy use, I can forgive them. I took them to the tailor who said she would repair them with Sicilian cloth and get them back to me in a week.

A week. That’s three beach days with the boys, three long swims. What could I do?

Answer: be grateful for my health.

We can show that gym use is most used by the wealthy. Actually, for anyone who equates luxury with expense, gym use is an exceptional luxury; it can cost a fair amount of money, and is a solid commitment of time. So swimming in crystal, clear waters, under a blazing Mediterranean sun, chasing jellyfish, diving for pearls, dodging boats, floating alone in the water, while everyone else is on land?

And feeling comfortable in one’s own body, one’s own ability to act, to do things, to perform?

That’s better than first class from London to Sydney, a pile of near-flawless diamonds, or a BMW convertible.3

And it is at Cammarata Sport Palermo Duca della Verdura where you can buy the tools that you need to perform.

And, if you are wondering whether to get board shorts, jammers, or briefs, think: when in Rome.

Growing up, we thought that Europeans all wore speedos on the beach. The reality is that most Italians wear board, shorts or trunks; only some wear briefs. But I thought: when else can I do this?

So I got some blue briefs, from an Italian brand called Aquarapid. And cutting through saltwater toward the open sea, diving deep to investigate flashes ten feet below, passing inches from skittish fish that might be dinner for someone in a few hours, bobbing up to watch kids jumping off of the pier, and finding a sand bar a hundred yards out where you can stand with the water just coming up to your knees, completely alone, with everyone on land wondering how you can levitate like that? It’s all more luxurious than an Hermes saddle, a Cucinelli sweater, a Zegna suit, or any Birkin bag you have to kiss ass to buy. Those things may make people feel comfortable in or with them; health, ability, and training helps one feel more comfortable in and with oneself.

And that, of course, is luxury.

Classic Luxury

10. DELL’OGLIO 1890

This is, without a doubt, the closest to a traditional “luxury” store you will see on this list. The stuff here is expensive – like, €30 for a pair of socks, €120 for a T-shirt.

So why include it?

Well, they are not a manufacturer, not a single brand, not a chain. They’re more like a curator of beautiful things – and, in this case, they happen to curate beautiful clothing, and they do an exceptional job.

But I want to talk here about the elevator.

An elevator may be a strange thing to fixate on in a clothing shop, but it says a lot, because the shop here is, when you first walk in the door, little more than an entryway with a counter with a few things for sale and way too many staff people. At the counter, you can get ties, soft, socks, wallets, and other small goods. There are upper levels, but you can also take the elevator down. The elevator itself is stunning. Stepping in, you feel transported back to the 1920s – art deco, Zoot Suit, big fenders, neon lights, jazz. Maybe that’s not actually, what Palermo was like when this shop first opened, but those are the associations I have just looking at the polished brass – and the brass here is polished.

Polished as a word that deserves closer scrutiny, far more attention than it gets. The act of polishing is itself luxurious; it is not necessary, not critical, but it does indicate that a greater level of care is being taken to maintain something than is strictly necessary. It’s like shining shoes, brushing coats, oiling one’s briefcase – but it is less about maintenance and more about attention to the small details that might matter.

And this elevator is polished.

You can go up, but you can go down, and let’s go down. When the doors open, you are presented with a beautifully lit, gorgeously presented showroom for clothes. Nothing is piled high here; they are not trying to move volume. Instead, they are showing everything in its best light, literally. There are no windows in the basement, so in this environment, it could be any time of the day or night and you wouldn’t be able to tell.

When the elevator doors opened, a short, chisel-jawed man was trying on a tuxedo, and immediately a saleswoman closed the door so he could have privacy. Something about it immediately made me understand why so much of the shop was blocked off from the outside.

If you are even moderately versed in 1990s gangsta rap, you may remember Biggie’s injunction to “never let no one know how much dough you hold.” His advice is striking for how different it is from how most drug dealers and gangsters seem to act; gangsters of all stripes have stereotypically (and probably traditionally) cared deeply about how they looked, and have loved spending money in as conspicuous and manner as possible. (A recent article in the Economist noted that “Colombian drug lords can be spotted driving luxury cars around (Guinea-)Bissau.”) And here, in this subterranean church of clothing, as if through osmosis, the history of these rooms, the thought and care that went into designing them, came through to me.

This, one of the oldest luxury shops in Palermo, was designed for the comfort and security not of men, but of made men.

Men with wads of dirty bills would have found this to have been one of the few places where they could have come without fear of arrest for assassination, where they could have relaxed for an hour, or two, enjoying the rotten fruits of their endeavours, the luxuries that their evil deeds afforded them. Outside of these doors, out in the world, they would never have been able to enjoy anything – I mean, imagine constantly being aware that you could be shot in the stomach whenever you turned a corner, or that a bomb could go off any time you started your car. How, then, would you be able to enjoy your 14,000 lira handkerchief? But here, in this temple of luxury, those with much to fear could have actually enjoyed the softness of their new cashmere boxers, or the stiffness of their benchmade Oxfords, before going back out into the world. One can even imagine the pact made, the terms transmitted through neutral runners, and agreed to instinctively: “right honourable gentleman: DELL’OGLIO is a neutral ground.”

And, in my opinion, the true luxury of the store is the careful, curated, safe atmosphere that is their legacy.

So go. Enjoy it. And if you wind up with a pair of €30 socks or a €2000 blazer, I won’t judge you.

What you won’t walk out of here with, though, is anything by Luis Vuitton.

One definition of Luxury is: “a state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense.”

It’s a good start. The thing is, most of the stuff considered “luxuries” today are things that involve great expense, but don’t have anything to do with a state of great comfort or elegance. The street definition of “luxury” is, more often than not, a nicer way of saying, “costs irrationally more than anyone can conceivably justify.”

For example, Louis Vuitton. It’s commonly considered a “luxury” brand. I have talked to maybe 20 of their devotees and one of their actual salespeople about Louis Vuitton products, and nobody has yet been able to explain to me why they are considered luxurious without leaning entirely on the fact that their products cost a lot of money. The most fervent admirer I have ever met, a friend of a friend in London whose family has a small amount of Middle Eastern oil and who owns several of their bags (and books devoted to their history), could only gesticulate with his hands and say, “it’s just…really, really nice.” When I asked what is nice about it, he said, “it just…is.” Then, he gave me that smile that begged to be excused for not thinking.

Anyways, Louis Vuitton seems to make a lot of money by selling very expensive things. For some reason, conspicuous consumers spend millions on consumption just because it is conspicuous.

I don’t like this fact, but I can make money off of these people who like to spend money.

So, a while ago, I bought a few shares of LVMH stock. It’s a pro trick that I recommend: if Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Moncler, Arc’teryx, Gucci, or any other brand makes you want to vomit a bit in your mouth, just become a shareholder. Then, whenever you meet one of their customers, you can be grateful to them for making you just a bit more wealthy. It works really well: now, every time I see people with LV bags, I think: thanks for taking money out of your bag and putting it in mine.

But even if it means my investment returns will suffer, I still have a dream that one day, we will return “great comfort and elegance” to the fore of the definition of luxury, rather than leaving it to the aft.1

And, as part of that effort, I want to write about luxury in Italy, especially Palermo.

I could start this part with, “Luxury and Italy go hand in hand.”

Then, I could ask AI to produce 1,000 filler words about luxury in Italy.

Blah blah blah blah blah.

Yes, Palermo has “luxury” shops; they are mostly in the northern center of the city, lining Via della Libertà near the newer, nicer buildings. I could write a piece on these stores, just to draw people in. I might get another 45,000 views that way, and maybe some new subscribers who really want to read about Dolce & Gabbana.

However, I never went in any of these shops, and I’m not writing for fashionistas. I’m writing for thinking people.2

Instead, I want to write about the stores that epitomize, to me, “comfort” and “elegance,” and robustness, excellence, quality, and, in these things, a life of true beauty. Some of these places facilitate spending time in a truly luxurious way - the paper shop in particular, and the book stores, speak of exceptionally elegant pasttimes. Some are luxurious because they make an outstanding product that is ephemeral, that must be consumed and appreciated in Palermo itself. The menswear shop, at least, would meet the traditional definition of luxury, but it has details that make it uniquely luxurious in a way that I’ve never seen in any other shop before - namely, for men who might have otherwise been blown up while trying on a belt.

So here, not in any sort of order, are my Top Ten luxurious shops in Palermo, Italy.

Luxurious Services

“Do you see a man skilled at his work? He will serve kings, not obscure people.” Proverbs 22:29

One of my theories is if skilled labor is more expensive than unskilled labor, and skilled labor produces nicer things, then some perceptions of luxury can be traced to the costs of skilled labor. I suspect that the people who stitch together Hermès and Louis Vuitton bags are at least semi-skilled, and that producing one of these bags involves a lot of work. I also recognize that this suspicion is without any support; recent reports indicate that, actually, luxury handbags are actually really poorly made.

If you are reading this, I think it’s safe to say that we agree with these propositions:

• Things carry stories.

• We tell ourselves stories about things.

• Our things tell people stories about us.

• Things are, inevitably, souvenirs that remind us of something in the past.

• Who we are impacts what we own.

• What we own impacts who we are.

• What we make in turn makes us.

• When we repair things, we interact with them in a deeper way than when we simply use them.

• We like nice things.

• We value our things enough to fix them when they are broken.

• Our things are actually worth fixing, rather than throwing out.

• Actually, if it is something you can just casually toss away, it probably isn’t worth having in the first place.

• We value labor, and the products of labor.

• We value craftsmanship.

• We value artistry, and experience.

• We are willing to maintain our possessions.

• We are willing to maintain our tools.

• We don’t throw away crap because we don’t have it in our lives in the first place.

• We think about what we consume.

• People matter to us.

• We think about our impact on the world.

• We actually think a lot about our lives.

So, based on these assumptions, it is likely I don’t need to go into the value of having a good tailor and cobbler wherever we go. Having them is something that we think of as a true luxury, because it shows that the clothes and shoes we have are already luxurious - they are beautiful, useful, and worth fixing when they break. In this way, having these craftspeople available to us is a reflective luxury; it shows that we already have luxurious items. It also shows, then, that you have solid values and principles, and this is the foundation for a good life - perhaps the greatest luxury of all.

A non-exhaustive list of other services we might consume: watch servicers, knife and razor sharpening (if you don’t do it yourself), butchers, potters, weavers, millers, nib repair.

So: starting from this perspective, the initial two luxurious places to patronize in Palermo are the cobbler and the tailor. (I’m not sure if Lonely Planet et al include recommended cobblers and tailors for all of their locations, but I suspect they do not.)

1. Calzolaio Rapid Shoemaker Da Enzo

Why Enzo? Well, for one, his shop is stunning in the way that a monomaniacal workspace can be. Literally everything in this shop is designed to better fix as many leather goods in as efficient and beautiful a manner as possible. Every countertop has leather tools on it, or is a space to put a broken item for fixing; every cabinet has its designated tools; even his phone, which might be a distraction tool, is instead set up to service customers. It is inspiring to watch him examine something - a shoe, a bag, a belt - and then simply reach behind his back, without looking, to pick up the specific tool that he knows is there, right where it is meant to be, because the workshop is a living, breathing extension of himself.

So Enzo is…well, he is an intense guy. In the half-hour that we spent together just on Daniel’s broken brogue, I learned that he works alone; that his workshop is exceptionally well-organized, even if it is extremely dirty; and that he takes his art very, very seriously. His main gripe in life - among many smaller ones, of which I only got the briefest glimpse - is that the cobbler a few doors down the street very willingly takes in customers looking for his services. Then, when she does a poor job, Google seems not to care that the reviews that are left for his shop are actually for the other woman, not for Enzo. This is why he has so many signs outside of his shop, and why he is constantly looking outside for people who might need his services. He does not have a website because he does not trust the internet; he trusts shoes, his hands, his labor, and that’s about it.

And he does an excellent job. He fixed Daniel’s shoe with the sort of care and attention that he would have paid to Meloni if she’d come in with her Blahnik’s (and, considering politics in the region, perhaps more).

It is a great luxury to be able to depend on someone in Palermo to fix your shoes, so for all of your cobbling needs, go to Enzo.

Just make sure that you don’t go to the woman down the street; she can’t be trusted.

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2. Sartoria Tagli e Cuci

Similarly, having a tailor is now, unfortunately, a luxury. Even in Palermo, they are few and far between.

The shop is around the corner from the train station and the central bus station. This is decidedly not the tourist center of the city; trash litters the streets, pedestrian crossings are few, and the shops and restaurants are low-key, selling cheap sandwiches and essentials for students and workers who commute in from the countryside.

The shop itself is…well, tailors fit a mold. There’s a counter, piled high with clothes; rotating hangers; bolts of fabric on specially-built shelves. The area around the sewing machines is extraordinarily well-lit from different angles. There’s a paper-and-carbon-copy receipt book in the middle of the counter which occasionally is hidden by a dress or a pair of jeans; you will get the yellow copy, and they will attach the white one to your garment. Tags are clipped to clothes with brief notes scribbled in code to remind whoever picks up the garment exactly what needs to be done to it. There are plants which look underwatered, a bank note in a frame (the first one they earned), and a porcelain blue-and-white teapot. No matter when you visit, there will be at least one customer at the counter with something to be mended; before you leave, someone else will have come in behind you, and will smile at you when you turn to walk out. You should, upon first greeting the tailor, comment on how much work they have; this can be done with words or with a large, open-handed gesture taking it all in. Then you should listen as they first complain about being busy and also express gratitude for the work. Only after they have given a sigh and asked “what can I do for you?” should you present your request. You should be very specific about what you want; the tailor will likely have an idea of what they think they should do, so unless it matches up exactly, let them know your desires. Agree on the job and the price and the date when you will come back, thank them, and then wish them luck with all of the rest of their work, and return their resigned smile with one of hope. When you do return, greet them, and make sure you comment on how the piles haven’t actually gone down; then, listen again as they complain and yet are grateful for the work. This time, they should remember you and the garment, and will bring it out; you don’t actually have to present the ticket. They will present your item in a plastic garment bag, and then lift the bag for your inspection. Let them show it off and then admire the work, touching and prodding it - there must be the touching and prodding. They will flip the plastic bag down again and then you will pay. Generally, they prefer cash, but a card is fine. Leave, wishing them well and promising to see them soon.

