Sicilian Diary

Aha! At last the music we play is starting to have its fans. Italians are usually pretty conservative where music is concerned, so I have dedicated much time since we opened to compiling playlists of music - world, jAZZ, Gypsy, flamenco fusion, hiphop, triphop, African, folk, singer/songwriter along with Italian, Sicilian and American/British/Irish songs which might be more familiar to their ears. While I was away mio marito had one of the playlists on and the DJ was fascinated with Amparanoia's 'La Fiesta que tengo'. He copied it and played it during many nights throughout the summer, but also at his slot at the beach. Next year he wants to do a 'Pachamama on the Beach' for sundown ... I have longed for the hip strains of flamenco fusion that gracefully accompany the puesto del sol on the playas de Cadiz .... but little other than Deep House seems to get through here. So it is a cause for celebration that Amparanoia is leading the way to more openminded appreciati...

August was a good month for Pachamama. We have a nice returning clientele among the seafarers: captains of chartered yachts and caiques come up to us for the third summer running; Milazzese who have gone to live in the north of Italy or other parts of Europe come to dine. Many compliments this year, not one complaint. Wish I had been around to hear some of that! At last, our travaglio bears fruit. It is fun to see lots of people enjoying their cocktails to the sounds of the DJ you have hired, the river of suntanned bodies doing their summertime thing on the road outside, nights drift on until 4 or 5am when the mint from the last mojito is thrown away and couple straggle off into the nascent eastern dawn. The polizia called once to deliver a hefty fine: it was 1.20am and the DJ was still playing. Indoors, it must be emphasized, since the four other locali in the neighbourhood had their live music on outdoors. But the police do not appear to differentiate between inside and out. Music m...

Been back a couple of weeks now. The heat still hasn’t let up. After the greeny fresh air of Ireland, the grit and dust and humidity is particularly hard to bear. The locals are feeling it too; people are starting to fray at the edges, tempers simmer, the elderly moan about whether or not to use the air conditioning, fa male , they conclude, and turn it off to lean listlessly in their doorways, hoping for a gust of wind to reach them. It’s the perfect clime for bichos of all sorts, and Via Montecastro has seen its fair share lately. On our first night back I hear shuffling; the merest hint of a noise, like paper being crumpled quietly – and nearly step on the cockroach as I enter the bathroom. A 2am chase after the scarafaggio ensues. I manage to daze it with spray then almost finish it off with a good whack from a brrom – but it is still alive enough to slither into the dustpan. I keep the lid on it until I get outside and shake it over the side of the terrace. But is that still more...

Ha! spoke too soon on the police-visit front. We had the polizia (different from the carabinieri) in on Friday at 1.30am when the dj was still playing (inside). Our waiters had been checking all night outside and were sure the music could not be heard past the wall five metres in front of the locale, where all the punters sit with their drinks. Plus, the live music OUTSIDE the bars just down and just up the road would have drowned it out. But the polizia probably couldn't be bothered to make their way up the steep hill to the next bar, so they stopped at ours. As usual. This hugely overweight policeman and his sidekick were in plainclothes, so we didn't have the chance to spot them and stop the dj. They asked had all our staff got contracts, did we have permission to play music in the bar and various other questions along those lines. We do have all our papers in order, even though this lazy poliziotto didn't even bother to check. He was just interested in finding a way to ...

We haven’t even had any hassle from the carabinieri this year – touch wood. They have called in a few times on their beat, but fortunately on both occasions the dj had just stopped so there was no music on. But we can’t really be faulted on that since we have music inside only, while the four other bars within a 100metre radius all have live music outside … which doesn’t go down well with the neighbours. It is completely illegal to play live music at the volume they do, in a residential area, but this hasn’t stopped anyone until now. The mayor called a meeting of all the bar/restaurant owners and said we were to be mindful of the neighbours and keep the music at a lower volume – but it wasn’t a definite prohibition, certainly not enough to prevent any of our competitors from having live music at the weekend. The mayor says he will now be responsible for issuing permits for live music etc, which is as it should be, but we are not convinced he will be attentive to the other borgo issues....

