A year in Italy inspires a book, but it's not all praise, notes Nicky Pellegrino.
There's a formula to travel memoirs like this one. First you go to stay in some foreign locale, preferably in rural France or Italy. Then you write colourfully about the ups and downs of dealing with the locals and their funny customs, while scattering through a few facts and some culture.
Sicily, It's Not Quite Tuscany by Shamus Sillar (Allen & Unwin, $29.99) sticks pretty faithfully to that method, but what is different is that Australian Sillar didn't opt for some rustic idyll for his literary OE. He didn't live the dream of restoring a palazzo or growing olives. Instead he chose to settle in Catania, one of the largest and liveliest cities in Italy's deep south.
Unemployed and a newlywed, Sillar decides to spend a year in Sicily with his wife Gill, seeing it as an extended honeymoon - she to teach English, him to write a history book. But nothing turns out the way they had imagined. Their apartment is a slum beside the headquarters of a fascist gang of football fans, a vegetable vendor with a loudhailer wakes them at 6am each morning, traffic thunders past their windows, the ancient monuments are covered in scaffolding and in no time at all Mt Etna is staging a one-in-150-year eruption and ash is raining down on them.
Sillar has an ironical writing style as well as a sense of adventure. He hikes past police roadblocks to see the rivers of lava for himself, risking his life and nearly getting arrested. He is equally intrepid when it comes to trying food - spleen sandwich anyone? He plunges in rather than waits for life to unfold around him and the book is more interesting for it.
