June 26, 2024 • 37 mins
Did you know that Sicily is the home of brain freeze? Or that the so-called snakes on Medusa's head might actually be eels? Or that Sicily is home to one very very specific type of revenge architecture? From Sicily's delicious space program to cutest animals to ever roam the land, dig in as Mango and his pal Jo Piazza-- author and host of The Sicilian Inheritance-- talk all things Sicily.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Hey there, Joe, Hello Mango. So I know
that you like canoli's. You've been making them for all
the people who come to your book launch parties at
various bookstores across the country for your wonderful book, The
(00:24):
Sicilian Inheritance, which is honestly the greatest thing ever. I mean,
coming to hear an author talk while they make canoli's
for you is pretty great. But then I saw this
fact this week about Canoli's and I had to tell
you about it. So did you know that a canole
has actually gone into space?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I did not know that, but I'm also not surprised.
I mean, I can only can really do anything. It's
an intensely versatile dessert. But how did it get there?
Did NASA take it there?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So the story is a little more low than that. Apparently,
these three young scientists decide that they wanted to do
something joyful for Sicily, so they started what they called
the Sicilian Space Program.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Wow, do they have T shirts? Because I want one?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I know I want a tea shirt too. But these
three scientists, with no real money, decided to send a
canoli into space, and because a real canoli would actually disintegrate,
they fabricated this delicious looking canoli or canolo because I
guess one canoli is called canolo, yes, And they made
(01:33):
it out of lightweight polymers, and then they modeled a
path and attached it to a little helium balloon craft
which they called the Canolo Transporter, and along with it
they sent a thermometer, a parachute, a GPS device, and
a camera, which is so great because the shots of
space from this like Canol helium spacecraft looking down on
(01:55):
Earth are absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Wait, no, no, sorry, Okay, So I am imagining it
with a face to be honest, because I so when
I sign the Sicilian Inheritance. And I'm now coming up
on my one hundredth event for this book in three months,
because I've been doing bookstores and I zoom into book
clubs for it for a while. I've been trying to
draw canoli in the books, but they never look like canoli.
(02:19):
They look like something else.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Okay, I'm not going to say what they look like.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And then I draw a little happy face on them,
which makes it even worse. So I'm picturing I'm picturing
this space cannoli with a little happy face smiling down
on the Earth, which is a really wonderful thing.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
But did they actually get it to space. They did
get it to space, no smiley face. They got it
to thirty thousand meters into the air, so into the stratosphere,
and I guess the thermometer recorded a temperature of negative
fifty degrees celsius before it started crashing to Earth, so
that's pretty amazing. And then the scientists chase it down
(02:54):
through this field of sheep to find their space canolo.
But what's really sweet about the whole thing is that
they just want to change the perception of Sicily a little,
from this land of mafioso and economic struggles to something
really delightful. And according to one of the scientists, this
is what he said, our Sicilian space program was a
gift meant for all Sicilians and a way to make
(03:16):
them smile. For us, this great little gesture is a
gift to the Cosmos, a technological right, and even just
a simple gesture to lift up Sicily in our own way,
which I just think is really sweet.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I love you. That's the first of a whole bunch
of facts we have about Sicily today, So why don't
we dive in.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Welcome to part time genius. I'm youngish articular. My good
pal Will Pearson is off on a business trip this week.
But that's great because I pulled in author, journalist, podcaster
and one of the most remarkable people I know, Joe Piazza,
to sit in his chair. Joe, thank you for being here.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Oh thanks for having me. I'll fill in for Will anytime.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And of course leaning back in the studio, feet on
his desk, cracking open Sicilian pistaches and just tossing them
on the floor without a care.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh yes, of course that is our wonderful Dylan Fagan,
just scarfing away on pistachios back there, but just just
snack and just snack. And you know I should have
made you guys, can only you know?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Joe? I always tell people I don't know anyone who's
as insanely productive as your. You've got three kids, a
wonderful marriage, You're always writing at least two books at
any one time, and you also seem to prioritize reading
and sleep, and you travel. So I am curious, how
do you get it all done.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I don't actually I don't actually know how I do it.
I have to say. I think it's I just don't
f around anymore, like I'm insanely efficient, Like I don't
have I don't actually scroll Instagram even though I report
on Instagram. And yeah, I'm an efficient Virgo.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
I grew up.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You'll appreciate this as a person who loves astrology as
much as I do. I grew up rejecting like all
of the traits of a Virgo, like super organized, super efficient,
love security, much in the way that I grew up
reading The Babysitters Club and thinking I was a Stacy
because she was cool and from New York City, and
you know, as I'm an adult, I'm like, oh, yeah,
I'm a freaking Virgo.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
And I'm not Stacey. I'm totally Christy.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So yeah, I asked Ruby what they thought they were
in terms of the Babysitters Club, because of course, you know,
obsessed with it. And Ruby's like, well, I'm organized like
a Christie, but I like to hide candy all over
my room like like a Claudia. Like a Claudia.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
That's fair.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So I've got your best seller right here. The Sicilian inheritance.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
came up with the story of this book.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Oh, I sure can, Yeah, I mean it started out
I wanted to write a delicious adventure to Sicily, and
I loosely based it on the murder of my own
great great grandmother, Lorenza Marsala. My family's been passing on
this story as like a piece of family lore for
as long as I can remember, but they don't know
(06:24):
many details. In fact, most of them don't know any details.
A lot of them didn't even know what her name was.
It was just, oh, our family matriarch was murdered in Sicily.
