You may be hearing about the growing strikes and protests in Italy. Much of it hasn’t been reported, not even here in Italy, but that’s changing as the situation expands.

First, for those who saw my Instagram posts: There was a mix-up with my hotel booking, so I had to check out of my hotel in Bologna on Saturday afternoon without another place to stay. Bologna was booked, so I left for Naples that night instead of the next morning. I was upset about the whole thing until I saw the news the next morning that student protests sparked by the protests in France had turned into chaos, particularly at the Bologna train station, just one or two hours after my train departed. There had also been violent clashes with the police and looting in Milan, where I had been a few days before.

Meanwhile, major protests led by truck drivers and farmers were underway throughout southern Italy, with almost no media coverage abroad and not much of it in Italy. Today, just as I am in the middle of hosting a tour based on Ep. 35: The Mozzarella Highway, the Financial Times reported that “Italy is facing a shortage of fresh buffalo mozzarella after nearly a week of highway blockades by truck drivers disrupted milk deliveries in the south of the country.”

But this is also a silly article because supermarkets throughout southern Italy, all the way up to Rome, are empty of everything, not just mozzarella, and people are waiting in line for gas, which is in short supply.

Before I go any further, please know we are just fine. We’re well taken care of, surrounded by farms with plenty of food; safety isn't even a vague concern, and we just spent the day baking the most beautiful bread and pizza. But I’ve never peddled a fake dolce vita Italy, which is why I think it’s important to share what’s happening because it matters for the rest of the world. Italy may not seem like a major player on the international chess board right now, but remember that COVID first hit Europe in Italy.

The primary reason for the strikes is fuel prices. Though southern Italian strikes are more directly tied to diesel prices, fuel prices are also linked to the protests in France, Milan, and Bologna because daily life has become untenably expensive. The movement directly calls it out — caro vita.

The truckers’ stoppage began in Sicily on October 16th, after diesel prices jumped when the fixed excise discount ended on October 6th. Calabria’s regional logistics federation began its own stoppage the same day, over the same fuel costs. Also in Calabria, bakers in the Cosenza area closed their shops over the price of raw materials and pressure from large retailers.

In Puglia, workers at the steelworks in Taranto went on strike on October 12th after a court confirmed the shutdown of the plant’s hot area. The company also announced it would temporarily stop operations at its Genoa and Novi Ligure sites by November 15th. The workers blocked access to the Eni oil refinery and the main roads around it, causing fuel shortages in Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria. They ended the blockade on October 16th. Meanwhile, the price of olive oil in Bari has fallen to about half of last year’s level, even as production costs have risen. Growers blame cheaper imported oil, and so the farmers have joined the truckers in the strike.

As of this Wednesday evening, talks with Matteo Salvini, the Vice President of the Council of Ministers, have failed, and the strikes will continue. The shortages have now spread to Campania, including Naples, and are being reported around Rome, with long lines to get gas that is running out. But supermarkets across Basilicata, Puglia, and Sicily have been empty for over a week, with few updates on TG1, Italy's main news channel. Yesterday, a friend in Florence had no idea what was happening in the south because few in the centro-nord were talking about it. Yet there was extensive reporting on fear and outrage over the looting in Milan. Whether you sit on the right or the left side of the political spectrum, I encourage you to be reserved and skeptical about your opinion because selective reporting is a good enough reason to pause and look at the larger situation.

Last week I was discussing the Italian economy with my friend in Milan, and he told me Italians are absolutely ashamed of their economic situation and low salaries, but they don’t protest like the French; they always try to keep the bella figura. So I find it both brave and refreshing that the truckers and farmers are directly calling out what everyone is experiencing.

Working people simply can't keep absorbing this caro vita.

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A quick recap of resources and upcoming events:

1. Tuesday, October 6th at 7 pm ET is the next Ask Me Anything About Italy for paid subscribers. This live Q&A with me happens monthly. If you can’t attend live, send me your questions at danielle@danielleoteri.com. I’ll answer them live, and you can watch the replay, available the following day.

2. Thursday, October 8th at 7 pm ET is a new online class for people with Italian roots. “Finding Your Way Back to Italy” debunks Ellis Island myths and explains why Italians left Italy en masse starting in the 1870s. This history is surprising, but it shouldn’t be—it’s beautiful, but also complex, and you will learn a lot about yourself and your family by understanding the underpinnings of the stories and ways of being you inherited. Click here to register.

I hope you enjoy this episode and let me know what you think in the comments.

Turin is one of Italy’s major cities that doesn’t show up on the mass-tourism map, and that’s a good thing. It’s an hour from Milan, close to one of Europe's biggest airports, and still affordable. It’s also completely walkable, made for wandering rather than rushing between sights.

Where Turin Is

Turin sits in Piemonte, in Italy’s northwest corn…

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Before Baia had snorkeling schools and glass-bottom boats, Joseph Walker was hiring a local fisherman to take him out into the Gulf of Pozzuoli and swimming down into what turned out to be the nymphaeum of Claudius and Nero. That dive became his life’s work. He arrived in Italy with the U.S. Navy in the late 1980s and never really left. This episode is a long, winding conversation about the Campi Flegrei, the volcanic zone west of Naples where myth and geology keep colliding. Joseph and I share a lot of interests, and this conversation could have gone on for hours.

What we discuss:

• How Walker found Portus Julius and started bringing tourists to see the underwater ruins.

• The Cave of Cumean Synil, how it predates Virgil by roughly 600 years, and Walker’s case for Etruscan involvement in its construction

• The amphitheater at Cuma that isn’t on the archaeological park’s tourist map, and the harvest feast that Walker got invited to as a young man

• Lago d’Averno as one of the mythological entrances to Hades, and the Oscan cult of death that came before the Greeks arrived

• Naples’ own relationship to death and the ritual of adopting bones at the Fontanelle Cemetery

• Bradyseism, the rising and falling of the Campi Flegrei landmass, and the current push to reopen sites like the Piscina Mirabilis to tourism

• How the region’s volcanic history may connect to the extinction of the Neanderthals

We also got into Puglia a bit and discussed:

• Castel del Monte and Frederick II’s use of the octagon as a symbol linking heaven and earth

• The mosaic floor at the Cathedral of Otranto, its King Arthur panel, and the monastery library destroyed in the 1480 Ottoman sack

Find Joseph Walker:
italianhistorywithjoseph.com/oteri — includes a free download of seven “Buried Italy” sites and a free chapter of the book (the Narnia chapter, cut from the final edit).

I am both happy that Italy is such a popular destination and chafed by all the vapid nonsense on social media that obscures the stupefying abundance of amazing things to do, see, and eat there.

