Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Read Free Book Online Page B

rendezvous with The Godfather, I didn’t talk about my claustrophobia. I didn’t tell anyone that maybe I didn’t want to be known only as my sister’s sister or my parents’ daughter or my boyfriend’s girlfriend, that maybe I’d lived in that town too long and I wanted to go someplace where I could leave the house for ten minutes without running into my seventh-grade math teacher. So I told them all I wanted to study abroad to better my chances of getting into graduate school, which sounds a lot better than telling the people who love you that you’d love to get away from them.
    I have a few weeks after Christmas before I have to report to Holland for a semester of art history. I fly to Vienna. I get on a train there and another one in Berlin, and another after that, and one thing leads toanother and I find myself in Italy. How did that happen? Oh well, as long as I’m in Florence, perhaps I should pop down and give Sicily a look-see.
    The fact is, my little freedom flight isn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. I swing between the giddiness of my newfound solitude and the loneliness of same. I make a lot of panicked phone calls to my boyfriend from museums that begin with descriptions of Brueghel paintings and end with me sobbing, “What am I going to do?” I am homesick, and since I can’t go home, I might as well go to the next closest thing—Sicily. I know Sicily. And I love the part of The Godfather when Michael’s hiding out, traipsing around his ancestral hills, walking the streets of his father’s birthplace, Corleone.
    I take a night train from Rome down the boot and wake up in the Sicilian capital, Palermo. I feel ridiculous. I thought of myself as a serious person and it didn’t seem like serious people travel hundreds of miles out of their way to walk in the footsteps of Al Pacino.
    I don’t feel so silly, however, that I’m above tracking down a bakery and buying a cannoli, my first. I walk down to the sea and eat it. It’s sweeter than I thought it would be, more dense. The filling is flecked with chocolate and candied orange. Clemenza was right: Leave that gun! Take that cannoli!
    The town of Corleone really exists and can be reached by bus. I checked. Every day I go to the travel office in Palermo to buy a ticket to the Godfather’s hometown. And every morning, when I stand before the ticket agent, I can never quite bring myself to say the word “Corleone”out loud to a real live Sicilian. Because you know they know. Idiot Americans and their idiot films. I have my dignity.
    So each morning when the ticket agent asks, “Where to?”, one of two things happens: I say nothing and just walk off and spend the day in Palermo reading John Irving novels on a bench by the sea, or I utter the name of a proper, art-historically significant town instead. As if the clerk will hear me say, “Agrigento,” and say to himself, “Oh, she’s going to see the Doric temple. Impressive. Wonder if she’s free for a cannoli later?”
    On my final day in Sicily—my last chance at Corleone—I walk to the ticket counter, look the clerk in the eye, and ask for a round-trip ticket to Corle— . . . Cefalù. Yeah, Cefalù, that’s it, to see a Byzantine mosaic I remember liking in one of my schoolbooks.
    Cefalù might as well have been Corleone. It had the same steep cobblestone streets and blanched little buildings that I remembered from the movie. Lovely, I thought, as I started walking up the hill to its tiny, twelfth-century cathedral. Freak, everyone in the town apparently thought as I marched past them. An entire class of schoolchildren stopped cold to gawk at me. Six-year-old girls pointed at my shoes and laughed. Hunched old men glared, as if the sight of me was a vicious insult. I felt like a living, breathing faux pas.
    At least no one was inside the church. The only gaze