CHARLIE IN ITALY
Living Abroad
Charlie in
ITALY
Every month we interview someone who has lived in or visited a foreign country. This month we are talking to Charlie, an Irishman, about his time in Sicily. What were your first impressions of Italy?
I was on a train travelling down from the north of Italy. In the morning, I woke up to see a Carabinieri come into the carriage. He stood beside my seat with a cigarette in his mouth and his pistol almost touching my shoulder. I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m in the Wild West”. Later, I arrived at Catania and the first thing I noticed was the traffic with hundreds of Vespas, and the air heavy with their fumes. The buildings impressed me too with their black-walled Gothic designs. Apparently, after the city was flattened by Mount Etna in the late seventeenth century, they rebuilt everything using black lava rock.
What did you do there? I went to study classics. My contact was Professor Romano. On our first day there we went to his office and told him who we were. He just smiled and told us to go to the beach, find some nice Sicilian girls to teach us Italian, and to come back after Christmas. And that’s what we did. For the second year I worked.
What job did you do? Getting work in Sicily is difficult. Sicily is a very traditional society
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where the family network is fundamentally important. Businesses are mostly family affairs, and many small firms employ all three generations of the immediate family, with the grandmother at the till and the grandchildren lifting boxes. During my first year the only job I got was washing dishes in a restaurant. The only real options are as an English teacher or as a waitress; I say “waitress” because in Sicily they only hire girls in bars. Eventually I went to work in an English academy.
What were the best things about it? Culturally Sicily is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Normans, Bourbons... you name it, they’ve been there. Cities such as Taormina and Syracusa are beautiful and full of history. By day you’ve got the beach, the volcano and great surrounding towns and cities to see. Sometimes you look up at Mount Etna smoking away and wonder why there is a city there at all. You can go up and check out the lava flows. You could even ski there until last year, when the latest eruptions destroyed the ski station at Nicolosi. At night, we did a lot of drinking. Catania’s got great nightlife, and it’s much better compared to many other Italian cities. This is mostly because it’s full of university students.
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