The slow-motion runs down Positano’s vertical steps, the perfectly staged twirling of spaghetti.

It’s a performance of travel, juiced up by robots to make you feel like you’re missing “the best thing” if you don’t wait in line for [insert stupid viral trend here].

A million influencers claim to show you “the authentic Italy,” but that promise has had its meaning scooped out like a wheel of Parmigiano cheese, inside which a dressed-up waiter drags around a large forkful of pasta, like a mop through a bucket. It’s a performance of Italy. And like the pasta in the Parmigiano wheel, it’s not completely bad, but it’s a damn shame if you’ve actually traveled to this magnificent country and had an experience you could have had in Cleveland.

So here’s the official (re)introduction to who I am and what you get from subscribing:

I’m Danielle Oteri. I’m a writer, an art historian, and an Italy travel advisor. As Stanley Tucci says, I’m Italian on both sides, and before I started working in travel, I was a Lecturer at the Met Cloisters. I wrote an essay called “The Secret of the Unicorn Tapestries” for The Paris Review about my years there. During that time, I also started Arthur Avenue Food Tours, an homage to New York’s Italian history. In 2015, I began collaborating with my family in Southern Italy to organize week-long culinary tours, and with my cousin Arianna, who had worked as a travel advisor in Rome, we started our own bespoke travel business.

I like a nice hotel and a fancy spa, and Italy does those things well, but Italy is one of the most rewarding places for the curious, and curiosity means taking the time to know something deeply. My work creates opportunities to become completely ensorcelled, because awe and wonder make our lives better.

Destination Deep Dives

These are for paid subscribers and include a monthly live Deep Dive and ongoing access to the full library. The recordings are available immediately, and I then build notes and resources to accompany them, so you have a clear plan you can adapt to your specific travel dates. You get logistics, but more than that, you get insight and context into how best to appreciate that destination in a short amount of time.

Here are a few examples of the kind of things I include:

• From the Naples Destination Deep Dive: The only line worth waiting in is at La Sfogliatella Mary inside the Galeria Umberto. This pastry counter had lines long full of locals, long before TikTok was invented. A sfogliatella is a sweetened ricotta-and-semolina filling flavored with orange blossom water, wrapped in flaky pastry. It’s a culinary signature of Naples, and you can get sfogliatelle at any bar or even gas station, but the locals wait in line to get these. Goethe said “see Naples and die,” and it’s probably because he had just eaten one hot from the oven, the powdered sugar stuck in the crevices of his ruffled collar.

• From the Rome Deep Dive: Accept that you are a tourist because Rome has always been a city for those from elsewhere seeking either money or transcendence. For those seeking the latter, be sure to visit Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy. Look up at the soaring gold and drama, and understand why it was built that way—as Rome’s theatrical response to the Protestant Reformation. You want that spare little white church in Germany, or would you prefer this spiritual container, designed to make you feel like a ring inside the Queen of Heaven’s jewelry box?

• From Venice: Don’t treat one of the most absurd urban grids on earth as a mere day-trip backdrop for a gondola selfie. You can only move as fast as your feet can carry you, so don’t plan more than one timed or ticketed thing a day. And at some point, make sure you sit in the Frari church, slightly buzzed from a long, wine-filled seafood lunch. Sit, don’t look at your phone, and just look at Titian’s massive Assumption of the Virgin until the sheer scale and emotion of the masterpiece make sense. (It won’t take long.)

  

To Protect Your Sense of Wonder

I cut through the influencer nonsense and make it clear that Italy is not a theme park with everything organized for your convenience. It’s also not a cheap destination, as people sometimes expect it to be, with Hobbit nonnas happy to roll pasta for you. Italy is a G7 nation, and just like most countries, some parts are less expensive, particularly in the south (though not always), and others cost as much to visit as New York or London.

This isn’t cynicism; it’s honesty, and I’ve got a lot of these little tidbits of hard-earned wisdom to share.

• If you go to the Saturnia Hot Springs, you will smell like a hard-boiled egg for days afterward—which is why you need a day pass at a proper spa with good soap to get it off you right away, not the pull-off-on-the-side-of-the-road-for-a-quick-swim option.

• The outskirts of Bari in Puglia are unnervingly ugly and industrial, and you have likely only seen photos of conical trulli houses and that one turquoise beach in Polignano a’Mare. Puglia’s tourism industry has exploded over the past 10 years, and much of it is luxury tourism, where boring is a virtue. Even for a Southern Italian specialist like myself, it’s hard to find information on Puglia’s rich history and culture, and that’s something I am actively working to fix.

• Never swim at the main beach in Positano; it’s too polluted by fuel from the ferries and tour boats. Swimming on the Amalfi Coast requires either a hotel with its own beach club, or best of all, a boat that will bring you into the coves. Also…skip Positano.

Ways To Work With Me

You’ve got my podcast, which is free. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube if you prefer.

The Destination Deep Dives and a monthly live Ask Me Anything About Italy for paid subscribers. ($8 a month or $80 a year).

Or work with me directly for a Trip Consultation or Bespoke Trip Planning.

You can also follow me on Instagram, where I’ve been pondering over a possible fake artwork. I was pretty sure it was a forgery, but now I’ve changed my mind. I explain that here.

I also always want and need your feedback, so please let me know in the comments what you'd like to know. My best work almost always comes from questions I receive, so don’t be shy.

Thanks for reading,

Danielle

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In this episode:

• Why hot summers in Europe can no longer be treated as an anomaly

• Best time to visit for Venice, Florence, Rome: spring (minus Easter week) over the increasingly-booked-out fall

• The seaside strategy for anyone who can only travel in summer — including how to structure a day around the heat

• Why an Italian beach club is a unique cultural experience

• Where to find real sagre and summer festivals

• The single biggest mistake I have to unravel for clients overstuffed itineraries

• Tipping in 2026: what’s expected now for guides, drivers, and restaurant staff — and why even the Germans are tipping.

All podcasts are free, but if you want to hang out with my live, and ask questions, consider becoming a paid subscriber. On August 27th at 8 pm ET, I’ll be doing a Destination Deep Dive on Pompeii, Herculaneum, Baia, and Oplontis. Because even though Pompeii is worthy of a thousand visits, it’s just one piece of the story, and one of these others sites might actually be more appropriate for your trip.

A quick note for paid subscribers: the August Ask Me Anything About Italy will take place on August 13th at 8 pm ET. This month’s Destination Deep Dive will cover Baia, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis — the ancient Roman cities around Naples in honor of the new series about Pompeii Out of Time currently streaming on Disney+. We’ll convene here on Substack Live for that on August 27th at 8 pm ET.

