When I moved from Italy to London 15 years ago, one of the things that I found most puzzling was how, in such a gloriously multicultural city, people still tended to form social groups based on where they came from. At first I thought it had to do with my personality, but one day the reason became clearer when I stepped into a coffee shop. While ordering, recognising the barista’s Sicilian accent, I switched to Italian and explained I was from Sicily too: that’s when the barista’s smile died and his tone became very rude.
Over the following months, there were similar incidents in bars and restaurants. Every time I tried to strike up a conversation with a fellow Sicilian they gave me the cold shoulder. On reflection, I realised that in Sicily people bonded over their sense of not belonging. This perceived alienation from our birthplace and to its fellow inhabitants is a curse that every Sicilian carries, but is not always aware of.
During my childhood and teenage years, the recurring pastime at family dinners and gatherings of friends seemed to be vehement complaining about Sicily and Sicilians. Be it institutions or individuals’ moral conduct, every anecdote was meant to prove how Sicilian society was doomed to failure.
The shadow of the mafia and corruption hung over our beautiful island, so when my parents asked me why I wanted to move to northern Italy for university and not even look at what local universities had to offer, it felt like it was a surreal question, similar to an unsolvable Zen riddle: I was so used to despising where I had grown up that I had never considered staying after my high school graduation. It was only later that I found out that such an obstinate rage was not the only possible relationship you could have to your birthplace.
Sicilians’ mass migration to the north of Italy or abroad (very often both, in two steps) has always been a huge problem. Since I left, more than 25,000 Sicilian university students have moved to universities in central and northern Italy or abroad and haven’t returned, leaving the island with a shortage of crucial professionals such as doctors, so much so that in March it needed to hire hospital staff from abroad to fill 1,494 vacant positions. In Messina, our third largest city just across the water from the Italian mainland, the population has declined by 9% over a 20-year period from 2001, leaving a prevalence of over-65-year-olds.
This phenomenon is certainly not unique to Sicily, but while an exodus of young, educated people is usually called a “brain drain” in English, it’s always a “fuga dei cervelli” – brains’ escape – in Italian. This difference is important because, while the concept of a drain is purely descriptive and contains no judgment, an escape is a desperate and voluntary action: you escape from a prison, and you do it because you feel you have no choice (a popular saying in Sicily is “cu nesci arrinesci”, “leaving is succeeding”).
But why is it so inevitable to flee, and so tragic to stay? If asked, most students would say their choice was motivated by educational and economic reasons, and Sicily indeed has a much higher unemployment rate of 15.9%, against the national average of 7.9% and the northern Italian average of 4.6%. It also ranks as the poorest Italian region in terms of average income. We have a history of big investment gaps between north and south, and this is likely to get worse under Giorgia Meloni’s government after a bill was approved in June allowing wealthier northern regions to keep more of their tax receipts – a move that has long been championed by northern Italian states – leaving southern Italy with even fewer financial resources.
But, I think, Sicilians’ urgency to flee and our self-loathing go way back: they are deeply rooted in our historical identity as witnesses of perpetual invasions. From the Byzantines to Muslim Arabs and Berbers, to the Normans and then the Spanish, we’ve been the cultural playground of an array of civilisations that left us with the sheer impossibility of forging our own identity and with a visceral desire to escape.
More recently, in spite of the island’s efforts to distance itself from its mafia image the sad truth is that while its beauty and delicious food now draw tourists from across the world (partly because of TV shows such as The White Lotus), the dark motif of its history still informs most narratives. This is not helped when the son of a former mafia boss posted a message on social media that wished his followers a “happy holiday” on Ferragosto – Italy’s national holiday on 15 August. He used the family’s old address in the town of Corleone (made notorious in The Godfather), even though the address was renamed six years ago in tribute to the anti-mafia judge Cesare Terranova, shot dead by the mafia in 1979. (The post was later edited after it had angered and upset the town’s residents.)
And just last month, a British friend sent me an Instagram reel of the comedian Jimmy Carr joking about an Italian couple living in the quiet, suburban town of Hemel Hempstead, commenting they must have been sent there for a mafia witness relocation programme. Italian media, too, still portray us through the stereotypes of criminals and idlers, with mainstream TV shows feeding on the widespread idea of a backward, folkloristic island.
I have tried to keep contact with my friends in Sicily, but in vain: the last time I saw one of them, when I was home for Christmas, she said: “I feel for you a mixture of admiration and envy,” and then stopped responding to my texts. Sicilians seem to have two choices: either forge your identity as an alienated expat who has fled the homeland or become a resentful local who has stayed put.
I believe the first step towards redefining our relationship to ourselves in a healthier way should be a shift in narratives, informed on political grounds by a drastic reversal of the government’s financial plans, allowing the south of Italy to access more resources.
At the same time, I believe that in today’s troubled political landscape – frequently provoked by extremist nationalistic feelings that divide in the name of unity – the idiosyncratic case of Sicily also gives us Europeans the opportunity to rethink ideas about belonging – we should root for each other, wherever we are from and wherever we decide to stay.
Viola Di Grado is an Italian novelist and literary translator. Her latest novel is Blue Hunger
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