Discovering the Hidden Treasures of Italy’s Biggest Island

THE STONE BOUDOIR

Travels Through the

Hidden Villages of Sicily

By Theresa Maggio

Perseus Publishing

246 pages, $25.95

There is something inherently romantic in finding yourself between one tiny black dot and another on a well-traveled tourist map. The pilgrim’s progress in Italy has become so worn with our footsteps that American college students traveling there often carry the ubiquitous “Let’s Go” travel guide--not for choosing destinations, as the title suggests, but rather as a template for what, and where, to avoid.

American-born writer Theresa Maggio has spent the better part of the last two decades on a Sicilian quest, looking for the tiniest of towns on Italy’s biggest island. “These are places tourists seldom see,” she writes in “The Stone Boudoir,” her chronicle of those journeys. “But they are the island’s hidden treasure and the secret spring of Sicilian endurance.”

Maggio--who last wrote about Sicily, the land of her grandparents, in the evocative “Mattanza,” a portrait of the tuna fishermen of Favignana, an island off Sicily’s coast--has sought out places obscured from the typical tourist’s vision by a sentiment that some towns and villages were too small even to bear mention.

Using Santa Margherita, the town from which her grandfather emigrated to the United States, as her base of travel, Maggio travels around Sicily with little money to spend on luxuries but with an intense curiosity about how people live, and endure, on an island whose rocky composition is both an obstacle and a comfort.

All that is constant in a Sicilian’s life, it seems, is the presence of the sky, the water--and stones. Houses are fashioned from caves; a woman saves the stone turned over in her fields to build a patio for her house; a man makes a living assembling semiprecious stones into a jigsaw puzzle of elaborate inlay that will fetch thousands of dollars. When we learn that the father of one of Maggio’s friends died after his body grew a kidney stone too large to expel, we know that it is not just medicine but the island that failed him. Stone, after all, lasts for ages.

Maggio herself finds comfort in the cobblestones. Describing the town of Polizzi Generosa--”a long name for a small dot”--she writes that the streets “were so close and intimate that I felt I’d walked into someone’s stone boudoir. Every time I put my foot down, it rolled over the soft convex of a stone.... In the rain, the stones shone like puffed satin pillows--uneven, imperfect, and of humans.”

Maggio is a compelling writer who can render even the simplest moments into sheer poetry. Describing a mother feeding her 3-year-old twins, Maggio writes: “She twirled the spaghetti on a fork and the girls sucked in their supper strand by strand. The noodles whipped their cheeks with red sauce and made their mother laugh--love from a bowl, in the street, where there was a breeze and people watching.”

In moments like these, when Maggio steps aside and lets the people she meets take over her pages, “The Stone Boudoir” is delightful. But too often she inserts her own interpretations of events and people, a habit that can be disruptive to the narrative. As a result, “The Stone Boudoir” reads like a scrapbook of sorts, a chronicle of Maggio’s own belabored journey of self-discovery as we leap from one place and event to the next.

Unlike “Mattanza,” “The Stone Boudoir” seems to lack a center, a place around which all anecdotes and experiences fall, and when Maggio writes that she is seeking out “small-town traditions that give dignity to life,” one wishes that she would just describe the traditions and let the reader decide whether they do, indeed, give dignity to life.

In the end, the quest for undiscovered country at the heart of “The Stone Boudoir” is at odds with the conclusions it leads us to along the way: The people of Sicily were never really hidden from view. Perhaps we just weren’t looking hard enough.