The men thought she was murdered by the mafia because
they all think they're Tony Soprano.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
And the women.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Thought that she was murdered because she was a Sicilian
witch or a healer, because they all believe they're Sicilian witches,
and frankly, they probably are. And I took that little
nugget and I just went with it. I tried to
imagine what it would be like to be a woman
in Sicily one hundred years ago, when your husband leaves
for twelve years at a time and you're left alone.
(07:00):
The women in these Sicilian villages, they took the men's jobs.
They started lending money and buying land, and they had
autonomy and agency for the first time in a really
cool way. And then I had a modern day woman
in the book go back to Sicily and try to
claim her family inheritance and solve this murder. So it's
just it's a delicious adventure and romp through Sicily with
(07:22):
the right amount of taking down the patriarchy.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So obviously you mentioned this. The story is based on
this real story in your family of your great great
grandmother Lorenzo, getting murdered, and your dad was obsessed with
this and spending all this extra time trying to solve
the story. But to tell me a little bit about
you know, the podcast and how that came together.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, my dad spent so much time and so much
money actually before before he passed away, trying to figure
this mystery out. And you know, now it's been seven years.
And when I started writing the book, like I said,
I wanted it to be fiction, straight up fiction. But
then and once I finished the book, because I'm an
(08:03):
intensely productive content creator, I decided, oh, now I have
to solve this mystery in real life, and I started
making a podcast about it, a true crime podcast also
called The Sicilian Inheritance to make things very Easy, where
where I go back to Sicily on a mixture of
fact finding mission and family summer vacation to solve the
(08:28):
actual mystery, digging through archives, digging through court records, interviewing
people in the town where Lorenzo Marsala is from. And
it's become this wonderful podcast. When I describe it to
people on tour, sometimes I call it white Lotus meets
only murders in the building because it is me, in
many ways, bumbling my way through Sicily trying to solve
(08:51):
this murder. But from the very start last summer when
we were there, we did discover some really crazy bombshells
that come.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Out in episode two.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
And yeah, I mean, people are binging this podcast like crazy.
So many people are telling me that Sicilian Inheritance is
their new favorite true crime podcast, and it's been.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
It's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
It's a it's a really sweet tone, and it's you know,
I got to work on it a little bit, but
to me, it just feels like this lovely driving to
the Beach Summer podcast that you know is delightful and
not gory, but still a true crime. You know, there's
something really wonderful about the tone totally. But you know,
I was looking into this and one of the things
(09:35):
that's amazing to me is that, like how many Italian
Americans are Sicilian, you know, Scorsese, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci,
Alicia Keys, Ariana Grande, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Steve Shechemi.
I mean, the list just goes on and on, and
I had no idea that, like Sicily was that big
a part of the US. But then you talk a
(09:56):
little bit about the immigration experience in the podcast. Can
you talk a little bit about what it meant to
go to Ellis Island to do research? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Absolutely, I mean there are so many Italian Americans who
are Sicilian, because you know, Sicily was very impoverished one
hundred and fifty one hundred years ago, and so it
was mainly Southern Italians and Sicilians who were immigrating to
the US to make a better life for themselves and
for their family. And one of my first stops for
(10:25):
research was to work with Ellis Island and their researchers
and historians are incredible. They don't just pullship manifests for you.
They help you research all different kinds of government records.
But what they were able to find for me is
the immigration documents for all of Lorenza's children and her
(10:45):
husband who came to the United States, which listed just
so much personal information and also information about Lorenzo because
they had to write about who they left behind. And
some of these children that immigrated were kids, they were teenagers,
they were, you know, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they
wrote on their document, I left my mom behind, and
(11:06):
that just got under my skin. And that one child,
that one son, he was almost sent back because they
were worried that he wouldn't have enough support here in
America without his without his mother here, even though you know,
other family members were here at the time. The government
was very very nervous about having anyone here that they
(11:26):
would have to take care of, and so he nearly
got sent back, and he did and he made it
to Scratton with his other brothers. But yeah, I mean,
it's a really intense emotional journey to hear these stories
and learn more about the people who came before you.
And the kinds of things that they went through and
what they achieved, and you know, it just it puts
(11:47):
so much in perspective today that we can do hard things,
we can do difficult things, and that we have this
actually in our blood and in our DNA.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, that really is remarkable and obviously so meaningful for
your family to discover all this stuff through you. But
I think what I love so much about the podcast is,
you know, I have no envy for all the struggles
with bureaucracy and the digging through records in Italy and
all that, but you know, like those bits about you
(12:16):
traveling around Sicily and Calta Balota and these like fields
of lemon trees and olive trees and old world towns
and gorgeous beaches and you do that beautiful, beautiful food
scene there. It all just makes me want to go
to Sicily so badly. Yeah, And that's why I thought
it'd be really fun to do at nine Things episode
(12:36):
with you to learn a little bit more about like
the surprising things people don't know about Sicily. So why
don't we get to some facts.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Let's do some facts. I love a fact, you know that.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So actually, if you don't mind. One of the things
that really stunned me about the podcast was like some
of Greece's influence on Sicily, and you talk about it
in terms of the Virgin Mary kind of being bigger
than Jesus and Sicily. Would you do that as your
first fact on the show.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely absolutely, And you know it makes sense,
like Sicily was indeed part of ancient Greece, part of
that ancient world. And one of the things I discovered
is that Sicilian women have just carried on so many
traditions of different goddesses from Greek mythology, from Roman mythology,
from Northern African mythology, and you know, put a lot
(13:25):
of those attributes onto Mary. You know, Mary is a
real presence in Sicily. She's she's not a meek woman
at all. She's not just the mother of the Savior.
In Sicily. The statues of her present like a powerful goddess.