These are the international etiquette rules of visiting a tailor which Debrett’s will never tell you about because they deal in publishing, not people.

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Luxurious Things

3. Mondo Cuoio

Italy might be known for luxury leather goods, but…well, it’s well-known that “Made in Italy” generally means “Made (by underpaid Chinese people who have been smuggled into the country to work illegally in sweatshops that are technically located) in Italy.”

I was hoping to find a actual traditional leatherworker, though. Mondo Cuoio is next door to two really cheap toy shops where you can, for a few Euros, get sand toys that will occupy rambunctious children for hours and hours. While Nick and Daniel dreamed about using butterfly nets to catch fish in the sea, I descended a few steps into this cool, dark oasis of leather. It is a simple shop, and anything that isn’t designed to It is run by two women who sit in their workshop - two tables covered in hides and tools - and create wallets, belts, purses, and all sorts of small leather goods. If you give them a sample paper notebook, and say that you would like a custom-made notebook cover, they will produce one for you in about four days, allowing you to select the leather, the color, and the stitching from their samples. When you pick it up, they will both explain how they made it together, and show you the details, of which there are not many, because they are artisans, not charlatans, and don’t throw a perfume on the violet. They will have anticipated, of course, that when you said you wanted a cover for “a” notebook you would eventually mean “six” notebooks, so that, over the next few weeks, as your needs expand, you can add notebooks into it for a variety of uses. They are smart like that and, to me, that sort of attention to detail creates a comfort that is an exceptional luxury.

4. I Papiri

On Via Gaetano Daita, a side street north of the city center, is I Papiri. There are only rarely customers in here now; the only other person I saw in the shop over seven visits was a friend of the owners, who continued talking to them as I shopped. It is, really, a shrine to the art of handwriting. I almost wrote “lost art” - I have younger friends now who say they haven’t written something down by hand in years - but, as I have at least eight pen pals with whom I regularly exchange hand-written letters, I can’t really say that this art is lost.

I challenge you to find me someone who says that hand-written letters are not luxurious, or who would argue they are not elegant. They are, of course, very costly - in time and, increasingly, in postage fees.

A man and two women work here. They are all well past middle-age, and they know every pen and scrap of paper in their shop. There are pens on display behind the glass counter, and they also have several which are not on display, and, if you ask if they have any Omas pens, this is an excellent way to show that you are knowledgeable about Italian pen brands and deserve to see the ones that they don’t display. They also have a selection of outstanding sealing wax on the lower level of the shop which will only add to the cost - and, to some people, the luxury - of your letters.

5. Libreria Zacco - Maurizio

In an almost mediaeval way, Palermo is trades still seem to congregate around certain areas. The bookseller area is just around the corner from the cathedral, and it does a vibrant trade.

The luxury of a society is support for the arts. Arts, really, are a supreme luxury. Personally, I am a fan of literary arts. I don’t know whether this is by nature or nurture, but I believe the books are one of the most beautiful adornments in any situation. I am glad to have good company in this feeling – there is a story that when John F. Kennedy was giving advice to his brother Teddy, his top tip was to always carry a book around with him, partly so he could read it but also so he looked smart. John Waters also advised that if you go home with someone and they don’t have books, you should not sleep with them. Books say a huge amount about us - as individuals, as a culture, as a people. You can tell a lot about a person if, for example, they love Becky Chambers or Robert Caro or Dostoevsky. You can also tell about the values that a group of people have when they place books in the centre of their city, and when they place the bookseller quarter close to the cathedral. It tells you that they are worth a visit, worth getting to know, that they are kind, peaceful, interesting, have good food, laugh, dance, enjoy music, support theatre, and, generally, have good lives that are worth studying and emulating. Perhaps it is these lives that have more to do with their longevity than simply their diet, but it is hard for hard scientists to study the liberal art of good living.

I have zero evidence for this, but I would bet that a culture that places low values on books correlates with bad food, uninteresting conversations, poor dental health, early death, relatively few contributions to scientific progress, fewer patents, fewer miles travelled per person, fewer passports issued per person, more violence, and greater levels of alcohol abuse.

Anyways, generally, books - real books - are the culmination of centuries of art and science, the descendents of tablets and papyrus and illuminated manuscripts, now printed by the millions and made cheap now when once they were worth far more than their weight in gold. They speak of leisure, a mind in search, of intelligent choices. To engage in one, to consume it, is often luxurious; it will probably take hours of your life, hours you will never get back, but also hours which you will willingly trade to engage with the written word. They are, by dint of beauty and only sometimes monetary cost, luxurious, and it’s worth visiting Zacco to celebrate this modern luxury, because it is a great little store with a wonderfully friendly proprietor; it is always buzzing, with people and ideas, and shows how exciting a small space can be when a community values books and ideas. Also, Zacco puts on the book festival, La Via dei Librai, and it is committed to spreading ideas throughout Palermo; go, if you get a chance, and live a more luxurious life.

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I walked down the main aisle. A man was setting out his arancini, whistling as his hands placed them delicately down, treating each as if it was a burning newborn kitten. The square was surrounded by tall buildings, none taller than the church in the western corner, and I went to the east, to the back, behind some of the market stalls. Here, nobody was setting up for the show that would soon start; this is where everyone parked, where they left their equipment for the day to pick up later if they remembered, where nobody was supposed to go. It felt like being behind the scenes of a festival - filthy ropes in a pile, a broken table, two unemptied metal-barrel trash cans, and the real life of the party happening on the other side, the pretty side.

I preferred being behind the scenes.

On one side is the large church; on the other, the oratorio. On the oratorio steps were three bodies, sprawled out - not awkwardly, but they hadn’t moved since they fell, or had fallen: two men and a woman. Within a few seconds I could hear that the woman was English, one man was French, the other African/Italian. Their muscles were so relaxed that the bodies seemed to have taken on the rough shape of the steps, rising and falling as they cascaded down, and I was sure that, if they were to get up and strip off their clothes, lines would have formed across their backs and legs at regular intervals. Their mouths were mumbling and their chests were shaking with shallow laughter. I immediately became extremely self-conscious in that way when everyone around me is doing something - wearing football jerseys when I am in a suit, eating hamburgers when all I have are cucumber sticks, mumbling along to Kanye or Drake when all I know is music. I looked at them as they looked at me. I could see that they were having trouble focusing, but they knew someone was near them.

“Hey bro,” one of the men said in a rough aproximation of a 1970s movie Mexican accent, “you wan some weeeeeeed?”

The woman burst into a fit of laughter, and the men followed.

It was suddenly 1995, between third and fourth period. I’d just come out of Mr. Hedberg’s biology class and there, lying on the sharp drought-resistant grass between the last row of classrooms of Granite Hills High School, were Kate, Wendy, and Angela. The sun was high, and yellow in that California way, so it must have been the springtime; it wasn’t hot enough to force the administration to give us a half-day. As I walked toward them, Angela jumped up and lunged at me while Kate and Wendy laughed. Angela looked up, her eyes unfocused saucers, and said, too loudly, “WE ARE ON AHHHHHHHHHCID.” She then danced as if she was at Woodstock - peace-signed fingers flowing past her eyes, then go-go dancing to some silent song, and, standing stock still, I felt a chasm open between us. I knew I would never feel what she was feeling at that moment, see what she saw, be who she was becoming; we had, in that one moment, in her simple decision, taken completely different paths, and I would never be able to travel the one she had chosen. I felt neither sadness or gratitude; there was just a sense of distance as Kate and Wendy fell backwards, consumed by the hilarity of whatever it was they were imagining in their world and I stayed in mine.

And I turned and walked away as the laughter got quieter, then stopped.

(Pritesh and Jörgen, this one is for you!)

The markets in Palermo are both legendary and ruined. The famous food streets - La Vucciria and Bancarella Del Polpottavio in particular - are not really even markets anymore; markets imply that sellers set up stalls with the intent to sell and customers go there with the intent to buy. Here, the buyers consume the experience, but very rarely the products; this has turned the markets into open-air theaters. Tourists wander between close-packed stalls in slow, steady lines, stopping whenever someone in front of them takes a photo of a swordfish beak sticking out of a pack of ice or a vendor draws their attention to a particularly attractive pile of tomatoes. The restaurants - which are, admittedly, often packed - all serve stereotypical Italian staples; there are no experimental chefs on the streets of Palermo. As far as customers go, the only locals are behind the tables and in the kitchens; I often wondered if the food on display was plastic, as it was hard to imagine the crowds doing anything other than taking photos of it.

Take La Vucciria, for example. There are many food stalls, most of which serve Sicilian staples - pasta, fried food, sandwiches. One man in the middle, though, sells the famous spleen sandwiches, pani câ meusa. These are traditional Jewish-Sicilian sandwiches made from an organ that is not usually celebrated in the culinary arts, and holds a hallowed place in the island’s story. The story, though, seems to mainly be told in English; the only Sicilians who stopped at his stall were other food vendors, coming by for a chat. The customers, coming at regular intervals, were food tour groups. Twenty people would crowd around his stand, with twenty phones at varying angles all searching for a cooking shot; then, phones would be traded as people got action shots of them eating the spleen, with appropriate shocked, amazed, and awed expressions on their faces to let viewers back home know how extraordinary it was that they were being so daring and adventurous. Then, sandwiches would be quietly disposed of in the bins provided, there would be twenty grazies, the group would move on to wash their mouths out with Aperol Spritzes, and quiet would descend once more on his coals. A few minutes later, his friends would appear to talk about the weather or the football or the politics while he casually started the next batch of spleens; as soon as another tour group appeared at the outskirts, the friends would melt away and he’d be left alone, to all appearances diligently cooking the offal to perfection with the apparent attention and dedication of an old master.

The seafood market, Bancarella Del Polpottavio, was similar. The one food market we came across, Mercato Ballarò, was better, at least in the early morning: people actually bought raw ingredients for cooking. Around 9 a.m., though, the performances start. These are all Instagram spaces; they say little about Sicilian culture and more about the desires of tourists to see a performance of stereotypes. One suspects that they may have paid extra to see a group of toughs loitering at the edges.

The Sunday Mercato Antico is a bit better. It’s a weekly market that happens in the streets and plazas around Giardino Garibaldi. Sellers set up early and, although the market officially opens at 8 a.m., browsing really starts around 8:30 or 9 - it’s a relaxed affair. The sellers in the piazza across from the gardens are mostly antique sellers; here, as in the antique market, you can find some extraordinary stuff sold by people who know its value. On the sidewalks around the garden, you can find tables with everything from textiles to antique watches, a lot of keys, Zippos, the obligatory man selling LPs (and blaring Miles Davis over an amp on repeat, week after week), an artist who makes sculptures out of junk, garden tools, bags, shoes, and books. There are only a few stalls where people sell assorted goods - everyone here seems to specialize in something, and they return to the same spots every week, making it seem less like a flea market (as it is described on Google Maps) than a club of people who sell together.

Better yet is the cloth street, which I could find on foot without any problems but can’t, for the life of me, locate on Google Maps - I believe it could have been Vicolo dello Zingaro. In the UK, some streets are named after what was previously sold there - Grassmarket, Haymarket, Fleshmarket. Now, these streets no longer have any association to their former occupants. However, in Palermo, trades still concentrate in particular areas. The antique market is one; there’s a stretch near the Cathedral where book stores abound, and on the fabric street, there are blocks of fabric stores, bolts of colors and patterns spilling out of open doorways.

I have absolutely no reason to believe that textile tourism is a major contributor to the Sicilian economy, and AI…well, it has hallucinated a few too many times for me to be comfortable asking it. I therefore have to believe that there is a large amount of local support for clothing stores, and that sewing is still common here - common enough to support numerous businesses and families. In any case, the textile shops have tons of interesting fabrics and patterns that one would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Indeed, some patters appear to be unique to individual shops, leading one to believe that the owners are also designers. We walked away with several yards of intricately-patterned cloth, which ended up on lampshades and napkins and sewn over a rip in some swimming trunks.

So: if you want to go home with something that is actually Sicilian, stop one might be the fabric lane opposite the Cathedral’s main entrance.

But for a much more interesting experience, you have to work a bit at your luck.

First, it helps to be up at 6 a.m., with all of your wits about you. Second, go out into the streets with a bag, scissors, and a camera. The scissors are for plant cuttings; the plan is to get cuttings of various plants in order to propagate them at home. The camera is for street photos, and the bag is to hold the scissors and camera and cuttings without being too conspicuous.

Pro tip: you don’t need the scissors. There are tons of succulents in the streets, literally falling out of planters and littering the ground; you can just pick up runners and put them in water for planting when you get home. At this hour, the streets are quiet, for the most part. But then you’ll get towards Piazza San Francisco Saverio, down near the museum. From here, stretching out into the surrounding streets, is an informal street market. It does not appear to be organized; maybe fifty or a hundred people have set out their wares, usually on the concrete sidewalks, sometimes on sheets or tarps, and they take over blocks as necessary. Like the sellers in the antique market, these sellers mostly know the value of what they are selling; unlike the antique market, though, these sellers are hawking things that are nearly worthless. Here you will find used kitchen utensils, old kids clothes, toys, working landline telephones, radios, well-used shoes, formerly non-stick pans, mugs, half-used bottles of shampoo, and anything else people no longer need that may fetch a Euro or two from someone similarly hard-up. Some sellers seem to be regulars; others are just desperate.

