We begin the day following the duchess through the narrow passages of the vibrant, noisy Capo market. Nicoletta navigates the stalls with the assurance of a regular, explaining that in Sicily a market goer only frequents certain vendors with whom a rapport is well established. “In return for my loyalty they take care of me,” she explains, as she examines the freshness of an enormous tuna, caught that very morning off the island’s west coast. “I know that when I ask them to filet this fish they will not substitute it with an inferior piece.” Nicoletta shares insights into these codes of Palermitani behavior as we fill bags with almonds and lemons and inspect mountains of tomatoes and eggplants. She tells us about fairly recent times when pickpocketing was so rife that the police set up bureaus in tourist hotels to help victims replace their lost documents. “The idea of trying to stop the thefts did not even seem to be an option,” she says with a smile of resignation. Then she takes an unexpected turn into an alley to show off a brilliant Art Nouveau mosaic, gleaming on a broken facade that stands like a skeleton amid a field of rubble.

Many ruins like this still litter the old city, where Allied bombs leveled streets of fine old palaces in 1943. Others were damaged but have been splendidly restored, and some have been left to molder, their marble staircases and fine woodwork either lost to the elements or carted off by scavengers. The Palazzo Lanza Tomasi survived the bombings relatively intact if a bit the worse for wear. Gioacchino began restoring the palace in the 1970s, dislodging hens from the courtyard and eventually reclaiming a labyrinth of rooms. Now, above family living quarters and a floor of stately salons are 12 charming apartments that the duke and duchess rent to short-term guests.

In the palace garden, flourishing beneath lemon and palm trees on an enormous sea-facing terrace built atop Spanish ramparts, we gather herbs and jasmine flowers, ingredients for the lunch we will prepare. Nicoletta walks us through her living room, a casually aristocratic-looking assemblage of comfy, slipcovered couches and armchairs and fine old tables piled high with books, then up a back staircase to the blue-tiled palace kitchen. There, she delegates tasks as we prepare dishes that combine raisins, almonds, currants, cinnamon, and other ingredients of a cuisine that merges the island’s Arab, Spanish, and French heritage. Her repertoire consists mostly of local dishes she’s encountered around the island. One team chops basil for Pasta col Pesto alla Trapanese, a deliciously simple concoction with almonds, tomatoes, and toasted breadcrumbs that the duchess came across 30 years ago on the terrace of the Albergo Paradiso on the island of Levanzo, off Trapani. Another group prepares a thick chickpea batter for panelle. Nicoletta’s special technique for this street-food staple is to scoop the batter into a narrow can from which both ends have been removed and slowly push it through the oiled cylinder and out one end, cutting it into thin slices that are then fried in oil to puffy, golden perfection. We mash anchovies with mint and pistachios and stuff this aromatic paste into slits we pierce in an enormous slab of tuna. No food could be more Sicilian than tuna, Nicoletta explains. Greek colonists were catching these giants 3,000 years ago, though fishermen no longer stage the ages-old mattanza, in which they lured the fish into mazelike labyrinths of nets and butchered them in a bloody frenzy. Dessert is a biancomangiare, a sweet almond-milk pudding garnished with zuccata (candied pumpkin), more pistachios, and jasmine flowers we’ve gathered in the garden.

Our creations seem impressively lavish as white-jacketed footmen serve us in the elegant dining room, where sunlight gleams off the Mediterranean and bathes creamy walls, oil paintings, Murano chandeliers, and majolica. The duke is an engaging conversationalist who glides easily and assuredly from one topic to another, a staging of the Benjamin Britten opera Peter Grimes to the clumsy restoration of La Zisa, the Norman pleasure palace at the edge of the city where an elderly princely cousin once lived, to the maddening quirks of the little elevator he’s installed in one corner of the courtyard. Nicoletta tells the story of the palazzo, where in the mid 19th-century Prince Giulio Fabrizio used to retreat to observe the stars over the sea. He was the great-grandfather of Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa and the model for The Leopard’s main character, the nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, who witnesses his way of life changing with the Risorgimento. The historical and psychological upheaval is summed up in what is perhaps the novel’s most famous line, “Everything must change for everything to remain the same.” The author moved to this palace in 1943, when bombs leveled his childhood home, the grander Palazzo Lampedusa. He and his wife, Licy, a noblewoman and psychoanalyst who lost her estate in the Baltics to the Nazis then the Soviet army, lived in a few habitable rooms amid dripping ceilings and collapsing walls. They shared a deep longing for the lost homes of their childhoods, and Tomasi di Lampedusa evoked his sprawling ancestral seat in The Leopard with “A house of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in.” He spent his days in cafes reading and writing and died of lung cancer in 1957, a year before his novel was published.