I mean, they just radiate strength. They're big, she's big,
she takes up space, and they treat her kind of
(13:46):
like a Greek superhero. She's often in a massive white
and gold cape that flares out around her body like
a mountain. She doesn't have a tiny halo. Instead, she's
wearing something that feels and looks a lot more like
a craft. I mean, almost like the moon, because it
resembles the goddess Diana, the moon goddess, and it is because,
(14:07):
like I said, Mary is just a bit of a
collection of different goddesses. The Sicilians took all of these
old Greek myths and the myths from the Carthaginians, like
Diana and Aphrodite, and they combined all of those into
the Virgin Mary. It made it a lot easier to
accept Christianity, and like they're fine, They're fine with Jesus, Okay,
(14:28):
But Sicily is a place where magic definitely still exists,
and so you can believe in the Virgin Mary but
also in the Evil Eye. And Mary can be a
mashup of all of these strong, capable women. She's a
little bit Greek myth, she's a little bit of Christian belief,
and in Sicily she's a healer and a mother, but
also kind of this wonderful, witchy goddess.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I really love that so much. But I also love
that you talk about her kind of like a witch,
Like could you talk about like Sicilian culture and witches
and strength as.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Straight I guess, yeah, I mean, as there was this
idea that Lorenzo Marsala, my great great grandmother, was possibly
a witch and a healer, and it's one of the
things that we're trying to prove in the Sicilian Inheritance podcast.
But of course, you know, there's no legal you know,
tax documents to be like, oh yeah, I'm just writing
off my expenses from being a peasant witch, sadly, sadly.
(15:24):
But there's ways, there's other ways that we try to
go about it. And you know, the idea of the
witch and the healer, it just has such deep roots
in Sicily for so long, and in fact, the straga
the witches were often known as the dona ayetane the
women who help, because they did help. They took on
(15:45):
all the attributes of doctors, healers, also social connectors in
a way, you know, they did a lot of the matchmaking. Yes,
they had the evil eye, but the evil eye was
to you know, not to vex your neighbor necessarily, but
to keep away dark forces from other towns, I mean,
(16:05):
from other islands. Things like that. They were really they
were the protectors and caregivers of Sicilian society for a
long time. And I do believe that that that is
part of what Lorenza did. And you know, we have
we have a very big witchy thread in the Sicilian
Inheritance novel as well.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
And there were midwives and ob GYNs too, kind of.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Absolutely, yes, there are midwives obgyns. They deliver babies, they
help women prevent pregnancy, you know, which was was a
was a very big deal. I mean, so many of
these women were constantly pregnant or constantly breastfeeding, and it's
an exhausting life and so these were these were the
women that really kind of held the fabric of society
(16:51):
together by by caring for everyone.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
So I mean, I love that bit. There's there's like
so much of this that like I either kind of
knew little bit about or like had no idea about.
And I think just learning about the land and the
feeling of really how transportive. I know I used that
word before, but like how transport of the podcast is
like can't be underscored. But one of the things I
(17:14):
wanted to do was talk about like a few things
that people might not know about from Sicily. And I'm
guessing you know all about Sicilian ice creams.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Right, I know a lot. I know a lot about
Sicilian ice cream. So I took the kids there and
you will hear them on the podcast, and they're little.
I took three children under the age of six to
solve a Sicilian murder mystery, which is what they get
to talk about in therapy in about twenty years and
so we had Sicilian ice cream about twice a day.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
One of the things I really love is that Sicily
apparently is the first place where brain freeze is documented.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Freeze shut your mouth. I didn't know that. I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
It's from this book called Frostbite, How ref Changed Our Food,
our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilly, and it has
all these great documented examples, because eating something that cold
was unusual in the eighteen hundred and seventeen hundreds. But
she talks about this description of brain freeze from the
seventeen seventies, and it's an account of a British naval
(18:19):
officer taking his first bite of ice cream at this
formal dinner and this is what it says after he
took his first bite. Quote, at first, he only looked
grave and blew up his cheeks to give it more room,
but then quote the violence of the cold. Soon getting
the better of his patients, he began to tumble it
about from side to side in his mouth, his eyes
(18:41):
rushing out water. Shortly thereafter, he spat it out with
a horrid oath meaning I guess he was swearing, and
in his outrage, had to be restrained from beating the
nearest servant. Wow, that description is so insane.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Wow. Oh wow, that's great. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Well, you know, I've heard I've heard a lot of
descriptions about cold things in Sicily, you know, Mount Etna,
because the grenita is the other big dessert in Sicily,
which is shaved ice. Okay, and you walk through the
streets of Palermo and literally men make you a greanita
by hacking away at ice with a machete. It's so
violent and so delightful. But grenda originated from the snow
(19:24):
and ice on the top of Mount Etna. They're volcano.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
That's very cool, Pretty cool, right, yeah, So well, fact
you have next Well, you know.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Since Dylan got his hands on those special Sicilian pistachios,
I do think it's worth talking about them a little.
Sicilians use pistachios in everything, and I mean, this is
a good time to point out we talk about this
in the podcast and in the book. Sicilian food is
very different from Italian food. Okay, there's no heavy red sauces.
(19:53):
It's a lot of influences from North Africa, from other
parts of the Mediterranean, and from the French, you know,
because the were indeed conquerors of Sicily for quite some times.
