Sicilian Splendors: Discovering the Secret Places That Speak to the Heart

Keahey (Seeking Sicily) is a congenial host in this sunny and inquisitive memoir of his three-month excursion to the least-visited parts of Sicily. He shows up in a town of a few hundred or a thousand people with a loose plan that is almost always guided by the locals (“I come into a village unannounced, ask questions, usually at a bar, where someone almost always knows the answers or knows somebody who knows”), who eventually show him around. Keahey interweaves Sicily’s history of invasions (Greek, Roman, Norman, and Arab) and their cultural and culinary legacies into his story, between getting sidetracked by a conversation with a new Sicilian friend or a delicious local pasta dish (while visiting Calascibetta, Keahey ate “some twisted noodles I had never seen before with ricotta and a tomato sauce”). The book has an air of melancholy to it, as well: Keahey notes how emigration to northern Italy or abroad has left an interior filled with empty buildings, some of which are now being rehabbed into B&Bs by those trying to make a living off the growing tourism industry. This is a wondrously joyous account of travel as it should be. (Nov.)