Podcast Show Notes: The Fake (Maybe) at the Met

I visited a piece that I absolutely love, but I also think it’s too good to be true. It’s a thymiaterion, an ancient incense burner used for weddings, ceremonies, and funerals, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a ring with five figures, each holding a different attribute, like little action figures. I think it could be a pastiche, a mix of something ancient with something modern, if not an outright forgery.

Terracotta group of women seated around a well head

The Instagram post that started it

I posted about it on Instagram, where I wrote: “I love this beautiful thing, but I think it’s a fake. Please prove me wrong.” The post got over 21,000 views and around 110 comments.

The original Instagram post — danielleoteri_italy

Prior owners

Mary Jaharis donated the piece to the Met in 2012. She acquired it at the 1999 Sotheby’s sale of the Christos Bastis collection. Before that, it was on view at the Merrin Gallery in New York until the early eighties.

The Getty’s own former curator of antiquities, Marion True, was put on criminal trial in Italy for conspiring to receive looted antiquities; that trial collapsed in 2010 when the statute of limitations expired. The dealer tied to that network, Giacomo Medici, was convicted in Rome and sentenced to prison. If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend “Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum” by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.

Chasing Aphrodite, by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino

Also, my apologies to Ralph Frammolino — I mispronounced your name in the recording.

The tombaroli and Taranto

The word for the people who do the tomb robbing is tombaroli. Taranto, in Puglia, is one of the most abused archaeological sites there is; its old city, la città vecchia, is Greek, filled with underground burial chambers that smugglers have used for storage in more recent times.

Museum of Looted Art

I got a message from an Instagram account called Museum of Looted Art, pointing me to their database of documented looted works, specifically the history of the Merrin Gallery. MoLA is a project of Jason Felch, author of Chasing Aphrodite.

The Tanagra connection

The figures are most closely aligned with those of Tanagra. In the 1860s, hundreds of these terracotta figures were accidentally discovered by farmers plowing their fields. When they first appeared on the French art market around 1871, collectors and artists went wild, calling them the Parisians of Antiquity. They were displayed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878.

More about Tanagra figures here.

A more recent parallel: the flood of fakes in Islamic art tied to wealthy collectors in Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi since the early 2000s, and the “Salvator Mundi” painting sold at Christie’s in 2017 for $450 million, which I have never for one minute believed was an authentic Leonardo.

Coverage of the Salvator Mundi sale

Paestum

Throughout the Southern Italian Greek colonies, most notably Paestum, you find hundreds, potentially thousands, of terracotta heads with an incense burner, often in the form of a flower, from the sanctuary of Hera. Many are on display in the museum right next to the archaeological park, but none show five women in a composition like this one.

Why testing doesn’t settle it

The main dating tool is thermoluminescence, which measures the energy stored in an object since it was last fired. Forgers can defeat this: carving fakes from genuinely ancient fired material, grinding real ancient ceramic into new clay, or artificially irradiating pieces with X-ray equipment.

Where I landed

I don’t love it quite as much as I did. I still very much want it to be real, but I’m going to trust my initial reaction here and say I don’t believe it. I’m not accusing the Met of anything nefarious; I don’t know the politics behind this object’s display, and I’ll leave open the possibility that the curators have good reason to believe it’s real.

What I hope this episode has done is made you more curious. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Forget Ozempic; this thing has shrunk me nearly three pant sizes, but the most famous effect is really not the worst part. It’s the near-constant nausea and fatigue that left me unable to leave my room at Borgo La Pietraia for a week. I was ill a few days before I left, but then recovered, and the doctor, who did not want to test for the parasite, said it was likely food poisoning. That seemed reasonable given the heat plus a ton of stress from the most…uh—challenging client we’ve ever had. But no, it was indeed the parasite currently feasting on American stomachs as testing remains difficult to get, labs are overwhelmed, and Bactrim, the only antibiotic that works on this sucker, is also hard to get. Also no, I did not eat at Taco Bell. I suspect it was either a turkey club sandwich or an ancient curse from the difficult client.

The first part of my trip was to be four days in Cilento to catch up with my family, go to the beach, and eat buffalo milk gelato. There was no gelato eating or eating of anything really, and after relapse #3, I realized I couldn’t accomplish anything I had planned. I did, in fact, visit a doctor who prescribed an antibiotic, though unfortunately not the only one that works on this bug. There was no point in traveling from hotel room to hotel room to just sleep all day. Plus, it is very hot in Europe this year, and something to take very seriously when planning your own travels. In the comfort of your temperature-controlled home, you may decide you’ll just deal with it. The lived experience of it is immediately humbling.

Another point to take seriously: Trip Insurance. I sometimes buy a separate policy if I’m spending a lot of money, but this trip was going to be relatively inexpensive, so I didn’t. However, I purchased nearly everything with a credit card that offers trip insurance, and just filled out the claim for reimbursement of my non-refundable hotels in Ascoli and Bologna, extra days for the rental car when I was too sick to return it, and the change fee for my flight. When I logged into the portal and checked the card member benefits, I was pleasantly surprised by how many perks are actually available, so be sure to know exactly what is already covered by your credit cards, especially related to lost luggage, car rentals, emergency medical treatment, and trip interruption due to hurricanes, fires, or illness.

I questioned my decision to leave early until the night before the flight, when I transferred back to Naples in anticipation of my early flight. I took just a short walk, and was nauseated by the smell of my most favorite foods — fried pizza and sfogliatelle. If you look at these beauties in the window of Pintauro, a Naples institution since 1785, and feel anything other than joy and delight, call the doctor.

I will return to Italy in October for take 2 at my plans, and I’ll also be hosting a small group for a week to visit ancient ruins, pick olives, and revenge eat all the buffalo milk gelato and mozzarella that I missed. This week, called The Cilento Secret, is the live version of Episode 35: The Mozzarella Highway, and we’ve got a group of 6 people who are now officially registered and paid, with room for 6 more.

There are currently 2 Deluxe Suites available (best for singles) and 4 Junior Suites. If you’d like to join us, and you should because this is a good price (that includes nearly all the meals) and one of my best ever itineraries, you can jump straight to the registration form here.

In other news, Thursday night will be the next Ask Me Anything About Italy live here on Substack.

And in lieu of a new podcast episode, I wanted to share an episode I co-hosted for the Italian American Podcast. I am a recurring co-host, which is so much fun, as it’s recorded at Red Sauce Studio, which you can visit if you’re ever in New York City. This is an interview with Andrew Novo, author of Where the Mountains Burn: A Novel of World War II in Italy. Dr. Novo was inspired by his grandfather’s personal story, and as an accomplished scholar and professor, I so appreciated how well he articulates complex and little-known pieces of history. I learned so much.