So you do see pistachios and crushed pistachios in lots
and lots of dishes, I mean almost every dish, and
so Sicilian pistachios or bronte pistachios are often referred to
(20:13):
as green gold because of their delicious and intense flavor. Now,
pistachios obviously grow in Iran, California, lots of other places,
but the reason that the nuts taste so intensely sweet
and meaty is because, of course, the soil from Mount
Etna is just so so nutritious and delicious, and that
(20:35):
soil gives a lot of Sicilian foods their distinct flavor,
from Sicilian wines and liquors to the local honey and
the strawberries the rich volcanic soil is not only super fertile,
but it also imbused foods with a complex earthy goodness.
And actually, just as an aside, I gotta say, Mount
Etna also plays a role in Greek mythology.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Did you know this?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I did not.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
The green thought that it was where Hephestus, the god
of blacksmiths, had his workshop and his forges, which is
why you can almost always see the smoke billowing out
of it like a chimney. But back to the pistachios.
The Romans originally brought pistachios back from the Middle East,
(21:19):
but they were mostly forgotten. And then when the Arabs
came to Sicily in the ninth century, they could not
help but notice the incredible flavor of the nuts, and
they kicked the cultivation up into high gear. And today
the Sicilian pistachios are still harvested entirely by hand, which
you know, oh wow, which sounds beautiful, right, I mean,
(21:41):
we love thinking about things that are done with our
actual hands and not machines. But it is intensely labor heavy,
intensely labor heavy. And then they spread out these big
cloth canopies when they collect them and shell and chop
them by hand, or sometimes they send them to the
factories to be turned into paste.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
But because it does take.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So much labor, and because it's intense on the land,
it only happens every two years to protect the trees
and improve the flavors. And this is why Sicilian pistachios
are a little bit pricier.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
That's funny, I didn't realize. So they're kind of expensive.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
They are, they are, and they're too expensive to use
in things like cannoli, even though I do it, or
or or ice cream over here, unless you're paying like
high end luxury prices. And The Times has an article
where they point out one businessman actually compared the price
of pistachios to find jewelry, which makes sense because, as
the Times rites in their very timesy and way, the
(22:39):
beautiful little nutmeats grown around Bronte a variety called smeraldo,
meaning emerald, So.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
The jewels of the jewel nut kingdom.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
They are truly the jewels of the nut Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I also like the word nutmeats.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
The nutmeats, my friends.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
So I'm gonna skip forward to a fact that makes
me think of your uncle Joe from the show and
how he talks about how maybe there's a vendetta against
your family and this long held grudge against your great grandmother,
and this fact is about revenge. So apparently Cicily is
home to one of the narrowest houses in the world.
The house is only about three feet wide from the outside,
(23:22):
and it's two stories high. I'm sure you've seen it
or been there, but I have. Indeed, yes, I wanted
our listeners to hear this because it is so incredibly
narrow that two people can't walk through it, and there's
nothing in it except a staircase and some windows. So
you might ask why did you build a place? The
name will tell you. The house in Sicilian is called
(23:44):
Casa du Karivo, or House of Spite. And this is
the story I got from this site. I like Audity Central.
The owner of the house in the nineteen fifties want
to expand his place to a second story, but per
the village rules, you had to get permission from your
neighbor to build upwards. But the neighbors did not get along.
The neighbor obviously said no. But there's a loophole that
(24:06):
if you build something a certain distance from your neighbor's property.
You don't need permission. So the owner basically built out
despite this narrow three foot side extension on the side
of his house two stories high, just to block the
view of the village below. And he painted the back
of the extension totally black, so when the neighbor looked
(24:28):
out their window, that's all they could see. It is
so horrible and wonderful.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I mean, it's horrible if you don't think grudges are
you know a thing that we should do.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I a the most beautiful grudge possible.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
It's the most beautiful grudge I've ever heard. And you
know I talk about that.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
I have this line in the Sicilian Inheritance book that
grudges are our national pastime. In Sicily, grudges are our golf.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So I love this fact that brings me so much sjoy.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
That's really funny. It also reminds me of that Larry
David in Career Enthusiasm starts that Spike coffee. I just
love the idea of like spike businesses.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
I love business.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
You know, I've recently started a war with Philadelphia Magazine
and I because they didn't get the Sicilian Inheritance in
like a book list that they were doing. And I'm Sicilian,
I hold grudges, right, and so I started a war.
I started my private war with them. I don't even
know if they know where it or And I'm like,
I'm just going to launch a Spike magazine in Philadelphia,
a whole Spike magazine of my own. I will launch
(25:30):
a competitor magazine just to just to hold this grudge
against you.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Will writing two books and parenting.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Three absolutely whatever, I can do it. All right, let's
move away from something spiteful to something something really cute,
which is do you know about Sicily's dwarf elephants.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I do not dwarf elephants, my friend.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Just think, just just picture this, okay, teeny tiny elephants.
According to the Smithsonian, the elephants were the size of
Shetland ponies. Oh it is a really small quite quit dwarfs, Okay,
dwarf elephants. And they once roamed all over the islands.
But you know, eventually they did, they did indeed go extinct.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So was this like fairly recently, like in the last
hundred years or two hundred years?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Is something No, No, this isn't like the thylacine, of
which you know obviously the Tasmanian tiger. The thylacine last
died out. This was at least fifty thousand years.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Ago, which is, you know, quite some time.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And it wasn't like sure the Sicilians kept them around
the house like pot pelly pigs, but I would I
mean if I would keep.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The dwarf, course, a dwarf elephant.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
But what is fascinating is that scientists have clearly wondered
how did these elephants get so small? And in twenty
twenty one, they analyzed a tiny elephant's skull found in
the Pentali Caves and discovered that the dwarf elephants evolved
from one of the largest elephants ever, straight tusk elephants,
which were freaking massive, thirty thousand pound creatures. And what
(26:56):
the DNA showed was that the animals which either crossed
land bridges to Sicily or swam there, they went from
being thirty thousand pounds to these tiny two thousand pounds
elephants and about forty generations. And for scientists it's just
this mind blowing example of how quickly animals can change
shape entirely and evolve.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Oh that's really fascinating and so cute. So I like,
that's so cute. So, you know, I didn't think we'd
be speaking about evolution on this episode exactly. But I
know what you're gonna get. I found this fact about
eels that I'm gonna read to you because it's scribbled here.
