I nearly rushed into the café the following morning, anxious to nail down what I knew about the barbarians or didn’t know. I tried to slow down to a deliberate pace as I stepped through the door, but my eagerness got the best of me.
“So, the barbarians, all of them, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths…”
“No, not the Visigoths,” Vito corrected, an arthritic finger pointed upward to reinforce his statement. “Remember, they didn’t get to Sicily.”
“Yes, I know. That isn’t where I was going. But, okay, the Vandals and the Ostrogoths. They were only in Sicily for a very short time, right?”
“Yes, if you’re speaking in geologic time,” he replied with a smirk and a sip of his espresso.
“Come again?”
“The barbarians were here for just about two hundred years, from the mid-Fifth Century