Listen or watch this episode of the Italian American Podcast with Andrew Novo

I won’t be premiering a new Deep Dive this month since I still haven’t fully rejoined the living, but I will be updating the Rome and Venice Deep Dives soon.

A la prossima

Every year on this day, my mind goes back to that room behind the choir balcony in the church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 115th Street: I am standing before a miracle-working statue of the Madonna.

For over 140 years, she has been the focus of intense religious devotion, kept above the altar of this church, so she can be prayed to and adored. She has been carried in processions that have cumulatively been attended by millions who made pilgrimages barefoot.

She is considered so spiritually powerful that Pope Pius X coronated her in 1904, making her one of only three sacred images with this designation in the Americas. But when I saw her up close, she was undressed and bald, her wig being replaced. She was quite literally laid bare in front of me.

I looked directly into her painted eyes. Should I pray? Should I speak my deepest desire now into the re-fabricated ear of this image at this moment, which seems to be just a maquette? I looked to Antoinette Scarpinetto, a lifelong devotee of the Madonna who was overseeing her conservation.

“After 131 years of making miracles, she certainly deserves a spa day,” she joked.

In the twenty-teens, I was writing for major publications such as Condé Nast Traveler, Gothamist, and the UK Independent. Or, well maybe I should say, I was doing a lot of pitching, because most of the stories were rejected. I pitched this particular story, about the ongoing makeover of a miracle-working statue, to NPR journalist Jacki Lyden. At the time, she was developing a podcast called “The Seams,” which focused on clothing and fashion in modern culture. She loved the pitch and led the story, which aired on the NPR Sunday-morning national broadcast. I was quoted in the broadcast as an art historian and was also the fixer and the photographer. This essay is an excuse to finally share many of those old photos that have been hanging out in my iCloud.

The Origins

The nearly life-size statue was made in 1884 by artisans in Polla, Italy, for Italian immigrants living in East Harlem. Italians were first brought to northern Manhattan in the 1870s by an Irish American contractor to be used as strikebreakers on the First Avenue trolley tracks. The population grew and moved northward. In 1881, immigrants from tiny Polla formed a mutual aid society named for Our Lady of Mount Carmel. In 1882, they organized the first festa on the first floor of an apartment house on 110th Street near the East River. They prayed the rosary and then ate a huge meal together.

In 1883, an Italian priest joined and celebrated Mass and spoke about the Madonna's miracles in Polla, and in 1884, a statue of the Madonna was sent from Polla.

Her first gown was a traditional brown frock, decorated with hundreds of wedding rings, bracelets, and watches donated by the faithful. The gold-laden gown served as a savings account for the mutual aid society. A thief might steal from the chapel where she was displayed, but never from the Madonna's herself.

The building of an Italian church was also initiated in 1884, though it was over the border of what was a German and Irish neighborhood. The Italians begged for it to be named for the Madonna of Mount Carmel and promised their physical labor to realize the building.

After long days of backbreaking physical labor, men donated their time to build the church at night, by gaslight. When the use of free labor was publicly criticized, women took over the job, and the church was completed. But immediately the Italian community was relegated to the basement, as they found no favor among the Irish and German clergy who disapproved of how they practiced Catholicism. The Italians and the Madonna would not be allowed in the basilica until 1919, even though they made up the majority of the congregation.

Robert Orsi’s outstanding book The Madonna of 115th Street is a detailed chronicle of this community’s search for identity and legitimacy in the United States, wrapped around this particular image of the Madonna.

The Pope recognized the miracles occurring in East Harlem and officially crowned the icon in 1904 before a crowd of nearly 500,000 pilgrims who gathered along the East River. The East Harlem Italian community, once the largest in the United States, has long faded, but a small group of descendants, now bolstered by a much larger group of Haitians who find deep spiritual hold with this Madonna, continue the feast.

The Makeover

In 2015, the physical statue itself had been decaying for a long time. And because of this story I was working on, I had this strange, exquisite privilege of being so close to her.

Back to that room with the undressed Madonna, I couldn’t anchor myself in the vast space between what this statue meant, emotionally and historically, and the object itself. So instead, I began peppering Antoinette with questions since she had grown up in the last gasp of the Italian community in the neighborhood that orbited around this Madonna.

She was tall and strong, with a deep, raspy voice and an accent that could only be identified by native New Yorkers as distinctly East Harlem. She kept her hands folded before her, and when moving the statue, held it tenderly, like a delicate, beloved family member. Antoinette’s husband was an artist who built Mardi Gras floats in New Orleans and who had the technical skills to rebuild the Madonna’s face and body. The wig, made from human hair, was also deteriorated and replaced with one that gave the Madonna a chestnut blowout.

For the Madonna’s new clothes, Antoinette and her committee enlisted Linda and Tom Platt, fashion designers whom they knew from Rao’s, the East Harlem institution that remains one of the hardest places in the world to get a reservation. By the 1950s, the dress had been updated from simple brown to a much more regal blue, white, and gold, a lavish upgrade embroidered with gilt in a style you’ll find in other hilltown villages in Southern Italy. The great honor was given to a seamstress in Astoria, Queens, and was even written about in the New York Times.

It wasn’t clear at that particular celebration, but that was the beginning of the end for the East Harlem Italian community. The apartment stock in the neighborhood was so terrible that the Italians lobbied the city for new housing. They succeeded, but by the time the new apartment houses were completed, Italians were no longer arriving in large numbers, and many were now moving to the outer boroughs or the suburbs. Those new apartment houses became home to people arriving from Puerto Rico, which is how the neighborhood came to be known as Spanish Harlem. The annual celebration was almost extinct by the early 1990s until Haitian women found the Madonna. They reinvigorated her devotion, and the dress made in 1954 was treated by conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But accumulated damage from electric lights in the Madonna’s niche above the altar meant an entirely new dress was needed once again.

Antoinette had the Madonna removed to the secret spot in the church where she would be cleaned and repainted. A conservator created new patterns for the dress based on the original designs. Tom Platt regularly visited to do muslin fittings since the committee forbade the Madonna being relocated anywhere beyond the church. The Platts couldn’t find anyone with the hand skills to recreate the dress’s embroidery, but found competent talent in India, where the dress was then sent.

At that moment in 2015 when I first saw her, the dress hadn’t yet arrived, but Antoinette told me I could see it, along with everyone else, at the Mass that November, when the refreshed Madonna would be debuted to the community. Jacki and I were both there and watched the Madonna being prepped behind the scenes like a pop star getting ready to take the stage.

Distant Shores

Why are there so many churches dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in New York? The reason, like so many other goddesses from Southern Italy, comes from the sea.