This is from the Margin Ilion, which is a great site.
But apparently eels have baffled civilizations forever. They are super
(27:40):
shy creatures. They're really hard to observe. Also, obviously they
can be dangerous and they look kind of serpent like.
So there's always been this like lore and myth and
you know, dangerous feeling around them. Aristotle thought they emerged
from mud, as did Egyptians. But as science evolved, one
of the big questions became how to eel spawn because
they have no visible genitalia. People have spotted eels with roe,
(28:04):
but male eels hadn't been very present, and it became
this big mystery in science. And then in eighteen seventy six,
this young brilliant scientist, a med student named Sigmund Freud,
decides to take up the case. He's only nineteen years old.
He just becomes obsessed. He starts trying to figure it out.
He moves to Triesta in Italy to do more study.
(28:24):
He starts his days gathering eels from local fishermen. Every morning,
at dusk, he takes them to a shack. He studies
them in bulls and on counters and dissects them and
observes them. Then he takes a one hour lunch break
and studies for another five hours every day. Like he's
devoted to figuring out do mail eels exist? And he
just can't crack the case. And there's this writer, Patrick Spenson,
(28:47):
who wrote this book, the Book of Eels, And this
is from Marginal Elliot. This is what he says. What
neither Freud nor other scientists at this time knew was,
of course, eels have no visible sex organs until they
need them. Metamorphosis is not just superficial adaptations to new
life conditions. They're existential, and eel becomes what it needs
(29:08):
to be when the time is right. And twenty years
after Freud's failed effort, a sexually mature male silver eel
was finally found off the coast of Messina in Sicily,
and thus the eel had finally become a fish, a
creature not so dissimilar from others, and I don't know,
I know it's like a kind of a gross creature,
(29:28):
but I think there's something wonderful and fitting about the
fact that, like Sicily is this land of myths and magic.
And also the fact that the answer to why an
eel isn't just a monster that comes from Sicily is
kind of wonderful.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
I love that, I really do.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
You know.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
I talk about this in the podcast.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
I talk about it in the book.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
You know, Medusa is on the Sicilian flag, and I
love the idea of turning around the Medusa myth to
be like was she a monster or was she a
woman who wasn't going to let people mess with her?
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And you know she has the snakes in her hair,
but some Sicili and think that they may be eels.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Oh that's really interesting. I had no idea. So I
know We've got a few more facts before we close
this out, but let's take a.
Speaker 6 (30:07):
Quick break first.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
It sounds good.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Welcome back to part time Genius, where I'm talking about
things you definitely don't know about Sicily with my pal author, journalist,
podcast or influencer Joe piazza. So, Joe, We've talked pistachios,
We've talked tiny adorable elephants, we've talked Canoli's in space.
So what fact do you want to end on?
Speaker 2 (30:42):
This is hard, This is really hard because I mean
there's just there's so many wonderful things about Sicily to
talk about. But we haven't talked about the Sicilian Arches
of Bread festival yet, have we.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
No, Well, you need to know this.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
The Sicilian Arches of Bread festival is very similar to
you know what.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
It sounds like.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
It's where the local people construct large structures out of
bread and make chandeliers out of dates. Yeah, I mean,
it's kind of like the American county fairs where you
make stuff out of butter, but with bread. So you know,
love that one. And then of course there's the the
(31:21):
Icarus myth.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
You know that one.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
I mean, it's really about Sicily because you know, Icarus
got burned by the sun, his wings melted, he fell
into the ocean and perished, but his dad, Datalus, allegedly
landed in Sicily, frankly, in Culta Balota, the town where
my family is from my town, and the legend is
(31:44):
that he built the town of Caltablota to be amazed,
much like the labyrinth that he constructed.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
There's a lot we can talk about, but give me,
give me a b you go first, you tell me
what you want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Those are two great facts already, but I like that
you've got a bigger one coming out were I do so.
I know, we didn't really want to talk too much
about the mafia, because you know, there's some more stuff
out there. But I thought this was kind of funny.
Apparently in the two thousands, the FBI realized that the
American mob was sending their men to study abroad in Sicily.
(32:18):
According to one source high up in the Sicilian mafia quote,
they send them here to make them become men of honor,
to make them practice because in America there's not that
feel for values and there is no more respect, which
I love that American mafia are traveling for these like
master classes in Europe to become more honorable in their
(32:40):
chosen line of work.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah, yes, my friend.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I mean those original rules that the mafia had with
regards to honor and respect were you didn't look at
the wives of friends. You treat your wives and all
women with respect, you answer questions truthfully, never be late
for appointments.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
There was there was really punctuality.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Punctuality was very important.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
There was honor baked into it, you know, also extortion,
racketeering and murder. Actually, I do need to tell you.
There's two main no mafia museums in Sicily. And you
walk into the one in Corleone, which is the town
where the Godfather allegedly from, and the first room you
walk into is pictures of all of the natural beauty
(33:22):
of Corleone, to try to say, this is what we're about.
