What Nobody Tells You About Living in the Sicilian Countryside

The fantasy is extremely specific and everybody has the same one. There is a long table outside. There is a lemon tree, close enough to reach. It is early evening, the light has gone the colour of weak tea, and someone is bringing out something in a heavy dish. Nobody in the fantasy is on the phone to a man about a pump.

I want to say up front that the fantasy is not a lie. I have sat at that table. The light does that. The lemon tree is real and produces more lemons than any household can absorb, to the point where you start leaving them on other people's walls at night like a criminal.

But it is an edited fantasy, and the edits are the interesting part. Here is what I wish someone had told me before I moved into the hills behind Cefalù.

1. Water is not a thing that simply happens

In a city, water is a fact. It is in the wall. You turn a handle and it is there and you never think about it, in the same way you do not think about the load-bearing structure of your own spine.

In the countryside, water is a project. There is a tank. There is almost always a tank, up on the roof or the hill behind, and its level is a number you will come to hold in your head at all times, the way other people hold their phone battery. There is a pump, and the pump has a personality. There is a schedule on which the mains — if you are on the mains — actually flows, and that schedule bears an ornamental relationship to the schedule you were told.

In my first summer I ran the tank dry twice. The first time was ignorance. The second time was arrogance, which is ignorance that has been told once already. I had guests. I had cooked. Twelve people, and I said the sentence “go ahead and have a shower,” which in that house, in that month, was roughly equivalent to saying “let us all now walk into the sea.”

You learn. You learn faster than you would like to. Within a year you are the sort of person who turns the tap off while brushing their teeth and feels a small unearned superiority about it.

2. The countryside is not quiet. It is loud in a different key

People move out here for the silence and then discover that what they had in the city was silence with a lot of noise on top of it, and what they have now is noise with nothing underneath to absorb it.

Things that are louder in the country than anyone tells you:

• Dogs. Not one dog. A relay. A dog three valleys over starts something at 2 a.m. and it is handed along the ridge like a message in a war, arriving at your house forty seconds later and departing towards the sea.
• Roosters. The rooster does not crow at dawn. This is propaganda. The rooster crows at 3:15, at 4:40, at dawn, and then, insultingly, at about ten in the morning, when you have given up and got out of bed.
• Wind in olive leaves, which sounds like rain and will get you out of bed to close windows for approximately the first eighty times.
• The Ape. The three-wheeled van. You can hear one coming from about a kilometre and a half away, and you can tell whose it is, and by the second year you can tell from the engine note whether they are going to stop.
• Cicadas, in July, at a volume that makes conversation on a terrace genuinely difficult, and which stops so abruptly at a certain temperature that the silence itself wakes you.

None of this is a complaint. It is just that “peaceful” is the wrong word. “Unmediated” is closer. There is nothing between you and what is happening outside.

3. You will be given vegetables, and resistance is pointless

Nobody warns you about the vegetables.

Somewhere in your first spring a neighbour will leave something on your wall. A bag of courgettes. A crate of tomatoes that would feed a wedding. Broad beans, in quantities that suggest a misunderstanding about how many people live in your house. You will not see them do it. There will be no note.

Your instinct — if you come from anywhere north of about Rome — will be to reciprocate immediately and proportionately. Do not do this. Returning an exactly equivalent bag of vegetables the following week is, in this system, a form of insult. It reads as closing the account. It says: we are square, and I would like the relationship to end.

The correct move is to accept, to say thank you specifically and at length and preferably in front of a third party, and then to owe them something for an indeterminate period, during which you will be given more vegetables. The debt is not supposed to be settled. The debt is the relationship. It is a rolling account that will outlive both of you and be inherited by your children, who will also be given courgettes.

There is a man near us — I will call him Turi, since half the men of that generation up there are called Turi and it provides good cover — who has left something on our wall, without a word, roughly every three weeks for years. In that time we have had perhaps six conversations. I could not tell you his surname. I would drive him to Palermo at four in the morning without asking why.

4. August is not a month, it is a weather event

You know it will be hot. Everyone knows it will be hot. What you do not know is the architecture of the day, which August completely rebuilds.

From roughly eleven to five, nothing happens. Not “not much” — nothing. Shutters close. The light through the slats goes to bars on the floor. Any plan involving movement between those hours marks you, permanently, as a foreigner. The first summer you will fight this, because you have things to do and you have travelled a long way and it seems absurd to waste six hours of daylight. You will lose. The heat is not negotiating.

And then there is the scirocco, which deserves its own paragraph. It is the wind that comes up off North Africa, and it arrives with a sky the colour of weak coffee and a fine red dust that gets into a closed house, onto a closed car, into a drawer. It is not just hot, it is hot and wrong. It makes everyone irritable in a way that is openly acknowledged — arguments during scirocco are semi-officially discounted, in the manner of things said at a funeral. The old people go quiet during it, and the dogs stop the relay, and you find yourself standing in a doorway at four in the afternoon looking at a brown sky, thinking about what it must have been like to live here before you could simply wait it out indoors with a fan.

It lasts a day, or three. Then the tramontana comes down off the Madonie and the sky snaps back to that impossible blue, and the whole island behaves as though nothing happened.

5. The year is not four seasons. It is a list of jobs

This is the deepest one, and the hardest to explain to visitors.

In a city, the year is a calendar with weather attached. Out here the year is a sequence of tasks, and the tasks are not optional, and they do not care what else you had planned. If the olives are ready, the olives are ready. Not next weekend. Now, this week, because the weather is turning and the fruit will not wait.

Roughly, and with the caveat that every valley will tell you a different version:

• Late winter — pruning the vines. Cold hands. The single most consequential job of the year, done in the worst conditions, by people who make it look like they are barely paying attention.
• Spring — wild greens and herbs, artichokes, broad beans, and the countryside briefly, absurdly green in a way that people who only visit in summer refuse to believe.
• Early summer — everything at once, and the beginning of the long anxiety about water.
• Late summer into September — the grape harvest, which is exhausting and short-tempered and, unfailingly, the best three weeks of the year.
• October and November — olives. Nets under the trees, poles, cold mornings, and the drive to the mill with everyone else's crates stacked outside it.
• Deep winter — citrus, and the fire, and the very Sicilian activity of standing in a shed looking at last year's wine with your arms folded.

We built our whole tasting calendar around this, because it turns out that if you follow what the countryside is actually doing in a given month, the wine and the food and the reason for gathering all arrange themselves without any help.

What you get in exchange

I have made it sound like a series of logistics problems with a view, and for about eighteen months that is exactly what it is.

And then something turns over. I can tell you the exact evening it happened for me. It was early October, the light was going, and I was standing at the end of a row of vines with a man who had just spent two hours explaining, at length and with some heat, why the way I had stacked some crates was wrong. We had run out of things to say about the crates. Neither of us went inside.

The valley below us went through about four colours in ten minutes. Somewhere down the hill somebody was burning cuttings and you could smell it. And I understood, with total clarity, that I was not on holiday, that this was not a view I was consuming, that I would be standing in roughly this spot in roughly this light for the rest of my life, and that the man beside me — who thought I was an idiot about crates — would be too.

That is the exchange. You give up convenience, spontaneity, water pressure, and any illusion that your time is your own. What you get is the end of being a visitor. You get to be from somewhere. It is not a fair trade, in the sense that it is enormously in your favour, and nobody who has made it has ever, in my hearing, wanted to trade back.

The country house side of what we do — Ambrosia — exists because of that evening, more or less. Divino in town is the introduction. The hills are the actual subject.

And if you would like the short version first, with a glass in your hand and no tank to monitor, the long table is right here.