The Carmelites were founded in 1155 by Christian hermits and former Crusaders living near the spring of Elijah on Mount Carmel, which is near Haifa, Israel. In 1238, the first group left for Cyprus and Sicily, and later arrived in Naples in the 13th century aboard Amalfitan merchant ships that regularly traversed the waters between Southern Italy and the Holy Land, carrying ivories, spices, and Crusaders. They brought with them a Byzantine icon of the Madonna that they had venerated on Mount Carmel itself. She became known in Naples as the Madonna Bruna for the simple brown frock that adorned the Madonna and a scapular that offered protection from this mortal coil. A scapular is just a scrap of cloth with an image on it, accessible to even the poorest citizens.

The most important church dedicated to the Madonna of Mount Carmel, more affectionately called La Madonna Bruna in Naples, in the Piazza Mercato. When Italians were emigrating en masse at the turn of the 20th century, this church was the last one they would pray in before boarding ships. She is the Madonna to whom they promised to dedicate themselves if she kept them safe on the journey. The fulfillment of that promise is why there are so many Mount Carmel churches across the United States.

At the Mass to show the Madonna off to the community for the first time, the priest told the congregation she had come out of the beauty parlor — a spiritual beauty parlor, he called it — rejuvenated. New hair, he said. New face. New hands. I watched Antoinette, a full foot taller than anyone on the altar, gracefully curtsy before the image, an old-fashioned crocheted veil atop her long, dark hair. In a flash, I felt as if I saw her as a young person, doing what all the other women around her did.

The Madonna of 115th Street Persists

Last night, a candlelit procession, accompanied by an NYPD squad car, laced through the streets of East Harlem. It ended in the church with a vigil and then a midnight mass. On Saturday, July 18th, the pilgrimage will be reenacted, complete with barefoot penitents approaching the altar on their knees. In Brooklyn, at another Italian church named for the Madonna of Mount Carmel, the annual Giglio festival is now complete, merging the ancient traditions of Nola, a town just outside of Naples.

The Madonna, like Venus and Aphrodite, whose stories have been adapted and transformed, washed up on many shores around the world. I see her when I walk my dog around my New Jersey neighborhood, with Manhattan’s skyscrapers visible, and the architectural landscape in flux. There are the small brick houses, still occupied by an older generation of Italians, who still have the once-ubiquitous “Madonna on the Half Shell” on their front lawns. These homes and their adornments are in stark contrast to the new houses that immediately go up when these old homes are sold and inevitably demolished, in favor of a large two-family cube with no grass or trees around it, so that square footage can be maximized and sold for two million dollars. Instead of Mary in front of the house, there is an EV charger.

Every July 16th, I think about that encounter with the exposed Madonna and try to parse what I believe. I am continually drawn to places and ideas that have been reimagined and redesigned, especially now because the last twenty years have been a hinge point in history. I think we’re all trying to locate ourselves in a vast space, where we’re not yet sure what all this change means. And when people feel lost, they often look for their mother.

If you’d like to join us, all the information is here: https://www.feasttravel.com/cilento

Also, a quick note for paid subscribers: the next Ask Me Anything About Italy will be July 23rd at 8 pm ET.

The most delicious thing you can eat in Southern Italy is buffalo milk mozzarella. Italy has earned such a sterling culinary reputation that most people just open their mouths and say yes to whatever is put in front of them. But every once in a while, someone says buffalo mozzarella, what the hell is that?

It is a strange thing to encounter, especially because the languid, enormous, but very sensitive water buffalo are cugini to the ones you’ll find in Vietnam or Cambodia, where buffalo milk mozzarella is not a thing. Buffalo mozzarella is made primarily in the region of Campania. It graces pizzas in Naples and has a different casein than most cow’s milk, so the lactose-intolerant among us can indulge. Buffalo farms abound in Caserta, near the stupendous Palace of Caserta, from where the Bourbon monarchy ruled over “the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” Before Italy became the nation we know it as today in 1861, it was a monarchy that pioneered several industries, including a dairy industry based on buffalo milk. But even more exquisite is the stuff made at a handful of farms, a little farther south.

If you’re driving there, maybe on a day trip from Naples or the Amalfi Coast, you’ll inevitably get snarled in traffic on what locals call “the mozzarella highway” through Battipaglia. Every sign on the roadside is flashing mozzarella di bufala. The traffic is largely due to hundreds of trucks that pass through daily to pick up mozzarella and transport it to supermarkets across Italy. I’ve heard waiters in Florence extol the virtues of its freshness, boasting that it just arrived in the restaurant that afternoon. I’ve also heard waiters in New York cooing that they just picked it up from JFK that morning. Keep driving; Battipaglia is an industrial farming zone, and everything is pasteurized for export. Better things await in the town called Capaccio-Paestum.

Paestum is most famous for three extraordinarily well-preserved Greek temples. They are massive and built of travertine, a volcanic stone, then coated in plaster and painted to mimic marble, which doesn’t exist in Southern Italy. Paestum was colonized by Greeks, conquered by Lucanians, who were the indigenous people of the area, whom the Greeks employed as their security goons, and then became a Roman city. Paestum was considered very old when the Romans conquered it. The oldest of the three temples was 280 years old. The Greeks regarded everything around the temples as sacred ground, but the Romans were insatiable real estate developers. There developed markets, civic buildings, a large Asclepieion, which was the closest thing to a hospital in the classical world, and dozens of smaller temples, all surrounding the big, very old ones.

Roman Paestum was bigger and far more important than Pompeii or Herculaneum, and though it’s beyond the reach of Mount Vesuvius’s molten tentacles, it is still affected by earthquakes. The Roman Empire declined, and Paestum sank. Literally. The reason: a phenomenon called bradyseism, which is a Greek word: bradys means slow, and seismos means movement.” It’s an imperceptible but continuous slow rising and falling of the earth - a slow-motion earthquake.

When the Greeks built the temples close to the glittering Tyrrhenian sea, things were on the up. But by the third and fourth centuries, Paestum was a swamp, infested with malaria carrying mosquitos. Mal aria means ‘bad air.”

The Paestani fled for the hills. Some went to the hills just above Paestum, founding Capaccio, my grandmother’s hometown, while others went higher to the sea-facing cliffs of the Amalfi Coast. The name Positano may be related to the Paestani who settled there.

And certainly people also went to Salerno, which was a Roman city, then under Lombard rule, and in 1077 was officially conquered by the Normans, proud descendants of the Vikings, loosely related to the Normans who just 11 years earlier had taken England at the Battle of Hastings. Salerno was a luxurious city, full of international merchants, and home to the world’s first medical school. Meanwhile, once glorious Paestum, not very far away at all, must have looked like the zombie apocalypse.