We're about these beautiful cathedrals. Where about these rolling hills
and these vineyards. And then you walk into the second
room and there's pictures of Francis Ford, Coppola and Mario
Puzo on.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
A wall of shame, an actual wall of shame.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, that is amazing. So tell me, how how do
you want to end this?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
You know, like I said, there's a lot of ways
that we could go. How about talking about one of
the world's greatest scientists, a Sicilian you might know as Archimedes.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
It's funny because obviously the.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Is one aspect of Sicily, and it's prominently known from
movies like The Godfather. And I've got to say I
was actually reading this site called Cecilia Anita, and the
writer writes, quote, think of Sicily as a place that
gave Europe a taste for sanguinelli, the blood oranges that
grow only there, a place that made things sweet when
(34:20):
the Arabs began to cultivate on its soil, that made
it possible for Europeans to wrap their bodies in the
luxurious feel of silk. Think of Sicily as the place
where spring is born when Pluto releases Persephone from her
infernal captivity. Yes, also also Persephone, the whole Persephone myth
that takes place in Sicily too. And so the author
(34:42):
goes on to point out that Sicily was first at
a lot of things. The first volcano, scientists, the first
solar clock, the first census, the first map of the world,
the first labor union, the first cookbook. All of these
things come from Sicily. And of course, as she pointed out,
the ice cream. And then there is Archimedes of sarah Cusa.
I mean, this guy figured out Pia. Okay, he figured
(35:06):
out how to burn Roman ships by using metal to
redirect the sun's rays. He discovered pulleys and levers and
the idea of water displacement. And did you know that,
like when he figured out water displacement, that is when
this man ran through the streets naked after hopping out
of his bath, shouting eureka.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
And according to the legend, even though Roman soldiers were
given orders not to kill him, when one did approach him,
he was so deep in thought with calculations that he
didn't see the assassin coming.
Speaker 6 (35:39):
That is so crazy.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Yeah, I mean, we're like first and everything.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Okay, So even though you can think of Sicily as
this great tourist attraction and land of incredible food and
history and beaches and Greek ruins like it would just
be nice if people remembered it as the land of
math and science.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
That's really wonderful. I like that. And we started and
ended on a science fact, so that's pretty great to
that end. But I am, of course going to have
to give you this week's trophy, Joe. Thank you so
much for being here. It's really a pleasure to have
you on.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Thank you for having me. I love it. I can
talk about Sicily forever, my friend.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Well, we can take that offline. But for those of
you looking for a terrific beat read this summer, go
out and buy The Sicilian Inheritance. I'm going to put
the first episode of the podcast Joe made in our
feed as well. And if you want to tell me
something about your Sicilian heritage, things you learned on a
trip to Sicily, or anything else, don't forget We get
our emails sent to our moms at pet Genius moms
(36:36):
at gmail dot com. They want to hear from you,
and we want to hear from you from Will, Dylan,
Joe and Me. We'll be back next week with a
new episode.
Speaker 6 (36:46):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongas
Chatikler and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's
episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan
with support.
Speaker 6 (37:17):
From Tyler Klang.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay
Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio. Hey there, Joe, Hello Mango. So I know
that you like canoli's. You've been making them for all
the people who come to your book launch parties at
various bookstores across the country for your wonderful book, The
(00:24):
Sicilian Inheritance, which is honestly the greatest thing ever. I mean,
coming to hear an author talk while they make canoli's
for you is pretty great. But then I saw this
fact this week about Canoli's and I had to tell
you about it. So did you know that a canole
has actually gone into space?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I did not know that, but I'm also not surprised.
I mean, I can only can really do anything. It's
an intensely versatile dessert. But how did it get there?
Did NASA take it there?
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So the story is a little more low than that. Apparently,
these three young scientists decide that they wanted to do
something joyful for Sicily, so they started what they called
the Sicilian Space Program.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Wow, do they have T shirts? Because I want one?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I know I want a tea shirt too. But these
three scientists, with no real money, decided to send a
canoli into space, and because a real canoli would actually disintegrate,
they fabricated this delicious looking canoli or canolo because I
guess one canoli is called canolo, yes, And they made
(01:33):
it out of lightweight polymers, and then they modeled a
path and attached it to a little helium balloon craft
which they called the Canolo Transporter, and along with it
they sent a thermometer, a parachute, a GPS device, and
a camera, which is so great because the shots of
space from this like Canol helium spacecraft looking down on
(01:55):
Earth are absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Wait, no, no, sorry, Okay, So I am imagining it
with a face to be honest, because I so when
I sign the Sicilian Inheritance. And I'm now coming up
on my one hundredth event for this book in three months,
because I've been doing bookstores and I zoom into book
clubs for it for a while. I've been trying to
draw canoli in the books, but they never look like canoli.
(02:19):
They look like something else.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Okay, I'm not going to say what they look like.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
And then I draw a little happy face on them,
which makes it even worse. So I'm picturing I'm picturing
this space cannoli with a little happy face smiling down
on the Earth, which is a really wonderful thing.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
But did they actually get it to space. They did
get it to space, no smiley face. They got it
to thirty thousand meters into the air, so into the stratosphere,
and I guess the thermometer recorded a temperature of negative
fifty degrees celsius before it started crashing to Earth, so
that's pretty amazing. And then the scientists chase it down
(02:54):
through this field of sheep to find their space canolo.
But what's really sweet about the whole thing is that
they just want to change the perception of Sicily a little,
from this land of mafioso and economic struggles to something
really delightful. And according to one of the scientists, this
is what he said, our Sicilian space program was a
gift meant for all Sicilians and a way to make
(03:16):
them smile. For us, this great little gesture is a
gift to the Cosmos, a technological right, and even just
a simple gesture to lift up Sicily in our own way,
which I just think is really sweet.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
I love you. That's the first of a whole bunch
of facts we have about Sicily today, So why don't
we dive in.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Welcome to part time genius. I'm youngish articular. My good
pal Will Pearson is off on a business trip this week.
