Linda Puglisi Zanelotti rediscovers her father’s hometown in Sicily.
That’s my Sicilian uncle Joe whispering a final piece of advice at our table in the restaurant, the one with no name and no menu. He wanted me to remember . . . remember this town of Novara, even as it’s taken on a new identity of late, emerging as a center for agritourism just across the strait from the Italian mainland. But what he really wanted me to remember . . . remember was my heritage in the village of San Marco, near Messina, the little corner of the world where my father had spent his youth. I knew my father — indeed, we all did — as the gentle but gregarious owner of a shoe repair shop in Anacostia. But he was much more, and Uncle Joe seemed to be implying that you couldn’t really understand how much more without a trip into the past.
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