Just to let you know, I haven’t forgotten we were talking about buffalo and delicious cheese; they will soon re-enter our story, but first we need to stop in Salerno.

Salerno was where the Norman king built a cathedral dedicated to Saint Matthew the Apostle. It’s believed he died in either Ethiopia or Persia, but his bones somehow ended up near Paestum, and two people had a dream, alerting them to the location. They retrieved the old bones, and the cathedral was built around them. The Normans also began to adorn the area we now call the centro storico of Salerno with Roman columns from Paestum. They’re embedded in many corners, and sometimes you’ll see a sign with a dog lifting its leg and a red line across it. It may read “Questa e storia” - this is history, and don’t let your dog pee on it. The massive columns that you’ll encounter in the courtyard of the cathedral came from what must have been another enormous temple at Paestum, which was clearly functioning as an open quarry.

Why? Because using Roman columns made an architectural argument that the new power is heir to the Roman one. For someone from somewhere else, Northern France in this case, to frame himself as the legitimate successor to Roman Caesars. And how did they physically pull them out of the swamp and drag them back to Salerno? With water buffalo, which are naturally immune to malaria.

Buffalo arrived on Italian soil via Arab merchants, who first brought them from Southeast Asia to Egypt for use as work animals. For roughly two centuries, Sicily was under Muslim rule, first governed by emirs from North Africa. Sicily was wealthy and well-developed, so much so that the various wealthy factions descended into infighting, which allowed the Normans to conquer them more easily. Neither gentlemen nor scholars, they kept what the Arabs did best, including mathematics, agricultural practices, and sugary desserts such as cannoli. Buffalo thrived in the marshy lands along the Italian coast and were incredibly effective at doing the impossible work of clearing rivers. As they plod through streams, the underwater reeds that are nearly impossible for humans to remove will tangle around the legs of a buffalo sauntering through the day and easily snap and break.

Paestum doesn’t appear in the historical record again until the 1700s, during the period known as the Grand Tour. Part of a complete education was a trip to the Italian peninsula, where something astonishing had happened. Pompeii was discovered. The Bourbon kings of Naples not only founded the buffalo mozzarella industry, but also the field of archaeology, which didn’t exist. Pompeii fever swept the educated world and set off the Neoclassical movement. Paestum, though never completely abandoned, defined the word backwater, and was a more adventurous leg of the Grand Tour. In paintings from this period, you can see these beautiful Doric temples, their reflections in pools of water, and grazing buffalo all around them.

Can you imagine what a sight that must have been to citified elites from England and Germany? People who had never seen or even imagined a buffalo, or were accustomed to having their dopamine spiked by imagery hundreds of times every day?

In those paintings, you’ll also notice houses, and the locals – my ancestors – guiding the buffalo, or sitting on a hill wearing loose pants and a floppy hat, playing a flute, or some other peasanty activity. As a sidenote, I don’t understand how my lineage in this area survived long enough to produce me, as I am target number one on every mosquito’s agenda.

When you arrive in Paestum today, you will also find the very best farms producing buffalo-milk mozzarella within a mile of the temples. Most well-reputed is Tenuta Vannulo, a local family-owned farm that has made artisanal cheesemaking and the highest standards of animal welfare a point of attraction. You can tour the facility and watch buffalo using state-of-the-art self-milking machines, getting massages with what look like car-wash brushes, while a guide explains how Mozart is played for them in their pens. The result is a product unlike anything on the mozzarella highway, and it is exquisite. I especially recommend the buffalo milk gelato. If you’re a coffee person, get the coffee flavor, drowned with a shot of espresso. (To the uninitiated, this is called an affogato.) That’s it, that’s the peak coffee experience of your life.

But my favorite place is Barlotti, partially because it’s within walking distance of the Paestum temples. You don’t have the full organized tour experience that you have at Vannulo, but you can hang out with the buffalo, who are very quiet and relaxed in a very Southern Italian way. Have lunch inside their beautiful glass-encased restaurant or in the garden underneath the pergola. Don’t overthink your menu choices. Get the sample plate that includes fresh mozzarella, smoked mozzarella, and a mound of ricotta, followed by a plate of cooked vegetables, a selection of whatever is growing at the moment. For dessert, a cannoli filled with buffalo milk ricotta.

After lunch, walk to the Paestum temples. The swamp was officially drained in the 1930s by the Fascists, another group that sought to legitimize itself by resuscitating Roman ruins, and the ground continues to be managed today. After the war, when malaria was eradicated, a modern Paestum was fully developed. If you walk on the right side of the road, you’ll see water running – there are ancient springs here, which certainly inspired the placement of the temples nearly 3,000 years ago. The presence of the Asclepieion, natural springs, and temples together indicates that the Greek colonists identified this as a place of healing. And you can squint past the sunlight and use your imagination to see a parade of buffalo, pulling a plow with a giant Roman column atop it, en route to Salerno. Because everything good from the old world should be used to build the new one.

In this episode:

• The Bronze Age Collapse, and how the Odyssey emerged from that dark age

• The Nestor Cup on Ischia and the earliest written Greek in the region

• The Riviera di Ulisse: Monte Circeo, Sabaudia, San Felice Circeo, Sperlonga, Terracina, Gaeta

• Where Lazio starts feeling like Campania (and why)

• Laura’s mystery cruise from Athens through Magna Graecia

• Scilla, the Riace Bronzes, and the archaeological museum in Reggio Calabria

• The many legends of the sirens and what they really mean

• Capri: how best to enjoy it

• The Aeolian Islands and the god of the winds

If you want to learn more about the Bronze Age Collapse, I highly recommend Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed.

The Ulysses Coast

Thanks to Laura for these recommendations:

• Saporetti — the old school beach club in Sabaudia

• Hotel La Nave — retro family-run hotel in Sperlonga

• Bazzano Beach — beach club in Sperlonga

Laura also wrote about beaches on the Riviera d’Ulisse for a Lazio special edition of Bellissimo, Italy Magazine’s quarterly e-magazine for paid subscribers, and included several of these towns in her list of best beach towns near Rome on The New Roman Times.

You can read Laura’s Afar piece on Windstar’s mystery cruise here.

And in keeping with my advice to never trust an Italian website — the website for Sperlonga’s archaeological park, Villa di Tiberio is —- not working. But don’t be disssuaded, definitely go there, it’s amazing!

Ischia & Capri

The Nestor Cup is at Villa Arbusto on Ischia. Here’s my Ischia Deep Dive for more.

On Capri, this is Farella, the textile studio Laura describes.

We didn’t discuss it, but the Li Galli islands are strongly tied to the sirens as well — which is why the most famous hotel on the Amalfi Coast, Positano’s Le Sirenuse, takes its name.

