I was shocked and amazed to hear about the horrible xenophobic experiences you have had in England. I am half Sicillian, my Mother was also born in Sicily. I loved my Grandparents, my Grandmother would kiss me on the mouth until i was about I can burn in the sun, but if i am a little careful i can get pretty dark. My father was adopted by his parents, but it said that he was Sicilian on his adoption papers. My skin is olive and my eyes are a hazel green, though sometimes blue.
Not to mention that my hair is a little curly, all the features inherited from the man. I have yet to do a DNA test as those are expensive. However, I had to deal with racism when I moved to West Virginia due to the ignorance of the people in my area. I was called all kinds of slurs, ones meant for Hispanics from south of the border, ones meant for Iraqi people, and Arab which is possibly accurate.
When I tried to explain that Sicilians were basically southern-Italians, no one believed me because the one guy who had an Italian last name was fair-skinned.
Basically, I used to hate my skin. You should always be proud of your heritage. Sicilians have given so much culture to the world and have so much to be proud of.
DNA tests go on sale. I could only imagine how living in WV is. My dad was born there and lived there for part of his childhood. Try your best to ignore them ignorance is all I can say. Best of luck. According to famiglia lore they were mixed Egyptian and Austrian, and I speak Sicilian, German and other European languages and have traveled the world and when in Sicily and Egypt I blend in!
I also was fair when a kid and have darkened with decades of sun. Sicilians and Calebrese accept my appearance whilst Egyptians on the streets of Aswan never solicit me to purchase souvenirs! Very interesting. I always believe Sicilian got a little bit of African. No wonder we have a hot temper.
Lol love being Sicilian. Wife and I are mostly Sicilian. Her grandparents both sides were from Sicily. We took one of those DNA tests and found that she had a small percentage of Greek, a small percentage of North African, and mostly Italian. Interesting side note. They recorded his last name incorrectly and it is spelled that way today. It was only after my great grandfather had worked in mills for a few years that he was able to go back and bring the remainder of the family.
Unfortunately the U. We did have a reunion in with our Argentine relatives, and it was so sweet to see my grandfather reunite with some of his younger brothers and sisters who were still alive that who he had not seen since his departure from Sicily. I love your family reunion story. That even happens within Sicily! This is actually a great look at sicilian people.
Every person in our family where the sicily genes are the strongest have dark thick curly hair, dark skin, and very not stereo typically european features. My cousin, who people often think is latino, married a sicilian girl who is not as dark as us but not light either.
Both of their daughters are fair with blond hair. Yes, there are white sicilians, but also there are sicilians who no one will ever think are white and face discrimination in america due to that.
We are a great and beautiful people who are diverse in color and aesthetic appearance but still seem to have very similar core values which is really what matters. This is a great article. I enjoyed reading it. I think the reason so many Italian-Americans want to know what Sicilians look like is they are hoping to find some similarities with themselves.
I am a 3rd generation Italian-American. My grandparents moved here When they were young and I grew up hearing about the old country, learning about the food and the culture. Being Italian is very much a part of who I am and I think my grandparents would want it that way. If your grandparents came from Sicily then you are 2nd generation italian-american just like me…I grew up being very close to my grandparents and they were incredible decent people.. This short article perfectly describes my Sicilian heritage.
I am split down the middle German and Sicilian. My wife is German, Sicilian and Hungarian. They are so greenish blue!! I am proud of my heritage and dark skin.
We are in a class all our own. Sicilians are made up of Africans, Arabs, Greeks, etc. I wonder what my great Grandfather was secretly thinking!!
My grandmother was so blond and white, she was thought to be Albino by doctors. I as well stumbled across your article and thoroughly enjoyed it. My grandfather and his family were from Siracusa. Their name was changed when arriving in the U.
Campisi to Campise. I have taken the original name back. They were shorter, olive skinned and had dark hair and eyes. I am a mix. Slavic, Sicilian and Dutch. You can tell I have the Sicilian skin tone in summer for sure. Thank you and caio! I wonder how many other countries are like this too. There must be lots of places around the world where people are mixed like this. Great article which I thoroughly enjoyed! Who knew my Sicilian ancestors were Vikings!
I am looking forward to sharing this with my parents. They will be thrilled! I love this brings back memories as our family went from deathly pale to a beautiful deep tan all yr round!
I remember growing up my grand father who was USA born ,made a comment 1 time in front of me and grand ma changed the subject while looking at him wishing she was holding cast iron frying pan. Her hubby knew that look and he never brought it up again lol. My dads family came from Sinopoli in Sicily. And that was their last name as well. I will be visit to read this great blog after grandson goes home lol.
Ha haaa I love your anecdote about the Calabrese! You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account.
You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Skip to content What colour are Sicilians? Shocking prejudice I realised why, when a Sicilian-American friend told me recently about the staggering prejudice she had experienced, growing up as an American with a Sicilian surname. Early Sicily… prototype for a Benetton advertisement? Greeks Romans Jews , who were the only ones to migrate to Sicily instead of invading.
As you can see, the gene pool is quite varied. The kiddo was a bit more exotic. Why so much variety among Sicilians? So, what colour are Sicilians anyway?
