My mother has Sicilian origins. In our family, “the beach” always meant the South, and the South always meant rural islands with impervious access to water. When I look back on childhood pictures, I see rocks (not sand) and very naked people of all ages and body types. My parents claimed that vacationing anywhere that wasn’t a sun-blasted lava rock in the middle of the sea—with no electricity or running water or roads—was a sin.
“You don’t want to be like those people that go on holiday in the North,” they said to my brother and me. But of course: We did. We wanted nothing more than to be those people. In the summertime, my friends went dancing in nightclubs by the beach and returned home with stories about wild nights and flings with exotic-sounding men. All we could report back on were anecdotes about donkeys, water-well politics, and unreliable boat schedules.
Eventually, as an adult, I acquired my own taste for isolation, lava rocks, and a bathing-suit-free lifestyle, but before then I had to give myself the chance to live the hedonistic summer that was my Mediterranean birthright. Italy had been a place of sensuality and perdition for everyone from D.H. Lawrence to Paris Hilton. Perhaps Alessandro Michele put it best: “Virginia Woolf vacationed here to escape conservative laws in England—and there’s a reason why Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice and not Death in Minneapolis.”
So the summer came when my brother and I decided to ditch our family. We made a statement out of it, heading as far north as our forever Southern minds would take us. We went with our cousins and crammed our clothes into tiny backpacks. On our incredibly slow regional train, we shared headphones, our Discman playing Neapolitan hip-hop on repeat, and saw every detail of the geology change outside the window between one province and another. When haystacks made way for glimpses of sea on the other side of the tracks, we knew we were getting closer. (The train stations all had impossibly articulated compound names that usually ended with the word Marittima.)
Once arrived, we took over a small beach and soon found an abandoned landing dock with wide wooden planks. We fit one body per plank, and the floorboards became our new home, the epicenter of life, emotion, and desire. It was the beginning of cell phones. My cousin introduced me to text messaging. We marveled at the fact that we could write Ti Voglio Bene on a tiny object, press Send, and know that someone could be on the receiving end of that process. Life was slow, but it was about to become a lot faster. And we loved it.
At night, we had bonfires on the beach with a bunch of German and Norwegian kids who told us stories about forests and fjords. We played mixtapes from an old boom box, danced, fell madly in love, and said things like, “Can’t you see? This is meant to be.” Nothing was ever just a coincidence. Everything was charged with meaning—the smell of the Mediterranean pines, juniper, seaweed, citrus, myrtle, helichrysum, and rosemary, and the sound of the sea lapping, never in a rush or a bad mood. We made older friends who had cars and piled into tiny Cinquecentos. We drove on curvy roads and went to nightclubs with 1960s designs. We saw the sun rise almost every day, went to bed at seven in the morning, and showed up on the beach when everyone was getting ready to leave. We were just like adults, except we weren’t, and we cooked terrible food for ourselves.
Every once in a while, someone would crash a scooter or get in a fight with a local. I wrote long letters to my parents in Sicily. I imagined them perched on their isolated rocks under the inescapable sun. Next year, I promise I will vacation with the donkeys, I said, but for now, just for now, let me keep thinking that dancing in a decadent vintage disco with fading painted palm trees on the wall is the most important thing in the world.
In this story: hair, Cyndia Harvey; makeup, Ana Takahashi.