Dare I say it? Things are going well at Pachamama. We have a good team in the kitchen and in the sala and all work more or less in harmony. It is a relief to feel so secure at the start of the busy season – and a novelty, looking back to the previous two years! I can see it in our attitude to potential customers; no longer are we falling over ourselves to explain our menu and ethos, we are assured, friendly and confident in recommending our place. Our aperitivo is the best in town, reflected in the numbers on a Sunday evening and also the increase in party bookings wanting aperitivo-style service. We went to another bar in the centre for a friend’s birthday and after an hour of waiting there was still no sign of the aperitivo. The sangria that my friend had ordered wasn’t ready when we arrived so she asked for a few bottles of wine, but when they emptied there were no waiters around to bring more. At ours we agree a number of bottles beforehand according to the size of the group so the...

Via dei Scopari is legendary in Milazzo, scopare being the verb to have sex, though the street name comes from scopo, which means broom - and Scopari therefore means broom-maker. Apparently teenagers make it their aim to pass this way at least once for their romantic encounters … there is no evidence of this today as I walk the stroller down Broom-maker street. It is one of the oldest streets in the town, running parallel to the fishering port in the Vacarella area, and is an odd jumble of old and new: low town-houses next to ruins, abandoned weed-ridden lots next to four storey 1960s apartment blocks. A couple of buildings are nothing more than the façade with vacant windows revealing long grass and wooden beams hanging dejectedly. One has the stone gargoyles but no balcony, another has the rusty balcony railings, but no bottom to the balcony. A potted nespola plant bearing the small yellow plum-like fruits shows that there is life in the ground floor house below one such derelict hou...

Spacca il silencio – Break the Silence, a threesome from Naples who do Italian singer-Songwriter covers, played last night at ours, after the aperitivo. They arrived two hours late, having got lost on the way, and then need showers and food. But they are not bad, apparently. This morning my suocera phones concerned that there is no sign of them at 10am since they were supposed to see mio suocero at 9am to get their instruments etc from the bar. I go to wake them in the attic space above the restaurant. A smoky voiced tall thin guy comes to the door in response to my Buongiorno. 10 minutes, he says. I bump into them later at the bar having granita and brioche, the Sicilian summer breakfast special. The singer is currently listening to The Virgin Prunes, I am impressed to hear. I intend to recommend him Las Grecas, but forget. Only he works, in Ikea, as well as having the band; the other two are full time musicians, they proudly tell me. They are based in Bologna and came all the way to...

Strolling my bambino along the marina, I reflect that the view encapsulates much of what is bello and brutto of living here: colourful fishing boats bringing in the fresh catch, the Nebrodi mountains and Mount Etna still snow-capped against the blue April sky; we are in short sleeves already, while Spring has hardly registered a change of temperature elsewhere in Europe. But looking past the fishing boats, there is a huge oil tanker in front of the sprawling funnels and smoking chimneys of the oil refinery and the electrical plant – and one is reminded of the pollution. Mio marito remembers clothes on the line covered in ash when he was little. His mother remembers how beautiful Milazzo was before the oil refinery was built in the 60s; the centre was free of the ugly high rise apartment blocks in dirty green and mustard purpose built to house the employees of the new refinery, and so the old 17th century buildings had much more visibility and majesty. But the fact is that Milazzo is on...

Today it rained – typical scirocco weather. Interesting to watch the Sicilians in the unusual weather. I took bambino out for a walk anyway as he was oblivious to the light rain in his sturdy rainproof stroller. My husband’s cugina pulled up in her car – ‘It could only be you, out walking the baby in this weather!’ she says. A light drizzle, nothing to worry about. Warm enough to sit outside under the canopy while I have my cappuccino and bambino sleeps. Four middle-aged men, one shorter than the other, join me but chat among themselves. Some people are well-prepared for the weather – an elderly gentleman in a tweed coat and dapper cap steps carefully. Others hold a magazine over their head and scuttle from A to B (never far as they park as close to their destination as the flexible parking laws allow). Nothing like the bowed-down hunched-shoulders marching against the elements you see on the streets of London or Dublin. There are good things here too. Though an English girl married to...