Cilento

The siren Leucosia is said to have washed ashore near Castelabate on the Cilento coast — one of three regional claims on the myth, alongside Capri and Sicily. My Cilento Deep Dive has the fuller history if this coast is new to you.

Ischia is the place I always offer as an alternative to the Amalfi Coast or Capri, for the kind of traveler who is really looking for a more down-to-earth experience. And it really has that loo…

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Naples is very safe, but it’s not a living museum like Florence or Venice. It’s densely populated and there’s crazy traffic, graffiti, and frequently overflowing trash cans, but that’s also because the local population hasn’t been relegated to the periphery as they have in Italy’s most touristed cities. If you would like a colder read on safety, know that Milan has the highest crime rate in Italy. Second is Florence. Naples is 13.

In the past, a dangerous reputation was more rightly earned. Much of that was a direct consequence of World War II. Fascism had destroyed the mafia in Italy, and many of its leaders fled to New York. Then the Allies used the Italian American mafia to serve as informants at the ports to oust the Germans. In the aftermath, a black market emerged in the final years of the war, with the mafia controlling the supply and distribution of basic goods. Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” depicts this through the character of Don Achille and the mafia's metastasis, as portrayed by the Solara brothers. There is still organized crime in Naples. It’s called the Camorra — every region has its own brand, as you may know from the book, movie, and television series Gomorrah (a play on Sodom and Gomorrah, and also on the local pronunciation of Camorra). It still exists, but like any business, it has transformed and will not affect you as a tourist.

Naples is the most dynamic city in Italy right now. And if anyone tells you otherwise — specifically, a travel agent who insists you should stay in Sorrento instead — this is their agenda: Naples has only a small handful of commissionable hotels. Agents who don’t charge a fee and work on commission need you to stay in Sorrento where commissions are abundant. This is a huge piece of why outdated stereotypes persist.

What Makes Naples Special

A few things that set Naples apart from every other city in Italy:

It is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The historic center is nearly 3,000 years old.

Every neighborhood has its own character. Naples is not a cohesive city the way Florence is, where the historic center is all one nice circle. Every neighborhood, called a quartiere or rione, has its own culture, its own vibe, almost its own identity. You are, in a sense, traveling between different experiences within a single city.

It is the very best day trip city in all of Italy. Capri. Ischia. Sorrento. Pompeii. Herculaneum. Caserta. Baia. You can go wine tasting, hike the slopes of Vesuvius, go to the beach inside the city, or visit incredible hot springs just outside it. There’s no better city in Italy for day trips. I would venture that there’s no better city for amazing day trips in all of Europe.

The food. More on this below, but the short version is this: it is the Italian food people come to Italy for: Pizza and pasta with tomato sauce. It’s easy to eat well and inexpensively in Naples.

The Metro. Built in the 90s (which incidentally sparked a ton of archaeological exploration while they were digging), it’s easy to use, tap-and-pay, and costs about a buck fifty. You can get around the whole city that way. Which is good because the traffic is madness, and you do not want to be in a taxi unless you have to.

My Strategy for Crossing the Street

The traffic in Naples is something you have to experience to understand. Crossing the street for the first time is overwhelming. But here’s the trick: find a rabbit, by which I mean, someone to follow. On your first day, find an elderly person or someone pushing a baby carriage, and watch what they do. They will just step out into traffic, and the traffic will slow for them.

What you will quickly realize is that there is actually a lot of human connection happening. And I know this sounds crazy if you’ve never been to Naples before, but I actually feel much safer crossing the street in Naples than I do in New York — because in New York, if you’re crossing when the light’s about to turn, someone will mow you down and say, “I had the right of way.” In Naples, they will actually look out for you.

The Three Most Famous Things

The Archaeological Museum (Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli)

This is one of the three best museums in Italy and one of the best museums in the world. It holds all of the treasures from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Baia. Originally a military barracks that was part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies — because southern Italy, up until 1861, was its own kingdom — it got converted into a museum during the 18th century, when King Ferdinand and Maria Carolina (who was the sister of Marie Antoinette) were on the throne and Pompeii and Herculaneum were being excavated. As they pulled all these incredible things out of the ground, they needed somewhere to protect them, and eventually, the barracks became so full of amazing stuff that it had to be turned into a museum.

It also houses the Farnese Collection, because Elisabetta Farnese from northern Italy married King Charles, who held the Spanish Bourbon crown and was king of both Spain and Naples-Sicily. She left her collection to her son. The Farnese Palace in Parma is still pretty salty about this.

If you have limited time, pair your museum visit with a trip to Pompeii—make sure you see the mosaic galleries, because what you encounter at the site and in the museum will form a complete picture.

The Veiled Christ

This is a sculpture made in 1753 by an artist no one has heard of — Giuseppe Sanmartino — and it is inside the Sansevero Chapel, which is still privately owned. It is carved out of a single piece of marble. The veil draped over the figure is so fine, so impossibly rendered, that I promise you have never seen anything like it and you will never see anything like it again.

This is the one thing in Naples where I think you should buy tickets in advance on their website. It’s a small space, they limit entry to timed groups, and it has become quite popular. For most other things in Naples, you can generally just show up — but not here. And they are very strict about no photography inside, which means it’s hard to get a real sense beforehand of just how extraordinary this sculpture is.

Pizza

Who on earth doesn’t like pizza? It was invented in Naples. Yes, there are flatbreads throughout history that sort of gesture toward it, but pizza as we know it today was invented here, and the reason we have such great pizza in New York is that so many pizzaioli — pizza makers — emigrated from Naples to New York City.

Neapolitan pizza is very particular. It is almost like a tandoori bread: puffy on the outside, paper-thin, and a little soggy in the center. You eat it with a knife and a fork. If the dough is good, it should be light as a feather, and you could honestly eat two of them despite how big they look. They’re cooked for just 90 seconds in the oven. Pizza is a religion in Naples. People will argue endlessly about where the best one is. My honest take: I’ve been to places Neapolitans consider mediocre, and I still thought they were pretty damn good. But the ones you really can’t miss are Sorbillo (there’s one on the Lungomare) and 50 Kalò, which is another personal favorite.

Food

The food in Naples is the Italian food that people come to Italy for. If you’ve ever done a Northern Italian lakes trip and found yourself staring down a lot of risotto and trout, wishing for pizza and pasta, Naples is your place.

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Like all the world’s most fertile places, Sicily has been chronically exploited and is right now undergoing a form of luxury colonization. What’s been happening is that many small 3-star hotels are being acquired by hotel chains and renovated into 5-star properties with spas, restaurants, and services such as hot-air balloon rides and spritz picnics in a FIAT convertible. Right now, this market is enormous. I recently had a conversation with a colleague who serves the highest level of the luxury market, and he told me that availability is so tight this year that even those willing to do a full buyout of a property won’t get a late check-out because someone else is arriving promptly that morning on a private jet.