But that's great because I pulled in author, journalist, podcaster
and one of the most remarkable people I know, Joe Piazza,
to sit in his chair. Joe, thank you for being here.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Oh thanks for having me. I'll fill in for Will anytime.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
And of course leaning back in the studio, feet on
his desk, cracking open Sicilian pistaches and just tossing them
on the floor without a care.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
Oh yes, of course that is our wonderful Dylan Fagan,
just scarfing away on pistachios back there, but just just
snack and just snack. And you know I should have
made you guys, can only you know?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Joe? I always tell people I don't know anyone who's
as insanely productive as your. You've got three kids, a
wonderful marriage, You're always writing at least two books at
any one time, and you also seem to prioritize reading
and sleep, and you travel. So I am curious, how
do you get it all done.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I don't actually I don't actually know how I do it.
I have to say. I think it's I just don't
f around anymore, like I'm insanely efficient, Like I don't
have I don't actually scroll Instagram even though I report
on Instagram. And yeah, I'm an efficient Virgo.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
I grew up.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
You'll appreciate this as a person who loves astrology as
much as I do. I grew up rejecting like all
of the traits of a Virgo, like super organized, super efficient,
love security, much in the way that I grew up
reading The Babysitters Club and thinking I was a Stacy
because she was cool and from New York City, and
you know, as I'm an adult, I'm like, oh, yeah,
I'm a freaking Virgo.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
And I'm not Stacey. I'm totally Christy.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
So yeah, I asked Ruby what they thought they were
in terms of the Babysitters Club, because of course, you know,
obsessed with it. And Ruby's like, well, I'm organized like
a Christie, but I like to hide candy all over
my room like like a Claudia. Like a Claudia.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
That's fair.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So I've got your best seller right here. The Sicilian inheritance.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
came up with the story of this book.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Oh, I sure can, Yeah, I mean it started out
I wanted to write a delicious adventure to Sicily, and
I loosely based it on the murder of my own
great great grandmother, Lorenza Marsala. My family's been passing on
this story as like a piece of family lore for
as long as I can remember, but they don't know
(06:24):
many details. In fact, most of them don't know any details.
A lot of them didn't even know what her name was.
It was just, oh, our family matriarch was murdered in Sicily.
The men thought she was murdered by the mafia because
they all think they're Tony Soprano.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
And the women.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Thought that she was murdered because she was a Sicilian
witch or a healer, because they all believe they're Sicilian witches,
and frankly, they probably are. And I took that little
nugget and I just went with it. I tried to
imagine what it would be like to be a woman
in Sicily one hundred years ago, when your husband leaves
for twelve years at a time and you're left alone.
(07:00):
The women in these Sicilian villages, they took the men's jobs.
They started lending money and buying land, and they had
autonomy and agency for the first time in a really
cool way. And then I had a modern day woman
in the book go back to Sicily and try to
claim her family inheritance and solve this murder. So it's
just it's a delicious adventure and romp through Sicily with
(07:22):
the right amount of taking down the patriarchy.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
So obviously you mentioned this. The story is based on
this real story in your family of your great great
grandmother Lorenzo, getting murdered, and your dad was obsessed with
this and spending all this extra time trying to solve
the story. But to tell me a little bit about
you know, the podcast and how that came together.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah, my dad spent so much time and so much
money actually before before he passed away, trying to figure
this mystery out. And you know, now it's been seven years.
And when I started writing the book, like I said,
I wanted it to be fiction, straight up fiction. But
then and once I finished the book, because I'm an
(08:03):
intensely productive content creator, I decided, oh, now I have
to solve this mystery in real life, and I started
making a podcast about it, a true crime podcast also
called The Sicilian Inheritance to make things very Easy, where
where I go back to Sicily on a mixture of
fact finding mission and family summer vacation to solve the
(08:28):
actual mystery, digging through archives, digging through court records, interviewing
people in the town where Lorenzo Marsala is from. And
it's become this wonderful podcast. When I describe it to
people on tour, sometimes I call it white Lotus meets
only murders in the building because it is me, in
many ways, bumbling my way through Sicily trying to solve
(08:51):
this murder. But from the very start last summer when
we were there, we did discover some really crazy bombshells
that come.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
Out in episode two.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
And yeah, I mean, people are binging this podcast like crazy.
So many people are telling me that Sicilian Inheritance is
their new favorite true crime podcast, and it's been.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
It's been a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
It's a it's a really sweet tone, and it's you know,
I got to work on it a little bit, but
to me, it just feels like this lovely driving to
the Beach Summer podcast that you know is delightful and
not gory, but still a true crime. You know, there's
something really wonderful about the tone totally. But you know,
I was looking into this and one of the things
(09:35):
that's amazing to me is that, like how many Italian
Americans are Sicilian, you know, Scorsese, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci,
Alicia Keys, Ariana Grande, Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Steve Shechemi.
I mean, the list just goes on and on, and
I had no idea that, like Sicily was that big
a part of the US. But then you talk a
(09:56):
little bit about the immigration experience in the podcast. Can
you talk a little bit about what it meant to
go to Ellis Island to do research? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Absolutely, I mean there are so many Italian Americans who
are Sicilian, because you know, Sicily was very impoverished one
hundred and fifty one hundred years ago, and so it
was mainly Southern Italians and Sicilians who were immigrating to
the US to make a better life for themselves and
for their family. And one of my first stops for
(10:25):
research was to work with Ellis Island and their researchers
and historians are incredible. They don't just pullship manifests for you.