Yesterday was like summer’s day. Three signorine had granita on the terrace of my local bar and admired bambino while I had my cappuccino. ‘He’s big for his age,’ they nodded wisely, not more than 13 years old. They wanted to know where I was from and what language I spoke to my bambino in and where I had lived. They said their English teacher at school was no good and that they planned to go to stay with their friend’s grandmother in England in the summer to improve their English. I gave them some tips on learning English, feeling the teacher in me respond to this obvious need. Teaching is so old-fashioned here, even these teenagers knew it – we just copy off the blackboard and repeat our teacher’s bad pronunciation, they said! ‘Sei giovanissima, quanti anni hai?’ they asked – ‘You’re so young, how old are you?’ Bold as brass, two of them. The third didn’t say a word, just dipped her brioche into the lemon slush. Like three young ladies out for a chat. The two interviewers remembered ...

I tried a yoga lesson this week, time to get a bit of flexibility back with all the hauling around of big bambino. A nice morning lesson, I had high hopes. But it was very slow, with lots of talking (of course) about the third eye and chakras and the point of strength 5cm below the belly button and 5cm inwards. Some rotation of wrists and ankles and one downward dog. Perhaps your evening class is more dynamic, I suggest. Depends what you mean by dynamic. Oops, she has taken offence, despite the fact that I complimented her on the lovely lesson first. Well, more toning. ‘Ahh, toning,’ she sniffs, ‘if it’s toning you want, go to a gym. The effetto tonificante of yoga is just a result of holding the positions.’ I know, I say patiently, the asanas … do you do any of these in your evning lesson? The triangle, the warrier, fish, bridge etc? ‘I was thinking of introducing them next month,’ she says, reciting their Sanskrit terms piously. Ahhhh, pazienza. The problem here is, when people get a...

Someone has broken the wing mirror on our car. It happened yesterday between 4.30 and 5.30, because I went out at 4.30 with bambino and it was fine and my in-laws were out on the street at that time too as they were heading to the restaurant. Bambino and I came back from our stroll at 5.30 and the mirror was broken. I looked up and down the street: the builders who are working on a dilapidated building just down the street were gone – and wouldn’t admit to seeing anything anyway. I scan the neighbours’ windows, because you can bet your life that someone will have seen what happened, but not a stir behind the craftily angled shutters. I look down the street – the cars parked in front of ours all have their mirrors pointed out, except one car which has turned it inwards for safety. There is plenty of space to get past where we are parked though, and even if another car had been parked opposite ours there would have been space. My sister in law is convinced it was the Pazzo, the madman on...

I ran into difficulty yesterday while out for a stroll with a friend along the marina. Bambino needed fed but each time we stopped at a bench a few fishermen would gather to stare at us, the fair haired foreign girls. They should know me by now! I complained to another foreign friend. Her partner is a fisherman and she knows them all, so she promised to come with me some time and introduce me. Can’t wait.

It’s hard to predict what way a ‘serata’ will go; Friday, the restaurant did very little, but the bar was packed with lots of people dancing to the tunes of DJ Giuppy … Saturday, the restaurant was packed and the bar too, so that the road outside was full of people like a summer weekend. And yet on Sunday night, the popular aperitivo attracted few punters this weekend – perhaps because we didn’t have a DJ last night. The SAIE – the PRS, or music rights people, to whom we have to pay €50 every time we have live music or DJ (As IF that money ever reaches the authors) warned us that they knew we were having DJs on Sundays (we pay up for Friday and Saturday, but it simply didn’t seem fair to have to do it on Sundays too … SAIE friends are exempt of course. We are not their friends, but at least they warn us, rather than coming to fine us directly). We didn’t have th barman either, so his mates didn’t come. We’ll have to decide if it’s worth the expense of barman, DJ and SAIE … Meanwhile, i...

