I have an admitted bias towards my hometown of Messina, and though I have since left it, I still feel like its champion out in the world. Often overlooked for other, grander Sicilian cities like Palermo or Syracusa, Messina barely registers on travelers’ radars.

Any friend who has been to Messina in the past typically tells me that they were only passing through to take the ferry and then rejoin the rest of Italy, as if my Messina was a ghost town. There is a tendency to prefer to claim being Sicilian (any interlocutor lights up at this discovery), rather than coming from Messina, in order to avoid this subtle humiliation.