I expect his backside is his 2. Like this: Like Loading Previous Post I Married a Pastafarian. Next Post Are you suffering from Tanorexia? Ian Senior-morrison says:. February 12, at pm.
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The man, named Sokhi, and I continued to talk in English. He told me had lived and worked in Dubai for several years. After I finished my snack, I asked if I could have a picture of the three of them together. They were happy to oblige. When he asked if I would send him a copy, I promised. He wrote down his name and address. I saw that they lived in Palermo. There was a fish market and fishing boats in one direction and a small outdoor carnival area in the other.
Before I left, Sokhi came back with a silver bracelet and said, "For you. It seemed like a very Indian gesture: to give a gift to a stranger. I put on the bracelet and thanked them, before continuing my walk. I felt truly touched by their generosity: they had not even known me. Was it because I had looked lost? Or because we had shared a conversation through many fragments of language? Or because we recognized a common past, history?
Before the end of my week in Sicily, many kindnesses shown to me and my traveling companions by near strangers revised my opinion. Perhaps this gift-giving--of smiles, oranges, a chocolate sweet, a silver bracelet, an old key--is Sicilian as much as it is Indian. In Catania, near the outdoor market, some men who looked like they might be Indian sat down at the base of a fountain and seemed to be looking at me. Feeling protected by my travel companions, I talked to one man who said he was from Bangladesh.
We talked about where we were from, what we were doing in Italy. Another student took our picture. I smiled good-bye and headed off toward the market. While Ellen, a photographer and traveling companion, and I walked through the market, the Bangladeshi man came up to us twice--once to give me his address and to ask me to send him a picture. He asked for my address--I said I'd write first and then he'd have it. The second time, he tapped me on the shoulder to present me a gift: a bag of oranges from the market.
Until the introduction of serious public education about a century ago, most Sicilians had, at best, a vague notion that they might be descended from the Arabs , Byzantines or Normans who ruled Sicily, even though the Sicilian language bears traces of the tongues of these peoples.
Historical awareness is one thing, day-to-day experience quite another. Perhaps the idea of Sicilians' collective "race memory" of conquest by these civilisations has been slightly overstated. That's a very good question. There exists an obscure urban social art sometimes called sicilianismo which involves men affecting a certain type of heavy, gutteral accent when speaking Sicilian, using arcane gestures, wearing lots of gold and generally attempting to impress others of their self-perceived sexist importance.
The cafone. The adjective sicula was coined by Sicilians to describe comparatively poorly-educated women who conform to the stereotype of the vastasa or cafona. Another word used to describe such women is giuseppina Josephine , actually a given name once very common among Sicilians. This pseudo-eponym is similar the Italian-American guido Guy , distant kin of the native Italian cafone.
Better-educated Sicilians aspire to be more cosmopolitan than this - perhaps studying English in a serious way it is now taught to Italy's youngest students and aspiring to a career beyond that of a velina, as Italy's beach beauties and show girls aspiring actresses are known.
Though underrepresented, Sicily's professional women deplore every palermitanata, as the lifestyles, chaos and urban problems of Palermo are called. A few years ago Tobias Jones wrote insightfully about these kind of phenomena in his bestseller, The Dark Heart of Italy.
If you spoke Italian and lived in Sicily for, say, two or three years, you would meet all kinds of people, even if everybody you met was born and raised and educated here in Sicily. From this experience you might be able to draw a few generalisations but few solid conclusions. You might find that for every case of babbismo or mammismo adult children well into their 30s emotionally and financially dependent on a father or mother there was a slightly less obvious case at the opposite extreme - perhaps even somebody whose father or mother had all but ignored her in youth.
There is also the matter of physical appearances. You would find that there are many Sicilians with brown hair and dark eyes but a significant number having red or blondish hair and blue eyes - albeit rather few with extremely light blonde locks.
Fashion is fickle and highly individualistic, even among young people. And black and white aren't the only colours people wear. Leaving aside the more obvious physical traits, for Sicilians themselves refer to dark-haired girls as more "Moors" and redheads as normanne "Normans" , you might notice a general dearth of better-educated people in certain professional fields; the "brain drain" is a Sicilian reality.
There are precious few high-tech firms in Sicily and the island's mediocre universities don't do a great deal of scientific research. However, there is no shortage of historians and archaeologists.
Here in Sicily, where tour guides are highly-educated, some guides' knowledge of Sicilian history is comparable to what you might expect of university history professors. You might also observe that an inordinate number of people simply do not seem very educated at all, premature school-leaving long before the age of eighteen being another unfortunate reality, especially among the so-called popolino.
Statistically, Italians read fewer books per capita than the people of any European Union nation except Greece. You might meet a handful of seemingly unscrupulous Sicilians, but also a few who are paragons of the integrity and honour so rare in the modern world. For every Cagliostro and Provenzano there's a Dolci and a Falcone.
You'd meet many women who know how to cook, and quite a few who don't! Most Sicilians are hospitable people. If a Sicilian offers you an espresso, he does so because he really wants to, not out of blind conformity to social convention. Yet most Sicilians, like most other Italians, are quite conformist when it comes to things like the "obligation" to give one's daughter a big wedding, perhaps going into debt to do so. This reflects the quest to put forward the bella figura, a good impression.
In Sicily individualism is too often an illusion.
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