During the week we went out for lunch for my mother-in-law’s birthday. We had the small agriturismo to ourselves. There were ten of us in total, including two children, but the noise levels would have woken the dead. When Sicilians get together over a meal they tend to shout at each other across the table. Plus, there was music on too, which I discreetly turned down once I had spotted the remote. But bambino didn’t like it! His nonno said, ‘It’s because you don’t take him out!’ what? I said, he’s out every day of the week. ‘Yes, in the outdoors, but not in noisy restaurants.’ Well, we’re in a different caffè every day of the week, where bambino is greeted by all (shouting ‘che bello’ into his little face) but apparently they are not noisy enough. Noise training is what my bambino needs. I see. … This is the third day in a row we have had lunch all together and the noise levels are getting to me too. At one point I ask the 5 year old does he not have a book to read. He and the three yea...

One of my favourite institutions in this town, which is backward in so many ways, is the poetry-writing postman. Always in good humour, a tall handsome man, tanned from his mornings on the scooter bringing the mail – apologising when it is obviously a bill – he whistles and sings as he goes about his work. He passed me this morning as I was having coffee with bambino, and raised a finger as he remembered something, after flashing his winning smile and wishing me a buongiorno. ‘Signora, I have a parcel for you! But I will deliver it to your house!’ It seems I am the only person who gets parcels so regularly in Milazzo. He never leaves it at my house, as it is slightly off the road, preferring to ring my in-laws’ bells, since their house is right on the street, so he doesn’t have to get off his moto. And he once brought the nonna a book of his poetry. Fantastic. Where else would you get such a personalised postal service? It almost makes up for the stinking, overflowing skips. On my way ...

Lovely aperitivo at Pachamama last night. Cosy lighting with candles everywhere and good chilled out music. Thankfully no DJ in fact many of the regulars commented there is no need. After the live music on Friday and DJ on Saturday, it is nice to be able to come and chat over a few drinks. Plus the music on the iPod is way better than either ;) Our regular DJ tells us that the bar across the road from has started an aperitivo exactly based on ours. They sent their DJ over to spy one night and he started it off last night. Will they have the same food? Same sequence of snacks? The couscous and the faro, the Greek salada and the tortilla, the chicken nuggets and the fried savoury our Neapolitan chef cooks up? Our aperitivo has been such a success – apart from the great deal – because it offered something new hear in Sicily. A common social event in northern Italy, the aperitivo doesn’t really exist in Sicily with real food, just nuts and olives.

Mid-week we get a request for a booking for a party of twenty, for a girl's birthday. She wants to spend a maximum of €60 - four bottles of prosecco. A bottle costs €16, so she wants a little discount, plus she will bring a cake which our waiter will slice and serve ... and of course, service is included - the plates and flute glasses and the dishwashing, and the laying out of tables for the twenty or so people. Although they will occupy most of the upstairs room, she there is no rental fee for the space. Never mind that a table for two would generate €60 with much less effort. On the night itself, she saunters downstairs every so often, 25 years old with the ways of an 18 year old. She apologises that many of her friends haven't turned up and so she would like one less bottle ... this happens several times throughout the night, despite the fact that the waiter notes all twenty places are occupied at the table, with more standing. When she tries to renegue on bottle number two,...

Mia suocera launches into a tale about a woman who used to work with her in the creche down the road. Her daughter works in a bar I go to often with the bambino, and finally after two years she greeted us with a smile. Since we are always given a great welcome in this bar her stony-faced service always seemed strange to me. So this is how my mother-in-law got stuck into her story. Every now and again she likes to regale me with some local lore. Her eyes light up, the voice lowers and she takes up her story-telling position. This time it is about Domenica, her ex-colleague. Domenica was very strict with the daughter when she was little, giving her hardly any freedom. The creche was opposite the child's school, so she was themost punctual of mothers and the daughter never got to roam around town with her friends. So she rebelled and ran off with a married man and had a baby with him bringing shame on the family at the time, 50 odd years ago. The married man divorced his then-wife and...