I believe Sicily is so attractive to today’s luxury traveler because it has the color and texture that offers a sensory vacation from the ultra-sleek, minimalist aesthetic of the wealthy in London, Los Angeles, or New York. The shouting fishmonger in Palermo is visceral and exotic for someone accustomed to sending their housekeeper to Whole Foods, with a list assembled from their Amazon Prime account. And as Sicilian economist and writer Claudia Fauzia said, the Italian south is the last place to experience authenticity while still being in the West.

Is this actually bad?

There are the predictable arguments for and against Sicily’s luxury tourism industry. Yes, it creates jobs, but the low-wage seasonal jobs do nothing to stem the Sicilian brain drain. People with law degrees don’t want to make beds. But at least people are coming to Sicily, many argue, and they will eat in local restaurants and pay entrance fees to the stupendous abundance of historic sites, all of which need more money and attention.

Food tours are popular; they visit markets, and the business is appreciated. Tourism is an effective way of helping local communities preserve their traditions. But it doesn’t help the vegetable seller or fishmonger who needs a daily clientele. The locals who buy ingredients for a weeknight dinner can no longer afford to live in the city center, because rents have been driven up by short-term rentals. The vendor making money is the one who sells shrink-wrapped cheese that won’t be confiscated at the airport, or bottles of limoncello in boot-shaped glasses. As such, Palermo’s Vucciria market, ongoing for a thousand years, is shrinking.

Old Bari

It has also happened in Puglia. More than a decade ago, the government of Bari finally got fed up with the mafia-controlled ports, empowered the prosecutors, and “cleaned up” the most historic section of Bari, essentially renovating the city for tourism. In the area that I remember friends in the early aughts telling me would often be shut down by police because there was so much drug trafficking, there’s now a Ferris wheel and an Eataly. The women who sit outside making pasta by hand, an artifact from a time when small apartments meant much of life was lived outside, are now photographed thousands of times per day by tourists from around the world.

So many Italians in northern Italy who held ancestral properties in Puglia began renovating old, dilapidated apartments and palazzi that no one knew what to do with until the tourists came and Airbnb made it possible to earn money with them.

It’s hard to argue that ousting organized crime and bringing in fresh eyes to marvel at a beautiful place is a bad thing. But in Sicily, as in Puglia, if you spend time in the places in between the tourist zones, you find a lot of unhappy people and difficult places. Tourists following the filtered path of social media influencers wrinkle their noses at the graffiti, garbage, or lack of reliable public transportation because infrastructure investment is continually lacking. My clients often ask me why they have a hard time finding more local experiences in parts of Puglia, like local bars and restaurants. I explain that the rhythm of local life doesn’t support those kinds of businesses well. People in the service economy work seven days a week during the high season, then have no work at all from November to May. They have either little time or little money.

Is the Luxury Colonization different than other takeovers of Sicily?

The Greeks began colonizing eastern Sicily in the 8th century BC due to overpopulation in Greece, and Sicily’s fertile lands were perfect for grapevines and olives. At roughly the same time, Phoenicians (people from what is modern-day Lebanon and Syria) colonized western Sicily to establish strategic trade ports between North Africa and Spain.

The Byzantines ruled in the early Middle Ages, extracting taxes and grain to feed Constantinople, until the Aghlabid emirs of North Africa chipped away at their authority, ushering in roughly two and a half centuries of Muslim rule. Under Arab governance, Sicily became wealthy from agriculture, but the ruling family tore itself apart in dynastic feuds, and the island broke into warring factions, leaving the door open for the Normans, descendants of Vikings, who completed their conquest of Sicily.

Today, Sicily's identity is built on conquest, with each wave drawing on its spolia to create something new. These transformations live most vividly in food and art. Like the Cappella Palatina, a Catholic chapel whose ceiling is adorned with muqarnas — an ornamental vaulting form born in mosques — and walls shimmering with Byzantine mosaics. The Spanish colonization of Sicily was part of the same empire that colonized the Americas, and through which tomatoes and chocolate arrived in Sicily from Mexico, then took off in their own direction.

The Luxury Elite

The wealthiest people of our age aren’t identifiable by their country. (Is Elon Musk South African, American, Canadian, or Martian?) But the wealthy do let us know who they are by where they show up. Lake Como, in clean, pristine Northern Italy, right on the Swiss border, is dominated by 5-star hotels, with a large clientele from China and the wealthiest nations of the Persian Gulf, places where wealth at this scale is newfound. Sicily’s luxury tourists come primarily from the United States and Europe. The Palermo fishmonger becomes a charming detail of a folkloric era that, gasp, still exists here. For now.

But does the luxury tourist add a new layer of history, or is Sicily just a colorful backdrop for vacation photos that live online? I wholly support the restoration of Sicily's beautiful palaces, and doing so requires a wealthy clientele. I have no problem with that. What makes me uncomfortable is when people become characters, rather than the protagonists of their own story. I fear the jig is up for the shouting fishmonger in the thousand-year-old market, unless he monetizes the theatrical experience like the pasta ladies of Bari. And I really hope that doesn’t happen.

A Better Model Does Exist

The model I find most useful is Matera, where the legal framework has shaped the restoration of the ancient Sassi, cave dwellings. Roughly 70% of the sassi are government-owned and leased under concession — available to anyone willing to cover the full cost of restoration — with Italian Law 771/86 requiring that all work adhere to strict conservation standards, preserving the character of the caves. The result is a city that wears its history openly: the luxury hotels built in caves feel like a new chapter, not a colonization. There are still debates and controversies for sure, but Matera feels reimagined, not just renovated.

The Rione Sanità in Naples is also an inspiration. Long a poor and mafia-dominated neighborhood, a priest began organizing local kids to help clean out ancient Christian catacombs, and abandoned churches Foundations and programs have been developed for locals to give guided tours and make history a deeply personal story.

Tourism is always eager to move on to the next hot place, which is why I wish local governments would have the guts to protect their best cultural assets: human beings.

Internally, it happens through legislation that favors locals, such as regulations on short-term rentals. New York did it, and even though it has made the city much more expensive to visit, it has been a very good thing for the city's dynamism and energy. Externally, I ask tourists to go to Sicily (and everywhere) with curiosity. Please do not complain about the graffiti or offer your ideas on efficiency. Sicily has spent three thousand years turning conquest into something beautiful and distinctly Sicilian.

Whether luxury tourism leaves anything behind or just leaves is the open question.

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