After lunch the duke and duchess walk us through a suite of salons and libraries, showing off furnishings from various family palaces and sharing stories: of the duke’s fun-loving mother, daughter of a Spanish diplomat and granddaughter of the governor of Cuba, a grandmother whose pet panther used to jump over the garden walls of her Roman villa, a branch that includes saints and mystics. Pride of place belongs to the typewritten manuscript that made its way around Italy’s leading publishing houses before Feltrinelli brought out The Leopard to immediate acclaim in 1958. Luchiano Visconti directed a lavish, color-saturated 1963 film starring Burt Lancaster as the prince, and a ballroom scene was shot in the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi, just a few blocks away on the pretty Piazza Croce dei Vespri. The novel and film and their Sicilian settings are lush and transporting, but not more so than a day with this amiable duchess in her palace.

A Day Cooking with the Duchess classes cost about $180 a person, including a market expedition, instruction, lunch, and a tour of the palace. Large, character-filled apartments, all with fully equipped kitchens and some with terraces and sea views, sleep from two to six guests and rent from about $95 a night. Visit this site for more information.

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I found myself being equally surprised and delighted by all the little extra things we were seeing and doing – and yes, often eating – that were NOT on the itinerary, the L&D moments that reflect the culture and deepen the immersive experience already embodied within the OAT itinerary.  

While exploring the capital city of Palermo, we stopped at a tiny, nondescript storefront with antique-looking sewing machines and irons but okay, the owner is a tailor. How then to explain all the old instruments strewn everywhere? The tailor is also a musician. He sang along as he played a 50-year-old mandolin. Come for repairs; stay for the repertory… Such an OAT moment – which places a great deal of attention on offering off-beat examples of local culture that are nowhere on the itinerary.

As soon as we arrived in Castelbuono, a 14^th century medieval village whose history dates back to the Arab influence of the 800’s, it was time for another discovery: a variety of Sicilian pastries washed down with samples of liqueurs ranging from Lemon, cinnamon to tangerine and prickly pear. By this time, it was hard for me to work up an interest in the surrounding history, usually a passion of mine. Stopping for a “taste” can translate into a marathon multi-course mini-meal. So yes, often L&D has to do with food – which is understandable: aside from the Mafia, food is what Sicily is known for.

Because another OAT philosophy is its emphasis on controversial topics, a discussion of the Mafia was not unexpected.  Meeting with Angelo Provenzano, the son of one of the most notorious Mafia bosses in Sicilian history from 1993-2006, was. Kept in hiding for the first 16 years of his life, he recounted the difficulty of separating his feelings FOR his father from his feelings ABOUT his father – and the impossibility of leading a normal life despite his having no connection with the mafia himself. It should come as no surprise that the Cosa Nostra is still alive and well in Sicily but not to the level that a Godfather IV is anywhere in production. In response to a question as to the accuracy of those films, Angelo replied: “Except for certain Hollywood effects, the films are basically realistic.” Angelo’s birthplace? The city of Corleone, of course. A name everyone in the room knew well.

Knowing that Sicily is known for marzipan, a favorite almond paste treat of mine, I asked our guide, Alessio where best to buy it. He sheepishly said: “We’ll find some.” Ten minutes later, at a small Benedictine cathedral built in 1092 where nuns had been preparing pastry for years, the following story unfolded: one year the Pope was coming to visit but being winter there were no fruits on the trees – so the nuns made little fruits out of marzipan and hung them on the trees.  Today, a group of cloistered Benedictine nuns still prepare such offerings which are only retrievable through a small mesh door that revolves to reveal its marzipan delicacies.  As responsive as I knew Alessio to be to  special requests, I thought, “Nah, he couldn’t possibly have had enough time to set that up…”

In a local museum in Mazara, we viewed the Dancing Satyr, a Greek bronze statue from the 3^rd century BC that was pulled from the sea in 1998 in the nets of some fishermen. As fascinating as the story was – an archaeological event that captured the attention of the world – it didn’t compare with the unexpected meeting with the boat captain who made the discovery. His personal story was even more enthralling.

Picnic lunches are not unusual on tours. But when they take place on an island settled by Phoenicians some 2700 years ago – one of the largest remains of Phoenician ruins in the world – and your picnic table is a stone from one of their former structures, the picnic takes on slightly greater significance.