So what’s the latest on the mafiosi scene? The most obvious thing, and the one that affects everyone, is the rubbish collection issue. Heaps of it, 2 metres high and occupying the space of three cars on the street every 100metres or so, make Milazzo a very smelly place to be. The new council promise that shortly it will be all resolved but I don’t think anyone really believes them. The mafia make money out of the rubbish not being collected so it is in their interest to block any progress there. Something that affects us more directly is the gang from the nearby town who come to drink every now and again. They came in last Saturday night, on a very good night with good music and everyone having a good time. These smalltime gangsters had a few shots of vodka without getting the scontrino at the till, and were loitering about outside. Mio marito had dealt with their boss effectively the first time they came and he had paid up, albeit with a small discount. But the bossman was very drunk ...

Our cook told my mother-in-law that the owners of a new restaurant down by the sea have approached him to go and work for them. What makes it even more unethical is that these owners are good friends of my husband’s sister. She is appalled: ‘Here, where friendship has ‘un certo valore …’ Hmmm. Friendship didn’t count for much in this case. Imagine he decided to go? But he knows they are famous for not paying up, and also they made him a very poor offer. He would be foolish to go anywhere! He’s landed where he is. All god news for his ego da cuoco .

This morning at the bar down the road, the barman - a waiter dressed in black and white like in Spanish traditional bars - called me signorina as he handed me my cappuccino - the best in town. He then corrected himself, Signora! spotting my bambino. 'Ha, you liked that, didn't you?' he laughed. A signorina is an unmarried Miss, while signora offers more respect to the married lady. But I rarely get called Signora, only if I'm with mio marito, and even then i get signorina. Which is a compliment, as the barman pointed out. But when I go out with mio bambino now, I am Signora everywhere. Interesting ...

Explaining new desserts to the cooks has always been a challenge. They can all do tiramisu blindfolded (I imagine). And their strong point is always, always without fail the semifreddo, a frozen icecream dessert, and their favourite for me to try is always al pistacchio. So when I come up with apple crumble (ap-play croom-blay) it’s a big challenge to his ego. I have to build him up first by telling him how good his risotto is, and it helps that for the first order I take since August I convince the couple to try his risotto al profumo di limone with courgettes and prawns. The grated lemon zest really does the trick. His involuntary smile as he squints at the order (all our cooks are halfblind but pride prevents tem from wearing glasses) makes me warm to him. It also helps that he made a fabulous chocolate cake alle mandorle e all’arancia earlier which I was able to praise. But more on that later. It would help if I was a baker myself. But no, I am just the daughter or one of the best ...

And how has the restaurant been in my absence? Did they miss me? The waiters said they were glad I was back because mio marito was getting more grumpy without me. Mio marito says that he had to play the role of the strict manager, which he had let me do while I was around … while he got to be the laid back, approachable boss, saying ‘I’ll need to ask my wife about that’, for anything he disagreed with. Ha. We have the same cook as before. He started muttering after the summer period that he would need to be paid more, once the restaurant started closing Mondays and Tuesdays through the winter. I would have been harder to convince on that one, because I think he has an easy time of it. The only time he might have some work is Saturday and Sunday, on week nights three or four tables max – and they might have piadine or panini which the second cook takes care of – and Fridays are really the worst night for the restaurant strangely. But he started muttering about how he was sending his CV ...

When I arrive back at Christmas there were a couple of local scandals. One was that two English teachers from the language school had been harassed by five locals on a Saturday night. They followed the two girls right up to the door of their house and then tried to get in the gate. One of them hit one of the girls and she fell to the ground in the confusion. The good thing is that the police caught them straight away. Though the girls say that in the police station the guys were making threats to them the whole time. Result? The two girls left for England the next day. No hanging around. They had only been here two months. In an interview in a local paper one of their students, a man in his mid twenties, said he wasn’t surprised they left, but that it was a terrible impression to give them of Sicily. He said he sees the English girls arrive every year to teach but that few of them ever stay longer than a year because there are no tourist amenities here. Bad infrastructure (for example,...

