The French Connection: How We Got to Sicily

It began with a wedding. Somewhere in the middle was a family trip to Sicily. In our normal vacation mode we drove to all the corners of the island we could squeeze into fourteen days, flying into Catania with the kids, hiking Mount Etna, leaping off ragged rocky coastlines into the chilly water at Isola Bella and pulling mollusks from the shorelines of Taormina and Acireale for dinner, driving through parts unknown but somehow oddly familiar foraging for snails and wild edibles along the way.

We left the kids to fly back to the US in Palermo. We continued our adventure back along the coast on the western side of Sicily, driving down from Trapani through Marsala, and making our way to Sciacca —all the while contemplating the advice from our grown children to consider taking the plunge and moving to Europe, at least part-time. The idea didn’t sound as wild or as impossible as it once seemed.

But where? Michelle had always dreamed of living in picturesque Portugal, while Danny was captivated by the beauty of Sicily, having been inspired by a magazine assignment two decades before this trip. That assignment from Michelle had landed him in Palermo, where he cooked with Oldways alongside a group of fellow chefs. 

He came back home from that tour with a passion for the place that never left him. The breadth and depth of fresh ingredients from cheese and wine to pastry and breads to meats and fish to fruits and vegetables – Sicily is a source for every food group you can imagine. And it’s all treated with such respect. And the olive oil, well, that’s a story in itself.

So, when we found ourselves on the last leg of our trip watching the sun set in Vittoria at Baglio Occhipinti’s impeccably restored agriturismo after a morning with fishermen in the small port of Scoglitti pulling live octopus from pots, gelato with Rose, a New York transplant, in her family’s seaside cafe, and a quick stop for still warm ricotta cheese at a local farm – well, the seeds were not only planted, they were taking root.

With one of our four remaining restaurants already sold, we began scouring the calendar for possible return days – this time including a stopover in Portugal to rule that beautiful country out of the competition, and perhaps some stops in mainland Italy. The timeline led us to travel in September. Michelle mapped out a trip from the Coimbra region of Portugal to the Southeast of Sicily, wrapping up the trip on the mainland in Puglia, another seafaring area we had traveled for work decades earlier.

The Portuguese leg of the journey was successful, swayed by beautiful mountains and farms, and just 30 minutes from the ocean, Danny was impressed with a small village we happened upon. The incredible seafood was a definite highlight. Charmed by Portugal’s allure and its warm-hearted people, Danny found an ideal site for a home and a potential hospitality business. Before we signed on the dotted line, we headed back to Sicily, where we were slated to land in an agriturismo Bed and Breakfast owned by a transplanted French woman and her Sicilian husband. Michelle picked the spot because she wanted to gauge the perspective of non-native business owners on the Sicilian climate for “outsiders” coming to live and work in town.

She made a few mistakes in her planning. First, Marcelle was not a French transplant. She was an Australian who met her Sicilian husband, Filippo, in Croatia when they were in their early 20s. They fell in love and she moved to Sicily thirty-three years ago. So, she’s certainly no freshly transplanted outsider.

She got one more thing wrong; to her surprise, Michelle discovered she wasn’t interested in living in Portugal anymore. Any thought of that idea took flight once she and Danny awoke for breakfast on September 8, 2023. It was on that day that Marcelle and Filippo sat across from them at the breakfast table, and an early morning chat swiftly turned into an early evening conversation about life, food, and, honestly, everything. Literally, no one moved from the kitchen for the day. It was like catching up with long-lost friends. I wondered a few times if this was how they managed to get along with all the guests. 

After 72 hours in their home – despite Danny’s remark that we can’t make a decision where to buy a house based on the fact that I met some woman I liked hanging out with – we extended our stay another week, cancelled the Pulglia leg of the trip, and started earnestly looking at real estate. Our search soon became the community of Chiaramonte’s search. Through Filippo’s web of friends, we would find ourselves being waved down by locals to chat about a piece of land or an old house they thought perhaps might be for sale.

I wrote this on a plane ride back to the US two years later. We just left Sicily after three months of work on our house in Chiaramonte Gulfi and tending to irrigation and olive trees on the farm. Marcelle and Filippo hugged us goodbye at Catania’s airport, and Danny was sending off a note to Filippo on how much he missed them both already, whilst sitting in the airport lounge. Danny’s Italian is growing by the day. In the meantime, I’ve really only begun to grasp the language by ear; my pronunciation lacks effective communication markers, but my Australian idioms are pretty good. In fact, the running commentator in my head now speaks with an impeccable Australian accent – not exactly progress.

But as they say in Australia, good on you, we’ve now got more than 400 olive trees and will have a good lot of extra virgin olive oil in the boot of the car on the drive to Blue Ridge. Our conversations now focus on building more tours and experiences in Sicily for our guests, as well as for our friends and now partners in the hospitality industry. Filippo and Marcelle are as passionate about hospitality as Danny and me; honestly, hospitality is simply part of Sicilian DNA.

We’ve had several successful tour groups visit for a truly authentic experience and the opportunity to meet long-lost friends they never knew they had. Our openness to new adventures brought us unexpected gifts with the sale of our remaining Blue Ridge restaurants, something we had not truly contemplated until the opportunities appeared. 

And now, we are simply following the path that life unfolds each day. This fall, we’ll start working on our next five-year plan, which is long overdue since we are now living the 10-year plan we drafted four years ago. It looks slightly different from the original plan, but still, we’re both settling into the way our story is unfolding, feeling a deep sense of fulfillment and contentment.

And for me, it’s always nice to win an argument with Danny. Our world right now is certainly proof that you can buy a home and change your whole world simply because you make a new friend, who, in a way, you realize you’ve known for a lifetime.