The truly beautiful thing is that here, you can see the things that Sicilian people actually have used in the past, and things other Sicilian people may use in the very near future. Next to a volcano erupting and burying the area in ash, then returning in 2,000 years, this is perhaps the single easiest way to get a look into fifty different houses, to see what the people have valued in the past and what others value today.

I came here three times, and every time, the market was running. I wasn’t smart enough to keep track of the days and times I visited, but my suspicion is that this market runs whenever anyone has something to put out, and this means that it operates every single day. It doesn’t seem to have specific hours – I was there at 6:30 am and noon, and sellers had their stuff spread out on the ground at all times.

Why do I love this market so much? Besides the fact that the wares here are true reflections of modern Sicilian culture, I also love bargains. At any flea market, the bargains are not found in well-organized stalls, carefully laid out and curated. The bargains are found when a seller has cardboard boxes full of disorganized debris, and you have to pick your way through everything. Treasure doesn’t just sit out, waiting to be picked up; it must be found. The seller should have some idea of what they are actually selling, but they should not be emotionally invested in it.

If we are valuing markets, based on their reflection, of how the people in a place and culture actually live – which, come to think of it, maybe a great definition of the overused term “authenticity” – then there is no better place than the unofficial market.

I want to try to paint a picture of this place, as I didn’t take any photos of it - I was too busy shopping. Parts of the neighbourhood seem to have been destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II and never rebuilt. The streets and sidewalks are intact, though, and people lay out blankets and clothes on the ground and put their stuff down. There aren’t designated pitches or spaces – sellers take up as much space as they need. Virtually everything here is used household detritus. The electronics cannot be guaranteed to work; sometimes it appears that people have gone through the trash to find anything that could be sold for €1 or more, and they have not been overly selective. Many sellers are poor; that’s why they are here. Many buyers are poor; that’s why they are here. You come here to search for bargains. And, if JFK was right and it’s not the kill but the hunt, these are wonderful hunting grounds.

Most of the times we walked through, I was with Daniel and Nicholas. This was not ideal. First, they wanted toys. Second, the toys were all very cheap. Third, the toys were also invariably filthy, or broken, and usually both. So I never stopped long with them - I would glance at the piles, and hustle them through the streets with promises of watermelon or cornettos on the other side.

But on the penultimate morning, at 6:30 am, I went on my own. I had my scissors, bag and camera; I wanted to get a few plant clippings from public planters – purpleheart, succulents, jade, anything I could find – and to see if the market had anything for me.

So I did, and it was glorious. Planters in Palermo, generally overflow with plants that can be propagated with cuttings, and I didn’t need the scissors – most planters had dropped “volunteers,” or branches that had dropped off into the street, the mother plant hoping that they would root somewhere new (and Edinburgh is certainly such a new place for these plants).

When I got to the market, it was wonderful. I joined the other hunters in the search. There is no organisation here, you just have to dig in piles of crap for something you may want. I kept a close eye on my watch – not because I was worried it would be stolen, but because this is the sort of place where I could lose track of time and end up spending an hour looking for things and two hours talking to people.

And the people are wonderful to talk to. Some sellers are pure hustlers. They may hustle you, but it is because they love hustling – there’s no animosity, no desire to screw you over. It is nothing personal, and if it turns out that you aren’t there to be hustled, they are perfectly happy to be friends until another mark appears. There’s nothing one can say to express one’s invulnerability to hustling – it’s unconsciously and subtly communicated, an understanding, a characteristic of one’s personality, an intangible that comes out in your posture, the way you talk, and the amused look on your face when you see everything they say as a sort of cosmic joke between you. With that, there is a game of laughing chicken – you escalate the interaction until one of you laughs, and the laughing is not a sign of losing, but of love of the game. This also isn’t a gendered thing; I generally find that these hustlers amen, but the best hustler I ever knew, is my friend Mary, who I have known since first grade and seems, in my experience, genetically predisposed to hustle everyone she meets.

Anyway, there are some wonderful hustlers at the informal market in Palermo.

I left one hustler space and kept walking. He had an okay selection. Then there was a half a block taken up by a couple, a man and a woman who were clearly both married and hated each other. They were engaged in some low-level, quiet dispute when I started looking, and everyone else but me seemed to have gotten a memo to avoid them. Me, though, I jumped into their piles, ignoring the quiet recriminations and sudden movements that easily could have turned criminal.

Their life accumulations – for this was clearly a place where they were selling their own unwanted stuff – were mostly uninteresting.

Then, my hand closed around a wooden cylinder, and I knew I’d struck gold.

It was a rolling pin, with an even, wooden surface and tapered ends. It was twice as long as any rolling pin I’ve ever seen, and I held it up like Excalibur, and the woman stopped muttering at her husband and looked at me, obviously surprised that, of all the things, this is what had caught the eye of the only foreigner in sight. I looked at her and gently tipped it towards her – from 20 meters away, the international sign for, “how much?”

She looked at it with a resigned expression and held up three fingers.

I smiled, leaned my head to the right a few degrees, lifted my eyebrows, pursed my lips, and held up two.

She dipped her head.

She muttered something to the man as I walked towards her and dropped a €2 coin in her palm. We Grazied at the same time, and I turned and walked away, giddy at my find and now faced with the very real possibility that it might not fit in my backpack. It did, though, and now, every time we make pizzas, cookies, cinnamon, rolls, and especially pasta, I think of Cassidy, and the vagaries of culture, and the evolution of tools, and that morning hunting in the streets of Palermo, and I’m grateful for the friends and cultures that have brought this souvenir to me.

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Of course, you can tell a lot about a culture by the things that they acquire, have, use, consume, and then leave behind. By looking at the artifacts of a culture, we can see the habits and rituals that made up their lives, and how similar they were to modern people, to you and me. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these things are souvenirs of lives long past, which is a big reason why we find them so fascinating. In looking around the world, in the past or today, it’s amazing to see how similar people are and how they are different in extraordinarily subtle ways - ways that are the building blocks of unique cultures.

I was thinking about those cultural souvenirs of Pompei because I was looking in the window of a tourist shop with Nick on Monday in Edinburgh. I have been trying to understand how these shops make enough money to not only survive but thrive. Tourists presumably go to them to get reminders of Scotland and its beautiful and unique culture. These shops, though, are full of kitsch that has virtually nothing to do with Scottish culture, and the things that seem to sell well are things that are completely unrelated to how modern Scottish people live. A shop chosen at random on the Royal Mile will likely have ten different sizes of Highland Cow stuffed animals, stacks of pens with crowns on them, tweed purses, tweed backpacks, tweed-covered flasks, tweed phone cases, tweed keychains, tweed gloves, tweed earmuffs, and an assortment of tweed sporrans.

Now, there are highland cows in Scotland. There are pens, and crowns. People sometimes have tweed bags or jackets, and drink alcohol. At weddings, you might see people - usually men - in kilts. However, highland cows are grown for meat, or are vanity pets at distilleries to draw tour groups in; you don’t see them anywhere else, even in Cowgate. Only museum curators see crowns every day. And as for cloth, it’s not 1831 anymore - people are far more likely to wear and use any other material than tweed.

In other words, the things that are sold as symbols and reminders of Scottish culture are things that real people in Scotland will very rarely encounter.

I was watching some tourists in a shop, weighing the pros and cons of different “SCOTLAND” tee-shirts, and realized something: the reason I find it so hard to understand their shopping urges is that they are not looking for souvenirs that involve personal stories (which I still think is the highest level one can aspire to with any tangible possession), nor are they looking for “cultural souvenirs” that show how people in a place actually live in a unique manner, or have adapted tools to their special cultural needs. Instead, they are looking for stereotypes of people that are different than their own lives, things that allow them to tell fictional stories to themselves about the world. Imagine Americans going to Scotland, then returning to Alabama or Iowa or Washington with things that Scottish people might actually have: a North Face backpack, or Patagonia jacket, or Levi’s jeans, or a New York Yankees baseball hat. While these are far more common in current Scottish culture than tweed sporrans or socks, they bring no variety to a tourist’s normal life, so don’t trigger any unique associations with Scottish culture. In addition, they don’t display to others that one has been anywhere different and, in modern days (and probably throughout history), showing other people that one has travelled somewhere else can seem just as important as actually travelling.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people who blow money in tourist shops on kitsch are mostly looking for symbols of a different culture, or what can be called a symbolic souvenir. For many, this means the souvenir must be somehow fundamentally different from their own lives, and they are willing to ignore the actual reality of the culture itself in favor of the imaginary one.

It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I wanted to say to all of the tourists buying tweed condoms on the Royal Mile: look! Literally look around you! The people of Edinburgh are not so different from you. They shop at Ikea for furniture, Amazon for books, and they signal their status with Levi’s denim and Converse canvas and Patagonia plastic. While tourists are combing the racks for a Campbell tartan jock strap, a stuffed Loch Ness monster, or a pen that blares a tinny rendition of “Flower of Scotland” from a built-in speaker, actual Scottish people are watching the Patriots play the Browns, eating at Five Guys, drinking bubble tea, and watching TikTok on their iPhones.

BUT.

That’s not to say that Scottish culture is exactly the same as American culture; differences do exist, if you are willing to do some work to find them. However, to really get into these cultural differences requires understanding, attention, and the ability to make distinctions. In other words, it requires thinking - and “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”

My friend Cassidy provided a perfect example of this. He is a chef, and he has an absurdly keen eye for tools and products. I mean this in both an awe-struck and occasionally frustrated way - he has extraordinarily high standards, which means that he is extremely exacting, and second-best will never do. The thing is, his skill excuses his perfectionism - nobody is going to object if the pasta is cooked perfectly for six minutes and 32 seconds in a 5.7% brine, but, with Cassidy, to get that pasta may have taken four hours across ten miles of back streets and a lot of flattering of a particular grandmother who possesses the extraordinary ability, developed over decades, to fold 24 egg yolks into 216 grams of flour, and that sort of quest, while admirable, is not something that you necessarily want to go through regularly.

Anyway: I wanted a rolling pin from Italy. I didn’t have a good rolling pin at home, and I figured that it would be a good reminder of our trip - particularly since we usually use them for pizzas. I mentioned this to Cassidy at the beginning of the trip, because I knew that he would have an informed opinion on just this very subject. He first said that American rolling pins are often squared-off, while the French ones are usually tapered; he prefers the tapered ones because they are more ergonomical. He then did some research and noted that Italian rolling pins are not tapered, probably because Italians often make pasta with their rolling pins, so they need to have a consistently flat surface area. In addition, Italian rolling pins are generally wood, in order to give pasta a slightly rougher surface so that sauce adheres to it, whereas if you are using a rolling pin for other purposes, other materials (marble, plastic, tempered glass) may be more appropriate. His recommendation: if you are making pasta, get a wooden Italian rolling pin; if making pastries, get French. If you make pasta AND pastries, get a bigger kitchen.

I mean…I don’t know if that’s entirely accurate, but the reasoning is impeccable.

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And that’s the level one should aspire to when purchasing cultural souvenirs. Ignore the “Scottish” tartan flasks, or the “Valencia” orange-print tea towels, or the “Florentine” plastic statues of David, all of which will be made in China anyway. Learn about the small things that make a culture unique, and which matter for one of their cultural rituals - pasta in Italy, bread in France, goulash in Hungary.

I think this is the main reason I object to tourism shops: they sell the idea, the symbol, of a people, but not the reality that makes the people unique. This isn’t culture; it’s a pale shadow, a fiction that masks the parts of a culture that make it truly different and interesting. While these things may be tangentially symbolic of the history of a people, they are not actual artifacts OF that culture. They are not things that people necessarily use, or offer any particular insight into how people of a culture live.

And when you learn how people are both similar and different, it’s like going from black and white to colour.

6 a.m.

Anytime after 9 a.m., Palermo’s air smells like burning dinosaurs. Scooters, buses, cars, and even tuk-tuks fill the streets with clouds of unleaded and diesel fumes, and the oppressive heat, still air, and close-packed buildings trap the toxic chemicals in low-hanging clouds, making for a carcinogenic combination. At 6 a.m., though, the traffic is sparse and the air is clear, no matter what the night was like before. The notable exception to this atmospheric cleanliness is at the the southwest corner of Via Roma and Via Vittorio Emanuele. Unless there has been a purifying storm overnight, this single corner always smells violently of accumulated horse urine. For up to 14 hours every single day, horses and buggies wait here in the sun for tourists to pay exorbitant rates for a brief jaunt through the city streets. In a month, I only saw them being hired four times; they are simply too expensive for most people, and one can’t help but wonder if they are part of some elaborate money laundering operation. The horses have baskets to collect their faeces, but they are well-watered and urinate liberally on the street. The urine pools in the gutters and the liquid evaporates and, because there are so many rainless weeks, the residue builds into thick, concentrated, extremely sticky layers. It is mostly in the street but the horses often splatter the sidewalk and, if possible, it is best not to wear flip flops when walking here, lest they splash noxious emissions onto your calves and feet. Even without the danger of bringing this fetid souvenir home with you on your skin, it is worth crossing to the other side of the street just to avoid the predictable olfactory assault.

It’s gross.

So at daybreak you pass on the other side of the street, and go up Via Roma. Again, at this time, vehicular traffic is light, and pedestrian traffic is lighter. You’ll recognize Hammamet Narghilè in Piazza Due Palme, just up on the left side of the street, by the people. Their hours are extraordinary: 12 p.m. to 7 a.m. every day of the week, and at 6 a.m., just before they close, there are at least a few old men smoking at the tables outside, all with loud, simultaneous opinions, empty white coffee cups in front of them. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, there are also at least five or ten 20-somethings stretched out in the metal chairs after a long night out, laughing with just the right amount of hilarity that shows that they are still too young to know when to go home. Sometimes the youth are all boys; sometimes, boys and girls sit across the tables from each other, as if they are playing a gender-segregated game which, of course, they are. They may talk, they may flirt, but there’s never a pairing off, at least not in public. They defer that much to the sensibilities of their elders watching them from the next table.