Today, Sunday, we-re on our Sunday morning stroll downtown, trying to decide which bar to have coffee in. I try the one which gets most sun in the mornings but all the tables outside are taken by dodgy looking people in shiny black bomber jackets and shades. We try inside anyway but don’t even get some much as a buongiorno or a smile from the staff. That’s important. So I reverse the stroller out. Dithering outside about whether to go to the quiet but expensive bar on the pedestrian strip to my left, or whether to go to the bar on the corner of the roundabout by the sea, I sense some eyes on me, and realize I have just sailed past some cousins who are getting a good eyeful of myself and the stroller. They come over for a chat and to check out bambino who is blissfully sleeping. Just out for a coffee and glance at the papers and stroll with all the other parents on the promenade, I tell cousins, with whom I will be shortly having lunch at the nonna’s, to mark a year since the nonno died...

It is quite an experience to go out with the buggy in this town. Now I am stared at even more than before. First for being foreign. But now I have the fancy three-wheel Phil & Ted stroller, without which I would never be able to leave my house due to the state of the streets here. The street we live on in the borgo antico is cobblestoned, but full of pot holes and all the stone slabs are chipped and broken making the surface extremely uneven. Impossible for the regular buggy to travel. So we brought the Phil & Ted over from Ireland. Meno male. I have joined the other strolling parents who walk their babies down along the marina. On Sundays it is a whole social event. Some families coming from mass, another social event in Italy, others just out for the passeggiata before stuffing their faces with the family, all don their Sunday best and strut their stuff down by the yachts and fishermen’s boats, since it is the only street wide enough to walk in twos, and smooth enough to enjo...

Even more so than when I was pregnant, people are pleasant to me. I know that sounds as if I am surprised, and I am, when I consider how I was treated with circumspection, if not suspicion when I first arrived here. This is not an Italian thing – in Tuscany I was received with open arms. But Sicilians are notorious for their ‘sfiducia’ with regard to ‘forestieri’ or foreigners, but which I mean someone from outside their town, whether or not they are foreign. With good reason, too, considering their history. Regulars from the bar and restaurant clamour to see our bambino and regale us with complimenti on how cute he is and often bring ‘regali’ too. The blue eyes win them over immediately, the wee charmer. I had him over at the restaurant for the Sunday aperitivo, now a regular and popular event (eat as much as you like, plus cocktail for €6: in Dublin the alcohol would run out, here it’s the food …). Well, bambino had a little fanclub gathered round the buggy. And the DJ (male) looked ...

The most long-awaited bambino in Sicily came back with me just before Christmas. The whole street turned out to greet him. Well, not quite. But all the neighbours wound down the slats on their shutters to get a good look at the Irish-Italian joining the street of losers and loopers. And at me of course, to see if I had regained my pre-pregnancy size. The in-laws feted him at every Christmas dinner and were disgusted when I took him home just before midnight on New Years’ Eve – I had no idea, nor did I care about the time – mio bambino was 7 weeks old, poor thing, and both of us were exhausted. Babies shouldn’t be up at midnight for noisy parties with champagne bottles popping and 30 adults all shouting auguri at each other across the room. Plus they had all had plenty of time passing him round and gawking at him and analysing whom he looks like during the previous large family dinners over the festive period. My north-European idea of a routine for the baby, involving a three hour loop...

Here I am back in Milazzo, after a four month absence. I went back home to have our baby because the Sicilian hospitals – and staff – were not at all convincing. I stayed until the end of August, doing my duty through the high season, carrying my seven month bump through the humid terrace where curious diners congratulated me, and sat under the air-conditioning near the till when not dealing with customers. The best thing was that no one smoked any longer inside the bar. I just had to move my bump nearer to the would-be smokers and they would lover the cigarette and go scuttling outside, usually with a shamefaced smile, most unlike the typical defensive attitude I met with before. The other, most interesting phenomenon was how attitudes towards me changed. No longer the north-European foreigner, to be regarded with suspicion and kept at a distance, I was embraced by one and all. Neighbours who had never exchanged a word with me, nor looked directly at me (while staring and observing my...