Taormina, Sicily – I reserve a special place, far in the depths of the lower intestine, where I store my feelings toward the state of Alabama.
You roll your eyes at the notion, clearly sour grapes for an adult life filled with Nick Saban-crafted heartbreak, but I’d love to grab a drink with the guy. Same with Steve Spurrier.
Just not with anyone from Alabama.
I love white barbecue sauce, and Huntsville is quite literally filled with rocket scientists, and every southerner wished their hometown looked like Eufala. I’ll grant you these.
But go to Birmingham and see a city that gave up when it lost Bear Bryant and Bull Connor. Soldier Field collapsing in on itself, a few lights reliably out on the Regions Bank marquee nearly 20 years post-crash, monuments celebrating iron as though the town failed to realize we aren’t living 1000 years before Christ.
And, most painfully, a population that spends the entirety of life with the mindset of an 18-year-old at a fraternity cookout.
The kind of cocky bastard that bends your ear about meats while burning the life out of your burger, tells you in one whistle how he can’t control himself looking at some underage girl at the pool party before offering an impassioned, Jesus-backed endorsement of eugenics.
And so one might imagine my reaction, upon our arrival at the Belmond off Taormina’s Corso Umberto, to find a wedding party chanting, “Roll Tide!” by the pool.
God gives his strongest soldiers his toughest battles, God has a sense of humor, God apparently thought this one would be a hoot.
An offspring of these Powerball winners is screaming on the terrace as I attempt to sample the wines, her parents piss drunk and unconcerned. We’re looking out over the hill down to the sea, Mount Etna in the distance. I briefly consider chucking the child into the volcano before realizing my issue is with her Homer Simpson of a father and he’s far too heavy to chuck.
Maybe I’ll color a pirate map to a Golden Corral and leave it under his glass.
Sicily has curiously found itself at the split between Earth’s two worlds throughout modern history: Athens and Rome, Rome and Constantinople, Christendom and the Caliphate, Washington and Moscow.
Italy’s toe stands testament to this millennia of conflict, its architecture a tour through the push and pull between worlds, Greek, Roman, through Baroque to the grit of the Belle Epoque. Each intermediate conqueror leaves her mark, refusing to allow the other side a final word, and the blend is hectic and beautiful.
It’s four billion degrees here, ample humidity, and every city feels coated in the blowing sands of a desert, as though the Sahara picks up occasionally and repaints the vibrant architectural diversity into a single golden hue.
I bite my tongue to avoid mentioning the Mafia. In Colombia I was warned not to mention Pablo Escobar which invited a similar anxiety. The king of cocaine was most certainly dead, however, unable to pop from the bottle should I rub it. The Mafia is still here.
And were there any doubt on this fact, the roads confirm it. Wide, modern highways break quickly to clogged, two-lane arteries without warning, nothing more than a few scattered cones to alert drivers to the immediate end of any ability to travel at more than 20 km/hr.
The comparison to drives in northern Italy is rather impossible. One half of the country has modern, privately-run toll roads and warm prosciutto sandwiches at the Autogrill, rarely a slowdown from Monaco clear to Venice. The other, well, doesn’t.
Most income and wealth metrics similarly show a lack of warm sandwiches in the south.
Armchair economists online blame the divergence – the questione meridionale – on the south’s agrarian base, a relative lack of social trust, the church, the Spanish, the land, the list goes on.
But the fact is that Sicily was one of the globe’s prized possessions throughout history and today remains in prime position for tourism and trade. The island features two international airports connecting to capitals across Europe and even to the States, and (pretend this one is in all caps) White Lotus filmed there.
The math is simple. China, Russia, Iran, once upon a time Venezuela – there are countries all over the world that have competitive advantages but funnel the benefits of those advantages to a few, not leaving much for the rest.
Sicily sits in the middle of history and trade, attracts celebrities, a state within a first-world power. But it feels like a Caribbean island, with fresh pavement where the tourists go, cows roaming pockmarked paths where the people live.
A land seemingly forever on the world’s frontier, a bit too far away to govern, the Mafia has little resistance to its grift, its control, its contracts that leave highways perpetually in a half-finished state.
In Birmingham those with power hoard their toys behind gates atop the mountain, for forty-plus years flippantly watching from above as the state’s economic engine devolved into a feral state. In Sicily, the Mafia leeched onto the crossroads of the Mediterranean and won’t stop milking.
Both spots, like so many these days, waiting on someone to invest in anyone but themselves.
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