Sunday Riposo (a weekly series)
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How Sicily Ruined My Ability to Complain Like a Normal American
I was born in Pisa. My mother in Sicily. My father was born in NYC, but his father crossed the ocean from the Naples area. My dad ended up joining the Navy, met my mother while stationed in Italy, and brought all of us back to Tampa, where I grew up on the water with the kind of childhood I wouldn't trade for anything.
Five years in Miami after college. Twenty plus years in New York City. And now I split my time between the USA and the base of Mount Etna in Sicily. So yes, I've earned the right to say this, and no, you don't get to argue with a guy who rides around Sicily in spandex with a dog in a basket behind him, who's judging my cadence when it drops below 92.
America has more of everything. More stores, more brands, more delivery options, more square footage, more choices at the grocery store than any civilization on the planet actually needs. Twenty two kinds of mustard and somehow still nothing to put on the sandwich. And somehow, we are the ones who cannot stop complaining.
Here I am complaining about complaining, which I realize is a little like showing up to a silent retreat just to talk about how quiet it is. But hear me out.
The political climate at home right now is exhausting, and the cost of living has gotten to a point where people are working themselves into the ground just to stand still. I get the complaining, I'm not writing this to tell anyone their frustration isn't real. But I've watched two cultures up close for most of my life, and I keep landing on the same observation. Americans have been trained to chase more, and Sicilians have been trained to notice enough. Two completely different operating systems for a human life, and only one of them seems to produce people who are actually content.
Sicily has less, much less. Smaller apartments. Showers the size of a phone booth, for anyone old enough to remember what a phone booth was. Fewer options on the menu. One kind of olive oil at the market, because it's the good one, made by someone whose family has been pressing it since before most countries had a flag. A closed shop on Sunday because the owner would rather eat lunch with his mother than sell you a lemon. And somehow, the people there are happier.
My mom brought us over to Italy every summer starting around age seven, so I got a taste of it early, and by taste I mean actual food that ruined every future sandwich for me. Anyone who knew my mother knows how fiercely she held onto her roots in Sicily and Italy. But I didn't fully understand it until I started living it instead of just visiting it and hearing about it for the four hundredth time at the dinner table.
Don't get me wrong, Sicily can be tough in plenty of ways. The bureaucracy alone could fill its own story, possibly a trilogy. The job market for young people is brutal. I'll get into that another time.
Back home, I hear friends complain about restaurants with forty items on the menu because none of them are exactly what they wanted. I've sat at dinner tables in Catania with two choices, maybe three, and everyone was thrilled, because the pasta was made that morning and the tomatoes came from someone's actual garden, not a warehouse somewhere between a data center and an Amazon fulfillment center.
Abundance, it turns out, is not the same thing as satisfaction. Sometimes it's the opposite. When you have unlimited options, nothing feels special. When you have one good thing, you notice it.
In Sicily, gratitude isn't a mindset you practice, like some app is going to ping you about it. It's baked into the day. We sit for lunch, so long that it makes me uncomfortable, the American voice in my head whispering "psst, you should be working." Shops close for three hours in the afternoon because rest matters more than one more sale. Nobody is trying to optimize their happiness. They're just living, in a way that leaves room for it to show up.
I think about my mom, leaving Sicily to chase a life in the USA for all of us, which she did. I don't regret a second of the life that gave me, and I'm pretty sure my brother and sisters would say the same, assuming they're not too busy complaining about something.
Tampa on the water, amazing childhood friends, Miami in my twenties, New York for two decades of building something real, a full career in film production and as a fitness professional. I wouldn't trade any of it, and I hope to share all of it with my family now.
But it took me standing in a kitchen in Sicily, watching my wife roll a cannoli shell by hand, and then dodging the wooden spoon, covered in cannoli filling of course, she threw at me for asking if we could just grab a cheesecake from Publix instead, to understand what I'd been missing the whole time I was chasing more.
You don't need forty choices. You need one good one, and the presence of mind to actually taste it.
A presto! Live your pawfect life.
Robert & Bolt.
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