Further up, on the right, Anytime Fitness is across from the fascist post office, but on the other side of the bar from last night. The post office is a huge building, but is also, like many post offices, very dull; the most that can be said for it is that it is large. It always reminded me of The Big Lebowski, because I could hear Walter grumbling, “say what you want about the tenets of Brutalism, dude, at least it’s an interesting aesthetic.” In a city full of intricate, elaborate details which often seems to celebrate the small and the precise, the post office is remarkably large and blank - as if Mussolini knew that his legacy would never be as interesting as the remnants of those he attempted to subjugate.

In the daytime, at the gym, things feel better. You’re in control here, you’re in a comfortable space, and the routine - the direction and focus - soothes you. You wonder, of course, if that is a good thing; should you accept that you are feeling aimless, or should you paper over it? Do you poke at the wound, or pretend it isn’t there?

The weight room downstairs is spotless because the cleaners, a friendly 38-year-oldish Sicilian couple, Marcello and Antonia, come seven days a week to clean it, year-round. Before cleaning, they have coffee and cigarettes at the caffe next door with other cleaners of businesses either starting or finishing their shifts. Upstairs, in the small cardio room, it is boiling - they don’t turn the air conditioning on until 7 a.m., and the heat has been rising all night, getting trapped in the tiny space so that, after five minutes of jogging, you’ll be pouring sweat onto the endless rubber loop, and for some reason there are no paper towels anywhere to wipe down equipment. Maybe that keeps the couple employed. If you choose the treadmill that faces the door, you will see the post office; if you choose the treadmills facing the alley, you’ll see an advertisement for some sort of heart medication and a severely chipped marble wall. It will take you a moment, but you’ll eventually realize that the chips are bullet holes from some long-forgotten street battle - perhaps between the Allies and the Fascists, but possibly from a mafia hit.

History is everywhere in Palermo.

7 a.m.

Cook onions down in butter, wilt spinach, and mix in six eggs, stirring constantly. Serve on toasted day-old bread with butter. For the duration of your trip, Daniel will eat this readily in the morning; you figure you will get him to eat spinach as long as you can, and be grateful until he pushes it away.

This is how you feel about cuddling him, too: you will do it as long as possible. Unlike spinach, which you expect he will return to in his later years, once the cuddle window is closed, you know it won’t open again. This might make you cry sometimes. You hope that he gives you grandchildren before you are too old to enjoy them.

10 a.m.

The botanical gardens are a lot of things. They are massive, stretching out further than almost any other gardens you have seen in Italy (save for the Boboli gardens in Florence). They are casually maintained, with weeds and overgrown grass and untrimmed hedges and dead, neglected bushes that make you wonder if the point is to show visitors that nature is actually unkempt and cruel. They are infested with mosquitos - swarms that rival Florida at its absolute worst. Unlike Florida, though, with its flocks of conservative snowbirds and 30 unsplit electoral college votes, the main danger here is the children. While some parents are attentive, many show a surprising willingness to indulge childish impulses and desires, and the most extreme examples can be found at the Botanical Gardens and at the Zoo. In both places, parents allow their children to assault the plants with sticks, throw things at the animals (food, rocks, plastic bottles), jump barriers, stomp through ponds, and generally treat nature as entirely expendable. The blame can’t even be laid at parental phone addiction and its resulting negligence - often, parents watch with a resigned air as their children attack other living things, only saying something when it is time to go. Even then, at any sign of resistance from the children, the parents will lean back again and say, “five more minutes, but that’s it, OK?” and the child will go back on the rampage for at least another six five-minute rounds.

The phrase you’ll find yourself saying often to the boys at the gardens is, “We don’t do that.”

12 p.m.

For lunch, walk along Via Maqueda toward the Opera House until you get to the two arancini restaurants on the left. They are, generally, so busy that they don’t need to employ people to hustle passers-by. I recommend trying both, repeatedly and extensively, to decide which one you prefer. For both, branding runs contrary to reality. Donnafrancalab brands itself as a “laboritorio,” so one would be forgiven for thinking that they are more creative with flavors; however, it is the more traditional of the two. KePalle says openly that they hew closely to some traditional elements, but, in reality, they are far more experimental. They are both excellent. From Donnafrancalab, get the Cacio e Pepe for a reminder of Rome, and from KePalle, get the Chicken Curry - there is something about having chicken curry in a ball of rice, which is then breaded and fried, that is both theoretically, culturally, and realistically satisfying.

Eat them in your apartment, and then nap in the air conditioning with Nick’s head on your chest, his little kid lips pursed, his breath smelling like meat sauce.

2 p.m.

The archaeological museum is a great way to keep kids occupied. There are three floors boasting a collection which reminds you of the one in Bologna, as both display specimens obtained when Italy still had colonies and Mussolini was showing Hitler how to get the trains running on time. No matter how much time and money you invest in their education, 99.999% of children, including your own, won’t know the difference between good and bad taxidermy. This invites the question: what, really, should kids get out of an education? What should they be learning? What is necessary, in either this day and age or over the next 30 years, for young people to thrive? Where does taxidermological discernment fall in the hierarchy of importance?

The fossils are, of course, all stone-grey and dusty; the stuffed animals are all old enough that they have turned brown (if they weren’t before). Children are more impressed by size, though, and allow their imaginations to run wild. Enjoy it. Encourage it. Don’t make derogatory comments about the complete inability of Italian museums to keep their collections modern, or how “this would definitely not be good enough for America” while thinking that Americans have absurdly high standards for museums, which maybe is a good thing, actually.

For a good souvenir, stop at the Antica Farmacia Cavour on the way back and buy eight tubes of discounted Pasta del Capitano toothpaste, bringing your total toothpaste tube count for the trip to north of 14.

4 p.m.

Famila for groceries. You’d been worried about grocery stores potentially being closed on the day of rest, so you might stock up now, but there is no need - it is open on Sundays (albeit with limited hours and fewer sausage options).

5 p.m.

Speaking of sausage:

SAUSAGE SOUP

Ingredients:

• Butter (life rule: it is always good to have at least a kilo of butter on hand)

• One pack of sausages - coiled or links, whatever you can get

• One large onion (any color)

• Two large carrots

• Three potatoes

• Two sticks of celery

• One can of diced tomatoes

• One bunch of cavolo nero

• Three cloves of garlic

• One litre of water

• Sea salt

• Three bottles of Birra Messina Cristalli di Sale

Equipment

• Cutting board

• Knife

• Large pot

• Spatula

• Ladle

Technique

1. Open a beer and sip throughout, repeating as necessary.

2. Put a pat of butter in the pot and melt it over medium heat. Add the sausages - either whole or, if preferred, slice them open and discard the skin, cooking the meat.

3. While they are cooking, dice the carrots. Or cut them into coins. Either works.

4. When the sausages are brown, remove the meat and leave the butter and fat in the pan. Return the pan to the heat and add the carrots and a pinch of salt.

5. While the carrots are cooking, dice the onion and celery. Actually, yeah, dice the carrots.

6. Add the onion and celery to the carrots as soon as they are cut up and stir, with 2-3 pinches of salt.

7. While they cook, peel and smash/dice the garlic.

8. When the onions are browned, add the garlic on top of the vegetables without stirring it in and immediately start dicing the potatoes.

9. Add the potatoes, and then stir everything in the pot around.

10. Cut the cavolo nero into small strips, and then add it to the pot, along with the tomatoes and the water. Bring to a simmer, then let it simmer, stirring every few minutes, until the potatoes are cooked - you should be able to pierce them with a knife and have them just slip off easily.

11. If you cooked the sausages whole, slice them up. When the potatoes are cooked, add the sausage back to the pot, stir, and serve.

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9 p.m.

Perhaps you’ve only finished two beers, maybe you’re onto the third. Regardless, you stay in tonight. At your age, with your life, there is nothing to be gained from going out.

Maybe.

Maybe you are, actually, just nervous. Last night may have shook you. If you are honest about it, you’ve been sliding into being shaken for a long time.

This time, sit, with your notebook. Nick and Daniel are asleep; Alice is working. Drink. Think. What did you envision for yourself when you were young? Is this it? Is this better? Where did things go wrong or right? Who are you, really? Is this the same or different than when you were 18, or 22, and just starting life? What matters to you? What do you do well, or poorly? What are your strengths? Which strengths are you proud of? Which strengths aren’t actually strengths at all? Why are you deceiving yourself? Are you deceiving yourself about more than this? Have you gone as far as you could have? Have you gone as far as you should have? What are your weaknesses? Which weaknesses do you admit to yourself, and which do you not, do you pretend away, do you bury? What rules do you have for yourself? Which rules do you pretend exist for everyone, and then judge other people when they break the rules? Why do you do that when it makes you feel so bad? What doors are closed to you now because you never tried to open them? What makes you look desperate, or pathetic? What do you believe about the world? Yourself? Where do your beliefs shatter against reality? Who do you compare yourself to when you are alone and brooding? When you do, who makes you feel worse about yourself? Who do you feel superior to? Does that make you feel better, or still worse? Is that healthy? Will it matter in ten, twenty, thirty years? At which points of your life do you wish something had gone the other way? Which decision points make you thank the fates that they worked that way, even if they hurt? What will you never regret? What do you take for granted? What were you able to do when you were young that you can’t do anymore? What do you miss about being 20, 25, 28, 33? What dreams did you have before that you don’t even remember now? Which friends have slipped away? Which friends have you pushed away? What still makes me ashamed when I think about it, makes me curse out loud if I’m alone, makes me say Our Father to beg for forgiveness from some deity for being so stupid? How much time do I have left now? What future am I still capable of building? And do I have that time, that ability…or has my time passed?

Actually, it’s better to do this sober, over a few hours or days. You’re too far gone tonight to start, so brust your teeth and get into bed. It’s another big day tomorrow.

If you’re an editor of the New York Times 36 Hours series, I suggest that you take notes.

8 a.m.

The ferry reaches the dock at 8 a.m., but, because they prioritize getting the cargo trucks and cars off of the ferry first, pedestrian passengers disembark last. Everyone will be kicked out of the cabins by the cleaning crew at eight, and you have to wait with hundreds of other passengers in the stairwells and vestibules for two hours, trying to keep your kids occupied, before you can get off the boat and walk to the nearest main road.

The buses in every other major city in Europe, if not the world, all have contactless credit card payment, but here, in Palermo, the bus system is a relic of the days when certain non-governmental organizations needed to create legitimate jobs for their associates. Of course, once created, a government job is hard to get rid of. Therefore, each bus has a driver and at least one conductor who checks that everyone on the bus has stamped paper tickets. Where can you get these paper tickets? Well, you can only occasionally get them on the busses. Seriously - some bus drivers will sell tickets, others won’t - it seems to depend on the driver, the day, and whether they’ve had coffee or not. Otherwise, the only dependable place you can only buy these tickets is from - of course - tobacco and newspaper stores.

You hear “tobacco” and “newspapers” and think: it’s great to see you again, 1985.

I am, of course, a fan of doing things the old way. I write my letters on laid paper with fountain pens, and polish my shoes once a week. I have a badger hair brush that delivers a delicious lather for my morning straight-razor shave. I read physical books. I hand-knead my bread, cook stocks from bones, and ferment my own vegetables (and occasionally alcohol, and of course it’s from wild yeast).

But these are all personal decisions. They speak, to me, of a slower pace of life that I want for myself. They are not inefficient and costly holdovers imposed on large modern populations from times when the Mafia shat terror throughout this Mediterranean isle. I’m certainly not aware of another city in Europe where public transportation is still dependent on buying paper tickets from a cigarette kiosk. Maybe some people can justify running this sort of public transportation system from an economic, public policy, or even a nostalgia perspective…and I’d love to hear from them.

Anyway, not having had a chance to visit a tobacco store before you got off of the ferry from the mainland, not eager to test your luck with bus drivers, and not seeing any taxis, you take an Uber to your AirBNB, which takes 52 minutes to get to you for a seven-minute journey.

11 a.m.

Check in and make sure you introduce yourself to Giuseppe, the doorman of your building and one of the most important people you will know during your stay. In Palermo, many buildings have dedicated doormen who monitor everyone who goes in and out, take care of the trash and recycling, clean the common areas and the sidewalk in front of the building, and keep an eye on what goes on in the street. Giuseppe…well, all in all, he is a great guy. He’s short, with curly greying hair, glasses, and a paunch that strains against his stained polo shirt. He speaks a staccato Italian that floats up and down in scales, as if his language is his instrument, and he especially loves greeting your children; you have the sense that, if he were not working, he would be on the ground with them, driving cars and trains around, or blasting rockets off in the street with a mixture of awe and mischief. He would be an amazing grandfather. His wife stops by every day at lunch; they smoke together in the street, she holding her cigarettes elegantly so they jut out from her knuckles at an angle, he cupping the lit end inside his hand and inhaling by seeming to kiss the backs of his fingers, as if this prevents the residents from judging his addiction. For you, he will mime the rules for trash and recycling, and explain that you can only bring the trash by at certain times for him to dispose of it; otherwise, it stinks up his office. There is literally no other way to dispose of trash - everyone in the building has to bring their trash to him, because he has the connections.

He’ll be here six days a week for your entire stay.

Drop your stuff and quickly child-proof the apartment. Then, go to Caffe Latino across the street for a coffee and a cornetto. They will certainly not be the best in the city, but they are the most immediately available. Because the street is mostly pedestrianized, the caffe puts tables on the street, under umbrellas; the only vehicles which will pass you are police cars and wooden horse-drawn carts, painted with vivid Sicilian colors, which rumble by a foot from your shoulder, close enough that your boys will be entranced by the theater of two of the things they love most in the world passing right next to them while they eat sugary pastries, and you will worry about them inhaling the fumes that accompany your espresso, and the country smell of horse waste that is so unexpected and omnipresent - and to which you will soon get used.1

12 p.m.

