Sicily: On A Clear Day You Can See Africa

Adam Leith Gollner takes a journey through Sicily in search of the Arab roots of the sun-drenched isle’s agrodolce flavors.

- Adam Leith Gollner

Seen from the sky—which is to say, observed on the in-flight video map during our final approach—the island appears as a triangularish football being punted toward the Maghreb by Italy’s boot. It’s a pixelated reflection of Sicilian identity itself, which hovers midway between North African and European. That intersection is what brought me here. I’ve come in search of a particular idea, a local expression, a secret password into this place’s soul: mal d’Africa. 

The mal refers to heartsickness, as in the feeling of missing Africa. For Sicilians, mal d’Africa is a kind of phantom continent syndrome, a sense of nostalgia for a lost homeland, a homesick longing for the landmass next-door that played such an important role in shaping their way of life. We all have it in some way, that desire to return to an impossible elsewhere. But people here speak of having mal d’Africa when they’ve been traveling away from home for too long. They miss Africa; they need to get back to Sicily.

On the morning I arrive, everything outside the airplane’s window is frosted in white clouds. From the lemon gelato sky, I descend into Palermo, a honking, city-sized souk lined with palm trees, closer to Tunis than Naples. When the campanile rings at the city’s main cathedral (its architecture Arab-Islamic, Byz antine-Orthodox, and Norman-Catholic), it sounds more like interstellar gamelan music played on gongs than Continental church bells.