Not to be outdone by the Phoenecians, the Romans and Greeks want equal time – so on to the Valley of Temples. 50,000 Greeks lived here 2600 years ago, and the remains of multiple temples constitute the second largest archaeological site in the world. One of the temples remains intact, while others have been reconstructed from original materials. It’s so hard to fathom that anything can survive that long. And then the Romans came in 600 AD and built their own structures on top of the Greek ones. And they, too, survived. Our local guide stopped to pick up what to me looked like a number of rocks which he then identified as a rooftop tile and a piece of pottery or a jug. Just lying there. Still. After 2600 years. Sometimes itinerary items are pretty cool, too….

By the end of the trip, after visiting sites representing Roman, Greek, Norman, Arabic, Carthaginian, Phoenician, Byzantine and Spanish occupation – and I’m sure I’ve left some out – we arrived in Syracusa, an ancient city that boasted remnants of all of them. There were ruins from everyone everywhere. And during the boat ride around the island of Ortigia, we sampled some Sicilian almond liqueur to get us through the 40-minute excursion. And why not? Just another L&D surprise. Who said alcohol can’t be part of a cultural experience? Again.

Admittedly, exploring the old Medieval city of Modica was fascinating, but it couldn’t compare with the unexpected joy rides in vintage iconic Fiat 500 sports cars over hilly, twisty, curvy, windy, narrow, cobblestone streets. First made popular in 1957 as a readily affordable automobile, these refurbished convertibles – smaller than a Smart car – still barely fit on alleyways that were unfathomably two-way. Warning: “Do not put your hand outside the car or you’ll end up losing it.” Sort of like a Disney ride threatening to go off the tracks. The fact that we were driving through a former 12^th century Norman city was just a bonus.

Another itinerary highlight worth mentioning? The Landing Museum, a moving testament to the end of Italy’s involvement in World War II. We – I – tend to forget that Italy, a Fascist nation, actually fought on the side of Germany and we invaded in 1943, effectively ending Mussolini’s rule. Upon entering a replica of a Catania street in the 1940’s, we suddenly heard an air raid siren – and were quickly ushered into the bomb shelter before the door closed. That was all the time we had if we wanted to live. What then ensued for a minute and a half – planes shrieking, bombs dropping, dogs barking, hysterical cries of anxious people – actually went on for hours. The shelter shook and as much as I knew this was only a simulation, I could still feel the terror of those who had to endure such trauma day after day for years. We emerged to find ourselves surrounded by rubble. The rest of the museum accurately relates the people and events who suffered through this sad part of Italy and Sicily’s history. And indeed it was nice to hear how welcome the Allied forces were once they arrived!

Because OAT thrives on controversy, we met with members of an organization that aids young immigrant girls who illegally land in Sicily, where a sign on the port declares “Welcome Refugees.” Oh how much we could learn from this small island, I thought. And it was harrowing to listen to 19-year-old Joyce’s story of being lured from her home and family in Nigeria with promises of an education in Europe only to find herself part of an agonizing nine-month ordeal spent in many refugee camps in Libya and Syria along the way under abusive, horrendous conditions as a part of a sex-and-drug trafficking operation. She was fortunately saved by the Casa di Maria organization upon her arrival in Sicily; most are not. No one exited that room without feeling emotionally drained. Again!

And then there’s Mt. Etna – at over 10,000 feet, the largest active volcano in Europe. Although the last eruption was in May 2017, we were repeatedly assured we were in no danger of a repeat. I’m a hiker. I’m used to climbing over rocks and roots. But this was my first experience with lava stones and fields – a topography I had never seen before.  As we climbed the almost two miles, we passed two centuries worth of vegetation from tiny tufts of green still recovering from earlier eruptions to huge, long-standing pine trees of old. I’m a travel writer and I’m supposed to be able to bring experiences to life but this was so surreal, other-worldly, so without comparison to anything I’ve seen before that I feel inadequate to capture it in mere words. A stop afterwards for a shot of Etna Fire – a 70-proof concoction – shook me out of my volcanic revelry.

After our Farewell Dinner, it was hard to believe there would be another L&D moment. After all, it was late – and we all had early planes the next day. But indeed we headed into town to a small, stand-alone outdoor shack where the vendor more replicated a bartender – even more a mixologist, a creator of drinkable art. Tamarind syrup, fresh squeezed lemon, soda water and then the piece de resistance…Baking Soda. All shaken up with gusto. The whole point? To make you burp. A lot. A Sicilian tradition. A very successful Sicilian tradition. Who wouldn’t want to go on such a tour?

For more information, visit 2018 Sicily’s Ancient Landscapes & Timeless Traditions.

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