Napoleon should have said that a family travels on its stomachs.

The Lidl around the corner is the closest grocery store, has an impressive selection of fresh produce and meat, and has at least two security guards at the door at all times. As with grocery stores around the world, they also have trolleys that you can use; you just need to put a Euro coin in a slot to access them (you get the Euro back when you return the trolley). However, the security guards also seem to be involved in some sort of scam: a homeless man uses a special tool to de-activate the security locks on the trolleys, then passes them out to patrons, hoping for some sort of tip or donation when the trolleys are returned. In other words, he has turned a resource that is meant to be free into something that shoppers feel obliged to pay for. He actively and aggressively blocks patrons from getting trolleys for themselves, and the guards are always looking elsewhere when this happens - you have to assume that they get a cut of the money. When you refuse a trolley and opt for a basket instead, he will pursue you through the store and shout at you when you won’t take a trolley from him, and the security guards…well, they are not there for the safety of the customers.

The Famila Superstore, which is further away, is like a posh 1980s California grocery store - fresh produce, exposed neon lighting, open fridges, and long aisles of preserved food. There is nobody here to monitor the grocery carts, although there is an extraordinarily short man who seems to always be shopping, and who will start greeting you warmly after two or three days, because you will see him every time you shop. He is there so often, and fills his cart with such massive quantities of groceries, that you suspect that he is actually a private buyer for residents or restaurants - sort of a local grocery delivery service. He also loves small children - and, perhaps because of his size, he is non-threatening, and even cautious Daniel thinks he is nice. There is also a good pharmacy here. Baguettes are reasonably priced, as are cured meats and cheeses. You can buy pre-packaged egges in cartons located near the beer and wine, but the cheaper option is to package your own eggs from farm-fresh eggs that are delivered daily to a shelf that is, for some reason, near the sausages. Oh, and the fresh sausage selection changes daily, on a schedule you never understand.

Now: get snacks, dinner (ingredients below), tea, coffee, breakfast. Bring tote bags and a carabiner so you can carry everything like a pack animal back to your apartment.

2 p.m.

Palermo is set up on a grid system. Starting at the Quattro Canti, you could go:

• Southeast on Via Maqueda. This is a road that takes you toward mostly residential areas, and will be discussed in the future.

• Northeast on Via Vittorio Emanuele. This is a mainly pedestrian road that goes toward the water, with lots of restaurants and bars. It includes a small park, “Horse Piss Corner,” some epic trees, and the best playground in the city (that is open, anyway - there is a seemingly better one that is fenced off). This will be discussed in the future.

• Northwest on Via Maqueda. This takes you toward the Opera House where they filmed the end of The Godfather III, a film you’d of course rather forget, and is a mainly pedestrian road that is packed with restaurants and bars. This will be discussed in the future.

• Southwest on Via Vittorio Emanuele. This takes you toward the Cathedral, and will be discussed now.

In Naples, you bought beer from the mainland, and drank it with a German on the ferry, standing at the railing, looking out at the utter blackness. Now, you are out. Maps indicates that there is a Vino Sfuso shop within walking distance, so, with boys in tow, you begin your quest.

The main roads, and many of the side streets, have lots of stalls and stands and an absurd amount of bars and restaurants, with employees aggressively pitching passers-by on authentic Italian dishes. You’ll pass all of them and walk up to the Cathedral - a massive building with plants and fountains in front.

Admire it. In the roasting Sicilian sun.

After a few moments while the boys shriek over how cool the fountains are, it will be clear that you need some shade, so go inside the cathedral. It’s dark here, and cooler, and the boys will want to light candles. The thing is, Sicilian churches have almost all switched over to electric candles, which flicker on at random when you drop a coin in a slot; thus, you will not be able to light anything, which disappoints both of them immensely. They love fire.

Walk out the back entrance and turn left, in the shade of the massive walls, and then right. Bear left at the fork, and then close your eyes.

Well…don’t literally close your eyes. The problem is that there are two streets here that form the “Museo del mercato storico delle pulci” - rows of low-slung warehouses full of antique dealers. It is safest to go on weekdays, when the only ones who seem to be open are on the corners; on Saturdays, it is particularly dangerous to walk down them, because every door is flung open and they have set up tables on the sidewalks, on which sit statues, scrolls, and sabres silently screaming into the street like sirens, and here plugging your ears with wax will not save you. The only thing that saves you is that the sellers seem to know the true value of their treasures, and have priced them accordingly. This is a market where you can get treasures, but not bargains. It is the third-most tempting place you will go in Palermo. The others:

1. The informal 6 a.m. market on the unused streets around Via Giovanni Grasso;

2. The formal Sunday Mercato Antico;

4. Mondo Cuoio leather shop;

5. I Papiri paper shop.

If you make it through the market unburdened by some needful thing, make a right, take the second left, then the second right to get to Lucchese Vini, the closest official vino sfuso shop. The man is absurdly welcoming and friendly, particularly to the boys, who get lollipops. He’ll fill your bottles, and it’s worth the walk for his wine. What makes it an exceptional trip is that he will then upsell you on a bottle of the most delicious neon-green olive oil you have ever tasted - pressed a few days ago, delivered this morning, and, at €12 a litre, an absolute bargain. It’s in a clear plastic bottle, which makes you wary, but you realize that they don’t care about protecting it from the sun or storing it in glass because they know it won’t last more than a week or two; it’s that good. Make sure you shake his hand; it’s an investment in a relationship that, here, seems to require the actual touching, the human contact.

Actually, that’s something missing in your life. At home, you can go a day without shaking hands or hugging, even when you see old friends. Here, you’ll touch complete strangers four or five times within a minute of meeting them - the hands, arms, shoulders.

On exiting, walk through the vegetable stand Frutta&Verdura da Ignazio, which is like a massive cornucopia spilling out into the street. Like all of Italy, they have extremely fresh fruit and vegetables, at absolute bargains. If the boys are hungry, Sfizi e Delizie is an excellent little bakery, but their ordering system is hectic - they are absurdly busy all the time, so don’t get flustered when they bark at you across the counter.

On the way back, take a circuitous route. No matter how you get back, at some point you will pass a man with a table in an alleyway; he will be an olive seller. Get a kilo of herb-cured olives - you and Nick will eat them all in a week.

4 p.m.

Home to cook. The emphasis now is on calories and vegetables, especially for Nick, who…well, loves meat and carbs.

Snack

Pit some of the olives. Serve to Nick.

Dinner

Ingredients

• 500g dried pasta (any kind. In Italy, of course, every pasta you get will be better than the best pasta you can buy at home)

• One of the big fresh spiral sausages that they have intermittently at Famila, packaged in good old styrofoam. If they don’t have the spirals, get a pack of the links, or a pack of pancetta from the fridges on the back wall near the yogurt

• One onion (diced)

• Two cans of diced tomatoes (I came to prefer Cirio, but any will do)

• 5-6 cloves of extraordinarily pungent garlic (smashed)

• One carrot (dirt scrubbed off, diced)

• One zucchini (diced)

• Butter (the olive oil from Lucchese Vini is too good to use for cooking)

• Water

• Sea salt (Sicilian, of course)

• Basil (buy a plant, and use it for the rest of your trip)

Tools

• Knife

• Cutting board

• Large saute pan for sauce

• Plate

• Large pot for pasta

• Wooden spatula

• Strainer/collander

• Spoon

• Electric kettle

Steps

1. Start melting the butter in the saute pan on medium-high.

2. Take the sausage and slit it open, lengthwise. Discard the thin prophylactic casing, then add the meat to the melting butter. Break it up with a wooden spatula and sizzle it until it is brown and makes the boys dance and giggle in the kitchen.

3. Remove the meat from the pan and put on a plate, but leave as much fat and butter in the pan as possible. Put it on the high counter so Nick can’t pinch a piece.

4. Fry the carrot in the fat/butter and add a sprinkle of salt. Cook the carrot pieces until they are no longer rawhard but firm, like a rubber dog chew. Add the diced onion and cook until the pieces are no longer white but are a bit translucent. Add the zucchini and a pinch of salt and cook it until the onion and zucchini are browned. Add the garlic and cook for 30 more seconds.2

5. Lower the heat and add the diced tomatoes and a few basil leaves. Let the mix simmer.

6. Boil two liters of water in the electric kettle and then pour it into the large pot, with the stove on high. Add some salt and bring it back to a boil. When I was growing up, everyone used to say that you added salt to the water so that the boiling temperature was higher and the pasta cooked faster, but I now realize that that is absolute hogwash: you add salt to the water so that the pasta absorbs salt as it cooks so it tastes better. Try it sometime - cook the same pasta two ways, some with salted water and some with unsalted water, and taste them - the salted one is waaaaaaaay better. Maybe in the 1980s, people were more conscious of energy prices, and didn’t want to add salt to their food, so they had to be lied to. Anyways, add the pasta, and cook according to the instructions, but reduce the time by one minute (for example, if it calls for you to cook the pasta for eight minutes, actually cook it for seven).

7. Drain the pasta, then add it to the sauce and simmer it for 2-3 minutes, stirring until it is well-mixed.

8. Turn the stove off and serve to adults immediately, or children after about 20 minutes.

9 p.m.

With the boys asleep, and Alice working, go out again into the streets. This is important. Wandering is important. The New York Times 36-hours articles, and guide book itineraries, prescribe specific routes between specific places, and ignore the importance of discovering things on your own, by accident. Of course they do - it would be a bad business model to say, “Get there and figure it out on your own; you don’t really need us to tell you what’s worth doing and what isn’t.” According to them, you’re supposed to go to this caffe, then this museum, then this shop, then this restaurant. You wonder how many places see their daily customers rise and fall according to these prescribed timelines.

For you, for now, just wander.

Things are slower when it’s just you, on your own, hands in your pockets, shoulders hunched. With the kids, you’re always trying to get somewhere, always looking out for them, for other people, protecting and defending. Your mind is focused: stop them from running into the street, or getting in the way of the guys carrying bags of concrete, or maybe you watch the guy muttering to himself in the corner, just to make sure he doesn’t attack. Now, you can slink along in the shadows with your self. You listen to the dueling opera singers at the Quattro Canti as you turn right on Via Maqueda. You see groups laughing on the streets and wonder what the joke was. You smile at the tired children stopping to watch the dancing puppets, and you wonder what entrances them. You pass people drinking at tables while they stare at their phones and wonder what on TikTok is so much more interesting than the streetscape and their partner. Homeless people, surrounded by their worldly possessions, are camped out in the middle of the sidewalk, and the pedestrians flow around them as if they were immovable walls to be ignored. The heat is still rising off of the street, but now it doesn’t feel like an inexhaustible resource, always being replenished from above; with every moment, some of it disappears into the sky and makes earth a bit more bearable. Somewhere close, garlic is meeting oil; a server tangoes out into the street laden with dishes, using gravity and centrifugal force to keep everything in place, since cutting through the passing crowds is easier than navigating the close-packed tables.

And as you wander, you have time to wonder: What are you doing?

Earlier in the trip, you’d read “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide.” You are 44, but you hadn’t ever thought that you were middle-aged; that was what your parents were when you were growing up. Now, they are old, and you are still younger. You’d seen articles about how 50 is the new 30, or 65 is the new 25, and thought: keep dreaming. You thought: what was it that made older people want to be young, like me? Didn’t they remember how much it sucked? Perhaps being older sucked even more, though. Perhaps it sucked less and, at 55, they felt as confident as they thought they should have felt at 20, just in a more dilapidated body. You used to think that we are all immortal until proven otherwise and, when that proof comes, we won’t know. But youth has an important difference: we are all young until proven otherwise, but when we aren’t, we know it. That difference makes all the difference. Unlike death, as we age, we are still here to see things change, and change is hard.

And until now, you’d always felt young, and never felt as if anything could dent that.

Then you got dented.

But you don’t know what hit you - you just feel like you got hit. The doctor says that you are absurdly healthy. You have a face that still gets carded for alcohol. Extraordinary wife. Two beautiful, brilliant, well-behaved kids. Property. Peace. Everything to be happy about. And that’s why you picked up the Midlife book - because something was wrong, if not externally then internally. You don’t know if this unknown problem was that something in your life was simply awry or was actually missing. You just know that there was a deep, dark space in your chest that seemed only to be growing, a hole that couldn’t be filled. You started envying the people who could genuflect in church; they had an imaginary friend to talk to about all this. You envied the people who could be happy for Instagram; they could honestly smile for photos to share with the world. You had a hole, and nobody, nobody who could understand, who could sympathize. Unlike you, even your peers who seemed to be struggling could find bright sides and silver linings.

The Midlife book helped. A bit. But it couldn’t answer the question: what is your personal void, this lack, this emptiness? That was the hardest part: you don’t even know. You can’t identify it, other than to say that there’s a complete lack of lack in your life.

And man, back when you were 23, the world was yours. You moved from state to state without a second thought, picked up jobs as they became available, interned just to explore. You had tons of friends, all working to figure out their piece of and place in the world. Everyone was full of hope, of optimism, of opportunity, of potential. You just needed a break, and a bit of experience, and you’d be on your way, grinding out until those big victories were yours. It was as if you were staring down a hall lined with a thousand doorways of all different sizes, shapes and colors, and, by finding just the right set of keys or a book filled with the passwords to life itself, all of the doors would be open, and you could pick the ones to walk through with complete freedom and confidence.

Today, you have gone half-way down that hallway, and, looking back, you can see that only a few of the doors have been opened, and, no matter which direction you look, many of them don’t even have doorknobs on them. You look at them and realize they will never open, no matter how hard you knock - they are closed, at least to you, forever.

