There are many things about life in Palermo that, coming from Ireland, can be readily romanticised. We (myself and my boyfriend Tomás Clancy, who joined me here in January) buy big bags of iridescent fruit on the road home from bellowing street vendors – it is already strawberry season.
The weather is aggressively pleasant, and the mountains tall. Broad men of every nation litigate on street corners. An atmosphere of indignation reverberates through the loud air. The only way to fit in is to begin to shriek at every opportunity, or putting a palm to a car bonnet also suffices. It reminds me of my imagined idea of Dublin in the rare aul’ times. A slow carousel of images, a sundial of nostalgia. I’m lucky because I speak Italian.
I’m 23 years old and have been based here since August 2023 after finishing my undergraduate in law in TCD last April and spending the summer trailing around Europe with my trusty, rusty bike.
I left Harold’s Cross in Dublin because I wanted a kind of financial freedom that wasn’t on offer to me there. I have a job here as an English language assistant in a secondary school. I got this job through a programme between the Irish and Italian governments (which it also has with many other European governments), and across Europe it is standard: 12 hours a week in classrooms with English teachers doing pretty much whatever they tell you to.
For me, this involves a lot of having students explain to me the different kinds of bread art that older ladies in their home villages make for Festa di San Giuseppe, and very occasionally trying to lead conversation classes during which there is lots of silence and whispers of “che cosa ha detto” (what did she say) – I am not a born teacher, by the way. But I’m earning €850 a month for my troubles.
In this city, I’m swimming in it when they pay me on time. I currently split €300 a month rent with Tomás for a whole apartment while my Venezuelan housemate is away on a research trip. It’s not just a matter of being cheaper than Dublin, there is a kind of life available here that has been squeezed out of my home town.
Though Ireland and Sicily are distant from one another relative to our compact continent, I am more often than not struck by the similarities in the mindsets of the people – psyches shaped by conquest, isolation and the sea. There are not one but two Peaky Blinders-themed enotecas in the city centre.
There is a kind of intoxicating sorrow in the social fabric of the community here that strikes me as being Irish, but that exists in our capital now only in traces. I spend much of my time here volunteering at a legal clinic for people who have entered Italy illegally. The situation for them is ever-worsening under the current Italian government, and Sicilians have no illusions about the cruelty of the new laws.
In my view, Ireland has developed of late a kind of postcolonial self-importance through which we imagine a lost spirit of “our people”, pillaged by centuries of occupation, which we must now “reconquer”.
In the summer, when roughly double the ordinary population of the Sicilian island Lampedusa arrived there in small boats in two to three days, the Lampedusan protesters said “the government is killing all of us, Lampedusans and migrants”.
In Sicily, people are people, the government is the government. They have a saying here: “A crime isn’t in what you do, it’s in who you do it for.”
In Ireland, we think we are exceptional for being a small island with two governments on it. But look at Cyprus, and indeed Sicily: it has always been a patchwork; architecturally, linguistically, culinarily, socially, demographically. You will often hear Sicilians say: “We are a mix of everything: some Norman, some French, some Greek, some Arab.”
And they have seen far too many bodies washed up on beaches to deny what modern migrants must sacrifice for the futures of their children. This is not to say that Sicily is not a very difficult place for migrants.
My best friend is a 31-year-old Moroccan migrant who has lived here for seven years. You’ve heard the stories about the passage across the Mediterranean (particularly if you have read Sally Hayden’s excellent The Fourth Time, We Drowned). But the woes do not end with the violent passage.
The other day we were talking about his Libyan friend whom we’d spent an evening with once, and how she always gives any begging person money despite her own difficult life. Yes, I said, she told me her baby died here. “Not died,” he told me yesterday, “killed”. He explained how she had left her son at home in the centre she had been staying in to get milk one day. Some ragazzo who lived there must have been playing with him [her son]. He often did. He must have thrown him in the air and the baby fell. When she came home with her milk she found her baby dead on the floor, and the ragazzo had taken his bag and run.
She received no kind of compensation. Yet, despite having lived in other parts of Europe after this, she returned to Sicily. She had shrugged and smiled when I asked her why. “The people” was her only stated reason. Sicily has been made by the strange boats that dock on her shores. It is “the original mixing pot”, said Palermo’s previous mayor.
I like to think I add a touch of spicy sweetness.
- Anna Waters is from Dublin and now lives in Palermo, Sicily. She is an English language assistant in a school, but primarily went to work with refugees and experience migration at the front line of Europe’s border.
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