I spent some afternoons in the library and evenings in the restaurants and sidewalk cafés around Mazara del Vallo. I met a number of locals, made some friends, and became known to them as the American who wanted to become a Sicilian, or as one man said in impressive American jargon, a “wannabe Sicilian.”
The thought clanged around in my head. I considered myself a Sicilian, a mindset common to people living in a country – the United States – who all felt like they had come from somewhere. The so-called “melting pot” mentality.
But people here came from here. They thought of themselves as Sicilian and me as American. My new friends didn’t have a hyphen in their self-portrait like I did and like most other Americans did.
“What is it like?” Antonio asked me one evening while we sat at the