When you get to the end of the pedestrian strip, the opera house will stand solemnly to the left, just past a small piazza. There’s a cigarette and newspaper stand in front, lit up like a birthday cake every night, and a string of horse-drawn carriages, waiting in hope for drunk, wealthy passengers to pay their extortionate fares. Turn right on Via Cavour and then make another right on Via Valenti, left on Salvatore Spinuzza, right on Vicolo Natale Cirino, left on Via Bara All’Olivella, right on Via Giuseppe Patania, then left at the split onto Via Monteleone to get to Le Cupolette, a beer bar behind the fascist post office. There are no seats inside; you buy your beer and then cross the street to a group of long tables with benches and chairs, unlit, between planters filled with oleander. Young people drink microbrews and seem to be in that classic quandary of youth when they are simultaneously in a violent confrontation with the world and sullen at its indifference to their genius. This isn’t a place for clubbers and party people who jump to loud beats without care for the past or the future; this is a place for artists and musicians and poets, people who feel all too keenly the pains of today. You look at them and think: they probably read paper books. They probably speak other languages, both for work and for fun. They are probably interested in the world, and in exploring it. They are, right now, still trying to figure out their place here, figure out who they are. The only lights are the reflected glow of the security spotlights shining on the post office; there are no candles on the tables, so it is dark, and your eyes can wander over their faces with abandon. As you sip your beer, you look at them and see their loneliness, their uncertainty, and above all the pain of being young. Do you remember that? Now you suddenly do: you remember feeling like a fish out of water throughout your 20s, and even your 30s; unsure of yourself, not confident in anything, even the things that people said you were brilliant at. Working extraordinarily frustrating entry-level jobs and unpaid internships. Moving to new cities where you didn’t know anyone and meeting people who had no idea who you were or where you were going, the drums of destiny. Now, you realize: you didn’t know either. And the loneliness! Remember that time that you had a birthday in Portland, maybe your twenty-second, when you were supposed to be surrounded by crowds of other young friends, but all of your roommates had made other plans and you didn’t know anyone so you spent it alone? You went to the sushi restaurant that always advertised that people celebrating their birthday could eat for free, and you ate a lot by yourself, and then when the waitress came her face fell when you showed her your ID, and it was only years later that you realized that the birthday deal was intended for big parties so they would bring lots of customers in - not for people eating on their own? Remember that time when your friend wanted a wingman and everyone else wanted to go to bed, so you went with him to the afterparty in Little Italy in that singer’s loft, and the woman pulled you aside and told you to leave because it was obvious that you didn’t want to be there and that that wasn’t your scene, and your face burned in shame because she was right and you were denying your own nature? Remember the time that…

Beer doesn’t help any of you.

The fascist post office next door is monstrous, in the best and worst ways. It towers over the street with an unadorned white facade that reminds you of the back side of a Paramount Studios building you once drove past and, with Los Angeles on your mind, and the oleander blocking a clear view of the full parking lots all around you, it feels a lot like a back-alley bar patio anywhere in Southern California. You think: so many of the people here would have loved to be drinking in LA, and so many people in LA would love to be drinking beer in Sicily, and you’re the only one who knows how similar they are.

So many people everywhere want to be someone else.

Finish your beer, alone at your unlighted table, then walk home, through the back alleys, avoiding the laughing crowds. Wonder if wandering was really the smartest move.

11:30 p.m.

Sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.

What he means is: what are we doing today? I don’t know why he asks it this way. Maybe he knows we love how creative his toddler language is. But there’s a very easy way to answer this question: let’s look at the Post-Its.

Imagine a short trip to a different city - say, a weekend in Berlin. You go with three other people. It’s clear that you only have 40 hours (Friday afternoon to Sunday morning) to experience the city; thus, you have to prioritize the “fuck yeah!” activities (Vabali Spa, kebab, Frau Tonis, running the Berlin Marathon) and completely ignore everything else. Maybe each person chooses one or two things to do; everyone understands that compromises that must be made. A schedule can be drawn up, and then you just…go, and do what it takes to get through your priorities. The time constraints actually facilitate planning; there’s pressure, and you have to accept that you can’t do everything.

Now imagine a month in Palermo with the same three people. You have thirty days to fill. THIRTY. Maybe you have a total of 100 possible activities that you have come up with. Perhaps 15 things are “fuck yeah” activities (I Segreti del Chiostro, Mondello Bay, Dolce capo, the informal 6 a.m. street market), and 20 are “I want to do this, but if there isn’t time, I get it” (Botanical Gardens, a drink at the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, the formal Sunday flea market). The remaining 65 are things that might be interesting but aren’t critical.

So how do you plan what to do?

Option one: plan the entire trip in one session (which is a terrible idea)

You could try to plan the entire month in a single session, then just work through that plan. This is the waterfall approach advocated by travel agents or Instagram tourists, and it is great if you only have a day or two in a place before moving on. However, on a longer trip, this doesn’t allow for random changes (like a freak snowstorm in July), or changing priorities based on new information (perhaps you meet someone who owns a winery, and invites you to stay for a weekend; would you give up a couple of day trips for it?). If one thing is derailed - a hot air balloon ride, a trip to the fascist post office, etc. - it could force a re-juggling of the remainder. Then you’re planning again, and balancing priorities and personalities against the time available.

Option two: only plan one day in advance (which is a terrible idea)

You might plan your trip day-by-day. This means reviewing the list every day, deciding what to do, negotiating, and horse-trading (“We could do your thing today, and two of my things later this week?”) This…well, imagine negotiating the same thing 30 times. It will end up taking a lot of time, and it will be frustrating, and you’ll never really know what you are doing or what the real priority is. When activities require buying tickets in advance, you might plan to go to the opera house the next day and then find that you needed to get tickets a week ago; what do you do then? Plus, lists can get really annoying: if they are on paper, for example, it is hard to rearrange the priorities when things change. For example, say you go to a museum today, planning on going to the botanical gardens later in the week. If a rainstorm hits, you may have to keep pushing it back…and arranging a paper list to change priorities is going to make you want to break bricks with your nose, especially if you want to do 100 things. Even an electronic list or a shared calendar can become absurdly cluttered and unwieldy.

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So I’d argue that planning the whole thing in day-by-day detail is a bad idea; going by the seat of your pants is also not optimal. Instead, I propose using one of the great technological innovations of the twentieth century to help you have the best trip possible:

Option Three: use Post-It Notes, WHICH ARE AMAZING.

This idea comes from Scrum,1 and it has saved us a thousand headaches, avoid a million “I WANT ICE CREAM” meltdowns, and absolutely revolutionized our trip planning. Here’s how it works:

1. First, the second-most fun part: dreaming up everything you might want to do. We might read books (for Budapest, for example, I read Victor Sebestyen’s Budapest and added locations that he mentions), Google Maps, travel articles, or recommendations from friends (thanks, Timea and Victor!). We put each activity on its own Post-It note - for example, “Parliament building,” or “Zoo,” or “Thermal baths.” We use three colors: one for Alice-only things, one for Andrew-only things, one for things with the kids. This might be spread out over a few weeks or months ahead of the trip, and it is extraordinarily fun.

2. When we arrive, we pick a wall of our kitchen and put seven Post-Its up with the days of the week in a vertical column, Monday to Sunday. (Two minutes, tops.)

3. We put all of the activity Post-Its on a different wall in a complete jumble. This might take a few minutes.

4. We then go through them and pick out anything that is a “fuck yeah” activity. We put these in a special area of the wall so we clearly know what our absolute priorities are. This should take no more than three minutes, tops. (A simple guide to sorting: if you can’t look at something and say “fuck yeah” to it, it isn’t a “fuck yeah” activity.)

5. Everything else is left on the wall in a group; these are second-tier activities.

6. Take the “fuck yeah” activities and put down time estimates on them: either a half-day or full-day. (With two kids, activities are rarely less than a half-day, unless they are pastry bakeries, hot chocolate cafes, ice cream shops, or other consumable activities that can be done in 30 minutes.) You might also group things that are close to each other so that you spend less time travelling.

7. Go back to the list of the days of the week. Add admin or health stuff that you want to do on particular days (early morning gym sessions, remote work calls, food shopping, Jiu-Jitsu, etc.). This should take a few minutes, and will give you a rough feel of available time.

8. PLAN. Take the priorities - say, 12 things in a week - and put them in on days of the week when you can do them. If 12 is too much to do in a week, put a few back in the Priority area; if you think you can do more, get a few more Post-Its from the pile.

9. Shuffle them around based on other factors like opening hours, weather forecasts, ticket availability, etc. Perhaps you have a Post-It for the parliament building on Monday, but you need tickets, and you find out that you can’t get them until Wednesday next week; buy the tickets, move the Parliament Post-It back to the “priority” group, write “WEDNESDAY” on it with opening hours, and put something else up for Monday. Then, the next week, when you plan, you already have something planned for Wednesday. If rain is forecast for Tuesday, switch your beach day for a museum trip. Etc.

10. Admire your creation and GET EXCITED! You now have a week of your top-priority activities, with enough time to do them; you’ll plan again on Sunday, bringing in priorities and, probably, some second-tier activities. Doing these things is absolutely the best use of your time this week. Be proud.

11. Have fun and DO IT ALL.

12. Repeat this process once a week. If you need to switch things around for whatever reason mid-week, all you need to do is move the Post-Its.2

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Example:

• Monday may have a pink Post-It for Andrew’s 7 a.m. Jiu-Jitsu class; a blue Post-It for Alice working for three hours alone; a yellow Post-It for Andrew going to the Park with the kids; and a yellow Post-It for a trip to a museum as a family.

• Tuesday: one yellow Post-It for the thermal baths as a family.

• Maybe we wanted to go to the model train museum on Wednesday, but it turns out that tickets aren’t available until the following Tuesday; we simply buy the tickets, then move the Post-Its around and do the next thing on the priority list. Wednesday, now, is a chance to go to the Star Wars museum, then get special cakes for lunch at the shop around the corner, then take a river boat cruise in the afternoon. We write “TUESDAY” on the Model Train Museum Post-It, and put it back in the pile.

• Etc.

You repeat the planning every week. As your priorities list empties, you can go to the second-tier; pick the ones that are top, and just add them to your schedule. As opportunities open up - an invite to the family villa of the last living Hapsburgs, the chance to drink wine with sanitation workers at 7 a.m., etc. - you can add them in.

Yes, this takes a small amount of time…but it should be about as much, or even less, than you would spend planning anyway. Plus, seeing all of the possible activities, prioritizing the important ones, and then doing them is a really wonderful way to be clear about what you will be doing; it also helps ease your mind if you are the kind of person who really wants to do eight things, and you want to do them now, today, maybe even yesterday. Knowing they are more-or-less scheduled means you can focus on what you are doing this morning, or tonight, and that you won’t miss out on that other thing you really want to do.

Post-Its have three other amazing advantages.

1. Say it’s Thursday in Palermo, and you have five things to do, including a trip to the Mafia Museum (Alice alone), getting cannoli from the convent (family), stopping by the cathedral (family), buying vegetables and rice for dinner (Andrew alone), and then taking photos in the evening (Andrew alone). Instead of trying to remember everything you have to do, or writing it down in a schedule, just pull the Post-Its off the wall, arrange them in order, and put them on your pocket notebook or fold them and put them in your wallet. If you forget what your next activity is, just pull them out, look, and go.

2. Say the weather changes, you learn about a festival that you want to go to (but is not in any book or listed on Maps), or a child gets sick. You can just replan by moving Post-Its around. It is extraordinarily easy to just pull them off the wall and then put up new ones. You don’t lose sight of your priorities, so you won’t feel like things are being forgotten or unjustly deferred.

3. The final absolutely outstanding benefit: when you’re done with any activity, put its Post-It in an area of the wall reserved for things that are “Done.” If you want, add the date and any memories onto the note - for example, on an art museum Post-It, write that you saw a Degas that you really liked, or that Daniel saw David and then copied his pose. At the end of the trip, pull these down and make a pile of them. When you get home, you’ll have a list of days, moments, and experiences to process and remember.

So Nick asks, “Where are we going this year?” I take him to the kitchen and say, “First to the playground, then the music museum to bang on the drums, and then to Margaret’s Island to ride on bikes.” He looks at me like I’m the greatest dad in the world and asks if he can have ice cream this year. I point to the Post-It for our ice cream day and tell him, “Yes, tomorrow.” We hug. Life is good.

Bring Post-It Notes on your trip. You won’t regret it.

If Sorrento is the worst place in Italy because it is so sanitized and planned and caters so hard to wealthy tourists at the expense of native Italians, Naples should, by this logic, be the best place, perhaps in the world. In Sorrento, you see freshly-painted buildings on clean cobblestone streets; in Naples, everything is tinged with sepia, as if decades of grime and pollution have infiltrated every visible surface. In Sorrento, men comb the streets every morning at 6 a.m., picking up beer bottles and candy wrappers and cigarette butts before they might spoil an early-morning influencer’s Instagram shot; in Naples, trash bags pile up next to buildings, and they have been sitting on the ground so long that the plastic disintegrates. In Sorrento, birds flit about between the fragrant orange trees that shade every street, and gulls bob on the gently rolling waves; in Naples, brown rats scurry in and out of the sewers in broad daylight, and there are precious few trees for birds to nest in. In Sorrento, the air is perfumed with exhaust fumes, cigarette smoke, and trash fires; in Naples, there aren’t as many trash fires.

You get the bus to the port and then Alice and the boys wait at the ferry terminal while you go into Naples for food. The port at Naples should be considered one of the great wonders of Italy. It is easily as impressive as David and The Last Supper, is arguably as beautiful, and is far more practically important. Walking from the ferry terminal to the city requires crossing what feels like an twenty-highway road with an infrequent and unpredictable light; dozens of people line up to rush across at what seems to be five-minute intervals, and the crossing lights are so dim that it is sometimes difficult to see when it is green and when it is red. But cross you eventually can, and then you walk past grimy stone buildings that look like they may have been important once, then left on Via Mezzocannone to get to the grocery store.

