When Italians discover that I’m Greek-American, they almost always utter the same thing: “Una faccia, una razza” (“One face, one race”). It’s not just the way we look, or the uncanny similarities in certain words (take, for example, “sabato” or “Σάββατο”, which is the same in both Greek and Italian)—there is a centuries-long history that links the two cultures.

And nowhere is that perhaps more apparent than on the island of Sicily, a melting pot that has managed to retain vestiges of its various Greek, Arab, French, and Spanish conquerors. If there is one thing Sicilians are not, it is simply Italian, whatever our modern conception of that means today.