Less than two miles off the coast of the Italian mainland, Sicily is the largest and most celebrated island in the Mediterranean. We all think we know Sicily. Its romanticized landscape, its exotic culture, that it’s Italy… but at the same time it’s not. 

The Sicily of my grandparents’ folklore, of The Godfather, and even more recently, The White Lotus, is exaggerated but is in part true. It is breathtakingly beautiful. It is indeed a complex place, with a sweet and sour volatile past that could be best described as agrodolce. But to truly know Sicily and its people is to understand its Arab identity.