Invading Henry’s House

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

In Siracusa, Italy, at Retro la Locanda restaurant, Lorenzo—the effervescent head waiter—captivates me. His personality bounces around the tiny dining room. He bustles from table to table, taking orders, chatting up diners, pouring wine, delivering food. He wears American jeans, American sneakers and a Marine buzzcut. He is a showman, happy in his work.

With his heavily-accented, nearly indecipherable English, he manages to let me know that he has touristed in San Francisco. His favorite restaurant, he reports, is the Mona Lisa.

To his gleeful amusement, I tell him I have eaten there often though nothing is as good as Locanda’s pasta with sardines. Pasta in Sicilian hands is the perfection of an Arabic import, dried pasta culturally appropriated from Asia.

For 3,000 years the Phoenicians, Greeks, Arabs, Moors, Normans and Romans have brought their ethnicities, their gods, their foods and their habits to Sicily. As I tell my high school history classes, colonialism isn’t a straightforward, one-way street. Lorenzo and his fellow islanders are a layered mash-up of invasions, intermarriages, melting-pot cookery and multi-ethnic assimilation.

Two centuries ago, Sicilians brought fishing, farming and winemaking skills to California. They brought Italian opera, and cooking. They built the University of San Francisco. The Bank of America was once the Bank of Italy. Three mayors have been Italian. Columbus Avenue honors an Italian. The original ‘fisherman’s wharf’ was organized by the Alioto family—Sicilians to their core. As surely as a Roman death masks preserved the past without providing for the future, Italians faced prejudice, discrimination and hate.

My temporary residence on Siracusa’s Ortigia Island is Henry’s House, a mere five minute walk from Lorenzo’s restaurant. With my American dollars, I enthusiastically contribute to mounting property values, higher prices, higher rents and less crime all the while wanting Sicilian culture kept as it is, for my benefit.

Just twenty years ago, Ortigia Island was controlled by a tough, rowdy underground. It is said that at night even the police feared it. Ortigia today is Siracusa’s combination public lounge and recreation center.

Thanks to tourism and gentrification, the area hums with UNESCO-protected uniqueness. Pedestrians stroll on car-free streets, explore historical sites, devour sugary pastries, sip coffee at bistro tables, eat fresh-caught fish, sample gelato, promenade along the seawalls.

At my hotel, a dark green sign over the entrance is barely visible even at close range. Two leafy banana plants stand sentry duty on either side of a plain wood door with two small brass handles. The street itself—barely wide enough for a single sedan—seems unmapped.

In the comfy Victorian-era lobby, in a small-framed photo, on a sideboard, the steady gaze of the face of Henry shows a man not afraid of the camera. He is handsome with wavy black hair, piercing eyes and delicate lips. Perhaps he too was once a trespasser in Siracusa.

I am only the latest nomad, intruder, gentrifier to arrive here. I am the tourist occupier—ignoring borders, flattening nationalism, carrying cross-cultural pollination wherever I land.

Sicily is mine.

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