It is small, and every possible space is packed with things to sell, and the aisles are wide enough for just one person. One can easily see why Neapolitans who moved to New York would have been so comfortable. Even in a cheap grocery store on a dingy street, though, the quality of the food is excellent - you can smell the earth on the potatoes, and the sweetness of the cut melon, and the lemons that shine with the light of a thousand happy suns. Now you buy yogurt, fresh fruit, some cured meats, cheese, and four bottles of beer that you’ve never heard of, then walk out, not realizing that it will be the last time you shop for food on the mainland. Then, around the corner, you stop at a caffe that you saw on the walk up to grab four sandwiches, reasoning that they will last until at least tomorrow, and back to the dock.

The ferry terminal is now occupied by a Polish Catholic tour group. They all move slowly, with the inertia that comes after a week of having everything organized for you so that nobody has to think. They have occupied every available seat, not so much sitting as spreading out; you imagine that if you pricked one with a pin, he would leak out all over the floor, leaving behind a thin, empty, human-colored sausage casing with a dirty short-sleeved shirt and a gold cross. You take the boys outside to see the boats, and suddenly you all feel small, because the Naples port is enormous. Well, relatively, the port isn’t actually enormous; it’s the tenth-largest in Italy, and nowhere near the largest in Europe. But because you are standing on gigantic concrete walkways next to ships that look like skyscrapers that have fallen over, and the tiny boys are overjoyed to see the towering cranes and the house-sized anchors and the ropes as thick as telephone poles connecting ships to land, and a seemingly limitless stream of cargo and tanker trucks driving onto ferries and parking one after another in cavernous holds, everything seems unfathomably massive, and you suddenly feel like a very small part of something very, very large. Italian men in high-vis vests shout oaths at each other, engines chop at the air, a ship tests its foghorn, and the summer heat and smell of oil permeate everything in the bright, bright sun.

The trucks keep rolling through the fenced gates, and you watch their containers being loaded onto ships, speculating about what is in them. Dinosaur bones? Ten thousand Christmas sweaters? A million bottles of Scottish water? Then, the fuzzy announcement blares over the loudspeaker in almost-English that the ferry is loading, and you get in line to board. You are shown to your cabin, and the boys fall in love with the bunk beds, and the portholes, and the extraordinarily small bathroom. You sit on the bunks and eat, then go to the deck to watch the mainland drift away.

Evening from the deck of a boat in the Bay of Naples is exactly what you think it might be. There’s a warm breeze blowing, but there’s also a chill in the air that makes Daniel, unwilling to go to sleep just yet, curl up in your lap to stay warm. As the wind shifts, the rotting sea smell is replaced with the smell of the diesel. Around the bay, the city rises up on hills; the street lights twinkle on, and then lights from kitchen windows start appearing, shimmering as the heat melts up, up and away. You look across the water, the small wave tips leaping up into the atmosphere and then plunging down just as dramatically, and the screaming gulls, soaring almost vertically into the air and then crashing down into the wake of the passing boats to fight over fish, and there is a figurative darkness in the air, a menace, a hint of bad things to come. It is like the opposite of an evening in Los Angeles when you were 21.

As soon as the moorings are cast off, it suddenly feels as if you are a hundred miles away from the shore, a hundred years from a past life, as if you were literally and figuratively adrift.

You’d started talking to a German guy in the line at the terminal, and you gave him your card; he messaged and, after the boys were asleep, you meet up for a couple of beers. The sun had set, and Naples had condensed into a single point of light; now, only a few gulls are following the boat, looking for screw-stunned fish. You drink the beers you’d bought in the shop, now warm from the ineffective refrigerator in your cabin and, when he seemed reluctant to pay for more, you buy another round just to have an excuse to stay on the deck. The boat is nearly full, but the mood of the other passengers is subdued, almost melancholy. A few have gathered around the bar and cafe for quiet conversations, but there is no jollity, no frivolity, no raucous laughter. The air on the water is cold, and you churn towards blackness.

The curtains over the portholes are worthless, so, at 5 a.m., you and Daniel are both wide awake, staring into a red Mediterranean sun beating its way into the cabin. You get down from the top bunk and dress quietly, then sneak out the door. A few others are up, too, and you get a coffee and some cornettos from the cafe. You look around; almost everyone up is a middle-aged man, greying, a bit portly, conservatively dressed, Italian. The atmosphere is familiar, almost fraternal; if EU regulations hadn’t forbade it, they would have been smoking cigarillos around the bar, and if it hadn’t been so early and they didn’t have trucks waiting downstairs that they needed to drive, they may have been drinking brandy and playing cards or dominoes. It was an atmosphere you are inherently comfortable in. One of the men at the next table sees you and smiles, and then tries to get Daniel’s attention; he says some Latinate words, and you excuse yourself and apologize for being barbarians who don’t speak Italian. Three of the men laugh, and the man puts his hand on your shoulder and explains that they are Sicilians, and it was the barbarians who spoke Italian. Daniel watches. The man has leaned forward and you can smell the stale coffee and tobacco on his breath, and he keeps his hand on your shoulder long enough to establish a comfort, a familiarity, a closeness, that you rarely feel with people you don’t know but always comes through the touching. He asks how old Daniel is, and you say five, and he says he has a grandson who is five, and you lean even closer and agree that it is a wonderful age, a beautiful age. In Palermo? No, they live in Milan. Opportunity, it is the economy. Is it difficult? Yes, but this is life. We all do the same things, don’t we? Yes, always we disappoint our parents, and you both laugh. You watch Daniel, still watching you, and you hope that one day he will be able to be comfortable so close to a complete stranger.

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When Daniel finishes his cornetto, you suck at the last drop of your espresso and then get up. You bow to the men and shake all of their hands, and one of them makes a joke and everyone laughs and ciaos. Alice and Nick are up now, and you all go to the deck. Around the boat is tranquil water, wine-dark, still enough to act as a perfect mirror for the scattered clouds and light-blue sky stretching out to infinity. There is no breeze; without an engine, you would have been becalmed. The wake churns behind, but, this far out, no gulls come to search its folds for fish.

It gets boring after a while. The hum of the engines. The air, moving past at just the same speed. The water, just reflecting. The grey smoke rising up, a reminder of how badly people seem to mess everything up. Maybe that was the real meaning behind the Garden of Eden: we humans can’t be trusted with anything. Here, on this beautiful stretch of extraordinary water, we still find a way to leave behind something destructive. Maybe you should have taken the train after all.

Then, a disturbance on the horizon catches someone’s eye, and leads to an involuntary twitch of her head; that twitch is picked up by another, and then three others, and everyone’s necks crane forward, all eyes looking at the same thing. Land! You rush toward the bow and look; there it is, Sicily, a black line rising just above the horizon. The engine seems to whine at a slightly higher pitch; the bow seems to cut through the water with more urgency, and then to get lower, the momentum carrying you toward the port.

And then you are in Palermo.

?

I thought about that when we were walking through Pompei, because it is only a couple thousand years old. If you or I travelled had been born in the shadow of Vesuvius in 50 A.D., we would be completely indistinguishable from the people who died in 79 A.D. We would have had the same desires as everyone else for irrationally overpriced things in the market (the more foreign the better), we would have smeared our faces with toxic chemicals in order to appear more attractive, we would have been distracted by circuses even if we knew it meant we wouldn’t have bread, and we would have choked on the toxic gasses that we never saw coming.

The magic of the site of Pompei is that the city is so well preserved, and one can see how similar the city is to cities today. If you go to Rome, for example, you only get glimpses of its former glory; Pompei is different. Preserved under tons of ash, visitors can now see the town almost as it would have existed when it was destroyed: the long cobblestone streets, the luxurious frescoes decorating sumptuous villas, the giant temples and courts, the statues of the Gods, the sewers, the slave quarters, the brothels. Like a Hemingway paragraph, there is just enough information in these stones to let us use our imaginations to fill in the beautiful gaps; we can guess what life was more or less like in Roman times because we can clearly see the physical infrastructure that supported Roman lives. We can walk down straight, centrally-planned streets, fill our bottles from regularly-spaced water fountains (with new plumbing, of course), hop over the gutters, tap the lead pipes, step through doorways into houses and shops, and stand in the changing rooms of the bathhouses, and any of us could have been there, in the path of an unforgiving pyroclastic flow, choking on our own breath, then held in place for centuries by the delicate, weightless ash.

The most identifiable buildings in the city are the restaurants. In the vast majority of ruins, there is little to indicate what they were used for; all that exist now are walls, with rare decorations like paintings or mosaics, but it’s hard to discern if these buildings were houses, grain stores, artisan clothes shops or brothels. You could tell where the restaurants were because of the cooking stations: often one or two bowl-shaped heating spaces in a counter, with spaces underneath for fire, where food was cooked. These were a core part of the infrastructure of the city, and they are everywhere.

Walking into one of these restaurants, you might be tempted to wonder what it would have been like to be a customer lining up at a place like…let’s call it Caesar’s. The customers were normal Pompeians, of course, normal Roman citizens. They were lawyers and doctors, soldiers, parents, administrators, police officers, politicians, businessmen, neighbors, friends. They worried about laws and regulations, death and disease, wars, the safety of their children, inefficient government, crime waves, power, money, status. They thought about what to wear when they weren’t eating lunch alone, how to talk to anyone about anything, how to win friends and influence people, whether their habits (atomic or not) were making them more effective, whether thinking could help them grow rich, how they could stop worrying and start living. They thought carefully about their childrens’ friends, their parents’ health, mental illness, heartbreak, and the smart ones thought about the damage that insane, corrupt leaders obsessed with gold and power and image could do to the nation and their way of life.

And they probably worried at least a little bit about nature, although they knew that it was completely out of their control.

They didn’t know that Vesuvius was a volcano until it erupted. Maybe they had earthquakes, or droughts, or floods. Did they believe that these were the actions of the Gods, calling down wrath upon mortals who had displeased them? I am always skeptical; surely nobody could be so stupid as to believe that a God would strike someone down with lightning for not burning incense or pouring out wine at the right time or in the right manner? But who knows - they didn’t have the advantages of science back then, or data. Plus, human beings have an overwhelming need to have faith; Pompeiians may have been firmly convinced of all sorts of things that we think are crazy just because they were predisposed to believe in things that don’t make sense. Of course, how much has changed! We have advantages that they didn’t: we have independent governmental organizations that monitor weather and tectonic plate movement, and we track tropical storms and cold fronts; we have evidence for the efficacy of vaccines, and national health organizations dedicated to curing and preventing diseases. We have all of the advantages of data and carefully-monitored, peer-reviewed experiments, and we should be able to trust in these great collective minds to give us good information; we shouldn’t be resorting to prayer, or offerings to invisible supreme beings, to help us. Things have improved since then. The residents of Pompei didn’t have our advantages; they were not stupid, not intentionally ignorant, but still blind and benighted. They couldn’t prepare for calamities to come; perhaps they could only throw up their hands and then bow to the spirits and pray for the best.

And to look up at Vesuvius from the streets of Pompei is humbling. It’s a reminder that nature, human or otherwise, is unsentimental and unforgiving. Unfortunately, of course, unintentional blindness can lead to the same results as willfully ignoring reality, despite all the warning signs.

So, walking those streets, one has to think that perhaps the smart ones focused on what they could control, what was in their circle of influence, while they could. Perhaps some slaves worked hard to save up money to buy their own freedom, and then the freedom of their spouses and children; perhaps most, seeing the enormous obstacles to freedom, just gave up. Perhaps the fake doctors worked on stockpiling herbs and potions to fight serious illness. Maybe some parents worked on making sure that their kids had the best tutors and nannies possible so that, regardless of what happened, they could carry the best education possible wherever they went, while others just put tablets in front of their kids and hoped they would learn to function on their own.

Even so, bad things happened every day. Some of it was probably due to the actions of individual malignant people, especially those in power. Perhaps corruption was so endemic that it could not be stopped; perhaps nobody thought of it as a problem and, instead, thought of it as a useful feature. Maybe, in their imperfect age, a sword maker paid off the Secretary of War to get a special contract to supply the local legion; maybe a metalsmith paid off the emperor to get a contract to mint coins or decorate the palace with gaudy gold leaf. Perhaps a banker supplied young children to satisfy the carnal appetites of his friends - other bankers, foreign princes, perhaps the Caesar himself. Imagine the outcry that would erupt if any of those things happened today!

And then the volcano erupted, and everything - except for human nature - changed.

Outside the Pompei city walls is the…well, the city of Pompei, where you can see how much has stayed the same. Just go out of the easternmost gate where Via Plinio turns into Via Roma, cross the street to the Piazza Immacolata, and turn left. On the corner is “Pizzeria da zio Carmine di fagà Adolfo e Paolo.” There are perhaps five plastic tables on the sidewalk, with twenty chairs, all full at all hours; if you are lucky, you’ll get there when someone is leaving, and your kids will run up to the chairs and nobody else will contest them for priority because they are so cute. The rest of the tables will be full of a mix of people. Some will be tourists; this seems to be a stop on local food tours, and guides will stand in front of the door explaining to their tour groups, in English or Spanish or German, why this pizzaria is particularly special, and what they do really well, and will stop everyone else from actually ordering food.2

The rest of the customers were locals. They may have been lawyers and doctors, soldiers, parents, administrators, police officers, politicians, businessmen, neighbors, friends. They might have been worried about EU laws and regulations, COVID, the fate of the Ukrainians and Palestinians, the safety of their children, inefficient government, crime waves, power, money, status. They were thinking about what to wear when they weren’t eating lunch alone, how to talk to anyone about anything, how to win friends and influence people, whether their habits (atomic or not) were making them more effective, whether thinking could help them grow rich, how they could stop worrying and start living. They thought carefully about their childrens’ friends, their parents’ health, mental illness, heartbreak, and the more intelligent ones probably worried about the damage that insane, corrupt leaders obsessed with gold and power and image could do to their nation and their way of life.

