Sea. Mountains. Sicilian granita.And a police stop.

Under the (blazing) Sicilian sun

Back in Fall 2017, my partner and I headed down to Sicily with our long-time collaborator, director of photography Antonio di Domenico, to film a branded piece for a U.S.-based client. So we took a ferry from the mainland to Palermo. Put it on your to-do list. Sailing into that city’s port and seeing the jagged mountains huddled around the city is absolutely breathtaking. The warm autumn weather was gloriously Mediterranean. We know Sicily well so we planned to combine work with a few days of pleasure to explore and visit relatives. This was turning out to be a very cool gig.

Love the one you’re with

For this quick two-day shoot, the client had provided us with a driver-slash-fixer to take us where we needed to go. That’s never a bad thing when you don’t know the area well. We needed to film a lot of b-roll before we did interviews so we were hit the ground running after dropping our bags off at the hotel. The driver was local so all we needed to do was tell him what we wanted to film and he’d make it happen. As a welcome, Cesare we’ll call him, insisted we first stop at a popular gelateria to try their granita, flavored ice, better than anything you’d find back home (and apparently anywhere else on the island by his own account) -- creamier, richer and intensely lemony. He parked in front of a church, always a no-parking zone, but he shrugged it off. After slurping up our icy treat (delicious, yes, though I prefer almond granita) we were off to the local port where several fishermen sat mending nets. Did we want to grab some footage from one of the docked boats, Cesare asked? He could make that happen. Shouldn’t we lock the car up where we had our gear? No one will take it, he assured us. I had the feeling we could do anything under Cesare’s care. He was eager to please, do as we wanted, yet maintained his distance. When I asked what he did for work on other days he mentioned sales, which could have meant anything. I wondered.

After filming at the port, we hopped in his car and were off to our next location. Cutting across town, we noticed in the rear-view mirror that a police car following us. Uh-oh. On went the flashing lights indicating to us to pull over. Cesare stopped the car in the middle of a busy street; passers-by stopped to watch. One of the officers approached the car, appeared to recognize Cesare, and asked for our ID’s. I’m certain they thought us a rag-tag bunch: a Roman, a Tuscan, an Italian-American from Chicago (always gets a reaction for obvious reasons) and a local who appeared known to the law. Is that a recipe for mischief? Maybe. After doing background checks the officers sent us on our way. We laughed about it later but it crossed our minds if Cesare had been in some kind of trouble before. No matter. He was pleasant, kept us and our equipment safe, and asked few questions. As sunset approached, he drove us high into the hills to view the shimmering Tyrrhenian Sea below. To our backs, the jagged mountains stretched deep into the Sicilian hinterland. We got our money shots that day. I was thankful to be able to travel back to my ancestral homeland to capture its beauty, this time for work. I never saw Cesare again. Sometimes, I think about him. And I think about lemon granita, fishermen mending nets, the Sicilian sun and the glimmering sunset sea.

I share one of my favorite quotes about Sicily penned by Goethe: "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."

A Chicago native, Gia Marie Amella is co-founder of Media Productions, Inc. a video and television production company specializing in non-fiction content across Italy. She lives in the medieval city of Montevarchi near Florence and Siena with her life and work partner Giuseppe Mangione and their rescue cat, Mia.