With Cousin Nino in Sicily
Sicily 2022
In 1988, I got the notion to quit my job at The Detroit News, a job I’d wanted since childhood, and go to Italy.
I had no plan. I didn’t speak Italian. I knew no one. Then I met Nino — and everything fell into place.
Nino and I are second cousins. Our grandmothers were sisters. Vita (mine) immigrated to Detroit in 1913. Rosalia (his) remained in Sicily.
Growing up in Detroit, I had never heard of Rosalia. Nino grew up Cinisi and had heard of Vita. She was Rosalia’s older sister and was known as a . . . well, today we might call her a bad-ass.
Grandma Vita was illiterate and spoke only Sicilian dialect when she settled in Detroit with her husband. It didn’t slow her down.
During the Depression, while my grandfather worked in a Ford factory, she ran a blind pig in her basement and later amassed a small empire of rental houses, buying up duplexes in our Sicilian neighborhood on Detroit’s Eastside. She did her own repairs. (I have a memory of her high up on a ladder leaning against a garage, holding a can of paint and a brush. I was four or five.)
Meanwhile, Rosalia was living a very different life in the small fishing village of Cinisi just west of Palermo. I imagine her life, if not tranquil, was very different in comparison.
I met Rosalia on that 1988 trip. (My sister, Theresa, joined me for part of it.) When Nino introduced us to her, we stopped cold. She not only looked like Grandma Vita, she sat like her, had the same smile and even held her hands in her lap the same way.
When Rosalia understood we were her oldest sister’s grandchildren, she pulled us in and cried.
I’ve returned to Italy and Sicily several times over the years and, always, Nino was there.
In 2022, I rented an Airbnb for a month near Cinisi to conduct family research for my first novel, Canary. Nino helped me retrieve the baptismal and marriage documents of Vita, Ignacio (my grandfather) and great -grandparents.
Thanks to him, I’ve explored the island, shared meals with distant cousins and listened to many, many stories.
I first went to Italy barely knowing a soul. I left with the rest of my family.