There were two 50-something men working - perhaps these were Adolfo and Paolo. One was the baker, one served customers. They were both stocky, and tall; clearly well-fed, with week-old stubble and aprons waterproof from splattered oil. It is easy to imagine them both inside the city walls, two thousand years ago, in a place almost identical to this - perhaps Caesar’s. Perhaps back at Caesar’s they, too, would have had issues getting flour in from suppliers, or perhaps they would have been paying too much rent for a prime location (and one can hear real estate agents telling them that it’s all about “locus, locus, locus”). They would have had to think about prep time, and part-time staff, and the whims and fashions of their customers. They didn’t have Google reviews back then, but they would have had concerns about word-of-mouth, and advertising, and licensing and regulations, food safety, and the grind of running a business that is entirely dependent on their own daily labor.

But somehow, we keep going, working toward a better future, toward a green light, because if we didn’t, things would fall apart. Some things have changed since Vesuvius errupted; some problems that existed back then no longer bother us. But many of the same problems that they had back then plague us now. Even if we know a volcano is going to erupt, or a earthquake will level our city, or a corrupt emperor is marching us toward a cataclysmic war and making decisions that destroy his country in order to enrich his own family, it is critical that we keep trying to make things better, we keep trying to operate within our circles of influence.

Perhaps the arc of society bends towards improvement, provided that we remember, always: we the people are the ones who must bend it.

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Anyway, this was years ago, and I haven’t seen that couple since. They moved to a house in the countryside, where they are probably currently protected by 47 acres of privilege. I haven’t thought of them since they left…until I was trying to figure out what I found so utterly repulsive about Sorrento, a theoretically gorgeous town perched on the cliffs above the Amalfi coast, with long cobblestone promenades and narrow alleyways and ancient facades, steeped in history, surrounded by lemon groves and olive trees and seemingly sunny 365 days a year. Somehow, though, it was irredeemably repulsive. It felt manufactured, fake, like Disneyworld in Florida, but with almost no kids and more Chinese-made tea towels, scarves, hats, shirts, and “HAND PAINTED” plates with lemons on them.2 Virtually every commercial space in the city is set up as a gift boutique, a limoncello tasting room, or a “Real Italian Trattoria” complete with “authentic” musicians playing beat-up accordions and serving microwaved “family” recipes. There are not flocks of tourists here but herds, seas of them, and only the most naive of visitors would ever think that they are seeing something approaching Italy. Instead, it’s more like they are seeing a closely-choreographed performance, a bit like a cruise ship on land: a carefully-cultivated escape from every kind of reality. Just like the all-inclusive resorts in Mauritius or Morocco or Miami, Sorrento, as a city, is not a place to visit if you want to see anything other than rich tourists.

Whew. I’m glad I got that off my chest.

So why come here? Well, Sorrento is a relatively clean, safe place to stay if you want to see either Pompeii or Herculaneum. It also has literal treasures for those who know where to look. Here are some of the great things you can find in the city.

1. Roman coins

Pico Iyer recently had a navel-gazing piece in the New York Times about an internal conflict he had: whether or not he should reveal the secrets of his favorite places or not. On reading it, I thought: a foreigner living in Japan thinks that he has discovered “secret” places? Please. He’s not in any position to gatekeep his “discoveries” - if anything, he’s just deluding himself into thinking that he has special insights that others don’t. I’m just curious as to how hard his Kyoto neighbors’ eyes rolled when they read that article.

And now I may have to eat my words, because I am about to reveal something that I think may actually be a secret about Sorrento. I mean…literally, locals probably do not even know about this. And it starts with competitive and strategic child-rearing.

Our boys love playing. Other kids will spend hours looking at flashing images while their parents play Candy Crush or scroll TikTok or whatever it is that “adults” do these days. Our kids, dreadfully screenless, run around, climb things, kick balls, practise casting fishing lines, build things out of rocks, turn sticks into light sabers, etc. Raising them like this, especially against the societal pressures to turn them into dopamine-fueled consumption machines, is one of the things that I am most proud of, and yet my feelings are very, very conflicted, because I feel somewhat guilty about their advantages.

We can tell, of course, that technology addiction is destroying kids’ (and adults’) brains. The link between screens and behavioral and learning problems with kids is extremely likely; I’m guessing that the only reason that it has not been conclusively proven is that there is no money, right now, in showing that screen time is bad for kids, and there is plenty of money in getting them addicted early on and then keeping them hooked. And it seems to be short-circuiting young brains, leading to an inability to interact with others, behavioral problems, and a general unfitness for both youthful and adult society. Our boys, though, with their sticks, stones, books, paper, pens, and very durable toys, are smart, engaged, and generally well-behaved, especially when compared to their peers. Without any conclusive proof, I think it’s partly nature, partly nurture.

So I’m very happy to have my kids growing up without screens. But do I want other kids (who aren’t my own) to also be screenless?

Well…there’s the rub.

Yes, in theory, and for the benefit of humanity, I think that other parents should not give their kids screens (and adults should get off screens themselves, except this one you are reading right now; long form travel pieces are amazing for everything from your brain health to your ability to digest cruciferous vegetables). I think that a screenless childhood can only be extraordinarily good for children as a whole, and will benefit them long-term.

But.

At the same time, I realize that these kids will someday be competing with my own children for increasingly scarce resources. I (quite naturally) want my kids to have all of the advantages possible, now and in the future. So…do I really want other kids to be able to pay attention to teachers, concentrate on difficult tasks, develop their interpersonal skills, and function as social animals? Why wouldn’t I want my kids to have every advantage possible while we watch other parents screw their kids up in a comprehensive and irreversible manner? It’s like we, as parents, are coaches training our kids for a competition, and I’m giving my boys chicken breasts and spinach and distilled water and mountain air, and other parents are giving their kids Doritos and McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and Marlboros. I should be able to happily sit back and watch other parents obliterate their kids’ chances if it means that mine are better-off in the big race. Screens are like that: they are the mental diet that other parents are putting their kids on that gives them a long-term disadvantage, which means my kids are already starting ahead.

But…is that the right way to look at this issue? In my heart of hearts, I don’t think so. If this whole life thing is a competition, it is a team game, and a team is only as good as its weakest member. I want my kids to be surrounded by awesomeness, so I should also want their peers to be at their best, which means that they, too, should not have screens rewiring their brains and wrecking their long-term chances for success.

It’s still something I think about. Whenever I see a parent sticking a phone or iPad in their kid’s face just so that they can have a quiet few minutes to play Candy Crush or scan TikTok videos, I can feel the angel on one shoulder muttering, “they’re fucking their kids up, you need to say something…” and the devil on the other shoulder shouting, “Yeah, tell them to keep going! Tell them that they’re doing an awesome job!!!”

Anyways, like I was saying, the boys love playing, and so one day we are walking along through Sorrento, and we see an open gate for a public park. We go in, and immediately, the boys see a giant playground, and they squeal. They ask if they can play; I say absolutely, and then I go over to the fountain to refill my water bottle while they start exploring. They climb on things, jump around, and make their way to the back, where there are swings. I’m pushing them when I see something round in the dirt. It doesn’t look like a bottlecap, so I let them keep swinging and walk over to pick it up. It has some writing on it, and a face, and an odd shape, and I call them over.

“Check this out!” I say.

“Daddy, what is it?” Daniel asked as they crouched down next to me.

“A Roman coin,” I said.

Daniel, who has a better grasp of the concept of money than Nick, thought it was cool that I found money. He thought it was cooler when I said that it seemed to be two thousand years old.

I looked down again; there was another coin, just poking out of the dirt, and a nail, little more than a four-sided tack, the hammer marks still visible in the iron. My heart quickened. I resisted the urge to start clawing at the ground (although I may have scuffed the toe of my shoe in the dirt a bit). I placed the three relics in a piece of scrap paper, then folded it to make an envelope, and put it safely in my bag. Later that evening, ten minutes of research indicated that the big one was from Probus, a Roman Emperor who was likely murdered by his men; I couldn’t figure out the smaller one, though.

So. If you are in Sorrento, and you would at all be interested in finding Roman coins without any work whatsoever, here’s the secret that I suspect locals don’t even know: look under the swings at the playground.3

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2. Marble on the road to Puolo Beach

It was 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning. I ran down the Corso Italia and then followed Via Capo out onto the cliffs, where, suddenly, there was no sidewalk, just a narrow road carved out of the stone with as little extra removed from the cliff as possible. The only reason I was able to run on the road was because it was so early on Sunday that the only people driving were the exceptionally devout on their way to worship, and their minds were likely primed for Christian charity. I ran and ran, around hairpin curves and through stone villages, up and up, past marble walls and olive groves and citrus fields covered with black nets. The fields everywhere, it seemed, had piles of rubbish smoldering among the trees; sometimes I could see the flames, but mostly it was a small, thin trail of smoke. Sorrento is always burning: if it’s not the diesel exhaust from the 1970s Vespas, or the cigarettes smoldering in the fingers of one out of every five adults, it’s the trash fires. Maybe this was a country thing; maybe it was a response to the problems with trash pickup in Naples. I wondered if there was an agreement: people would light their fires early, so that the police had a reason to plausibly deny knowledge, which meant that they didn’t need to enforce laws against burning trash. I assumed there were laws against burning trash, anyway. Maybe that’s unfair; maybe I was projecting my privileged western values on the Sorrentonians. Then the road plunged down a hillside toward Puolo, a cove with a few fishing huts and a couple of hotels, the switchback slope more and more severe, and I had to stop thinking about the enforcement of local ordinances in order to literally avoid falling off of a cliff. I paused at one of the turns and looked down at the buildings. An old woman opened a window at the top floor of a hotel, flung out a rug, and shook the accumulated dust out. I thought of the line in The Great Gatsby when Nick watches a maid look out of one of the mansion’s windows, but unfortunately, my woman never “spat meditatively,” and I kept running to the bottom where a German couple dressed all in white were waiting for a taxi with their bags, a honeymoon glow behind their unnecessary sunglasses, and I walked to the edge of the beach and dipped my toes in the water, an almost religious motion, baptising them. The Germans were still waiting when I started running up the hill again. My competitiveness drove me to run up the steep incline hard, wanting to beat their taxi, and I never did see it, coming down for them or taking them to the airport.

On the side of the road, I found a squared piece of marble, perhaps a relic from a building site, and I picked it up and carried it back. I thought that if I was hit by a car I could Hail Mary the stone and shatter its windshield so it could be later identified as the Death Car; that’s how clearly I was thinking after the insane ascent and the stress put on my muscles. Then I thought of All The Light we Cannot See, which describes in exquisite and beautiful detail how diamonds are formed over millions of years, with dead plants and animals decomposing, then being put under immense pressure, then the rocks being pushed up to the earth’s surface. I felt the smoothness of the marble in my hand and thought: this is metamorphic, which is rather incredible. The only reason that this wasn’t used in some ancient Roman villa was because it was a few feet too deep when the quarry slaves stopped digging 2,000 years ago. We fetishize the age of these old columns, but we don’t think about the age of the rocks, or the miraculous processes that these stones go through just to exist. I rubbed it with my thumb and thought: this is just as beautiful and meaningful a piece of marble as anything on Palatine Hill. I’m going to keep it as a reminder that beauty can be found anywhere.

So, if you want to find ancient stones (and a good dose of perspective), run very early on a Sunday morning to Puolo, and look around. Your rewards will be everywhere.

3. Vintage wine crates

On another early-morning run, I went down a side street. Trucks were rumbling toward Naples, and the trash fires had wafted over the city, so I crossed down to a side street to at least get away from the exhaust fumes.4 I was running past a corner restaurant and saw something miraculous next to a tied-up industrial trash bag: three wooden wine crates, nested inside each other. I slowed down and knelt next to them; they were all a bit scarred, a bit beat up, and I wondered what they’d been doing since they had delivered their wine. Had they been used for storage? As decorations for a restaurant? I picked them up and brought them back to our apartment, then went back out to finish my run.

Alice said she could pack them easily; because they were empty, they fit in with her stuff without adding much bulk, and they were light. We finished the trip with the attitude that if they were to break, we’d lose nothing. Luckily, they didn’t, and now one of them holds about 2,000 vintage postcards that a friend gave me, one holds herbs next to our windowsill, and another holds letters, full notebooks, and assorted souvenirs of life.

And every time I see them, I think of the treasure one can find even in Sorrento: the least Italian place in Italy.5

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The response from the government is even better, and is worth noting. Instead of giving into populism, or trying to pass the blame, mayor Roberto Lagalla has more or less done what Jocko Willink, Trevor Moawad, and Stephen Covey would have advised: he has taken ownership of the problem, he has recognized the reality without judgment, and he is doing what is within his (and his government’s) circle of influence to fix it. They aren’t blaming tourists; they seem to accept that they have an amazing city with tons of culture and absolutely fantastic food. They also aren’t blaming opportunistic businesspeople for trying to get as much of the (lucrative tourist) pie as possible; this is the nature of business. Instead, they are quietly saying, “We are in charge of regulating these businesses, so, like Warren G, we are going to regulate.” They are taking small but concrete steps to change the laws - the article is about banning new restaurants so that the city is not focused solely on food - without antagonizing tourists, making them into scapegoats, or interfering with current businesses just trying to survive. They are taking the various viewpoints into consideration and acting - dare I say - collaboratively with residents to figure out how to fix this so that tourists can continue to eat and local businesses, which give the city its vibrancy and life, can thrive.

I know nothing of Mayor Lagalla or his administration other than what is written in this article1, but if this is how he governs, other politicians would do well to follow his wise example, and other cities should follow closely what happens in Palermo over the next few years.