They help you research all different kinds of government records.
But what they were able to find for me is
the immigration documents for all of Lorenza's children and her
(10:45):
husband who came to the United States, which listed just
so much personal information and also information about Lorenzo because
they had to write about who they left behind. And
some of these children that immigrated were kids, they were teenagers,
they were, you know, thirteen, fourteen years old, and they
wrote on their document, I left my mom behind, and
(11:06):
that just got under my skin. And that one child,
that one son, he was almost sent back because they
were worried that he wouldn't have enough support here in
America without his without his mother here, even though you know,
other family members were here at the time. The government
was very very nervous about having anyone here that they
(11:26):
would have to take care of, and so he nearly
got sent back, and he did and he made it
to Scratton with his other brothers. But yeah, I mean,
it's a really intense emotional journey to hear these stories
and learn more about the people who came before you.
And the kinds of things that they went through and
what they achieved, and you know, it just it puts
(11:47):
so much in perspective today that we can do hard things,
we can do difficult things, and that we have this
actually in our blood and in our DNA.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, that really is remarkable and obviously so meaningful for
your family to discover all this stuff through you. But
I think what I love so much about the podcast is,
you know, I have no envy for all the struggles
with bureaucracy and the digging through records in Italy and
all that, but you know, like those bits about you
(12:16):
traveling around Sicily and Calta Balota and these like fields
of lemon trees and olive trees and old world towns
and gorgeous beaches and you do that beautiful, beautiful food
scene there. It all just makes me want to go
to Sicily so badly. Yeah, And that's why I thought
it'd be really fun to do at nine Things episode
(12:36):
with you to learn a little bit more about like
the surprising things people don't know about Sicily. So why
don't we get to some facts.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Let's do some facts. I love a fact, you know that.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So actually, if you don't mind. One of the things
that really stunned me about the podcast was like some
of Greece's influence on Sicily, and you talk about it
in terms of the Virgin Mary kind of being bigger
than Jesus and Sicily. Would you do that as your
first fact on the show.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely absolutely, And you know it makes sense,
like Sicily was indeed part of ancient Greece, part of
that ancient world. And one of the things I discovered
is that Sicilian women have just carried on so many
traditions of different goddesses from Greek mythology, from Roman mythology,
from Northern African mythology, and you know, put a lot
(13:25):
of those attributes onto Mary. You know, Mary is a
real presence in Sicily. She's she's not a meek woman
at all. She's not just the mother of the Savior.
In Sicily. The statues of her present like a powerful goddess.
I mean, they just radiate strength. They're big, she's big,
she takes up space, and they treat her kind of
(13:46):
like a Greek superhero. She's often in a massive white
and gold cape that flares out around her body like
a mountain. She doesn't have a tiny halo. Instead, she's
wearing something that feels and looks a lot more like
a craft. I mean, almost like the moon, because it
resembles the goddess Diana, the moon goddess, and it is because,
(14:07):
like I said, Mary is just a bit of a
collection of different goddesses. The Sicilians took all of these
old Greek myths and the myths from the Carthaginians, like
Diana and Aphrodite, and they combined all of those into
the Virgin Mary. It made it a lot easier to
accept Christianity, and like they're fine, They're fine with Jesus, Okay,
(14:28):
But Sicily is a place where magic definitely still exists,
and so you can believe in the Virgin Mary but
also in the Evil Eye. And Mary can be a
mashup of all of these strong, capable women. She's a
little bit Greek myth, she's a little bit of Christian belief,
and in Sicily she's a healer and a mother, but
also kind of this wonderful, witchy goddess.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I really love that so much. But I also love
that you talk about her kind of like a witch,
Like could you talk about like Sicilian culture and witches
and strength as.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Straight I guess, yeah, I mean, as there was this
idea that Lorenzo Marsala, my great great grandmother, was possibly
a witch and a healer, and it's one of the
things that we're trying to prove in the Sicilian Inheritance podcast.
But of course, you know, there's no legal you know,
tax documents to be like, oh yeah, I'm just writing
off my expenses from being a peasant witch, sadly, sadly.
(15:24):
But there's ways, there's other ways that we try to
go about it. And you know, the idea of the
witch and the healer, it just has such deep roots
in Sicily for so long, and in fact, the straga
the witches were often known as the dona ayetane the
women who help, because they did help. They took on
(15:45):
all the attributes of doctors, healers, also social connectors in
a way, you know, they did a lot of the matchmaking. Yes,
they had the evil eye, but the evil eye was
to you know, not to vex your neighbor necessarily, but
to keep away dark forces from other towns, I mean,
(16:05):
from other islands. Things like that. They were really they
were the protectors and caregivers of Sicilian society for a
long time. And I do believe that that that is
part of what Lorenza did. And you know, we have
we have a very big witchy thread in the Sicilian
Inheritance novel as well.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
And there were midwives and ob GYNs too, kind of.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Absolutely, yes, there are midwives obgyns. They deliver babies, they
help women prevent pregnancy, you know, which was was a
was a very big deal. I mean, so many of
these women were constantly pregnant or constantly breastfeeding, and it's
an exhausting life and so these were these were the
women that really kind of held the fabric of society
(16:51):
together by by caring for everyone.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
So I mean, I love that bit. There's there's like
so much of this that like I either kind of
knew little bit about or like had no idea about.
And I think just learning about the land and the
feeling of really how transportive. I know I used that
word before, but like how transport of the podcast is
like can't be underscored. But one of the things I
(17:14):
wanted to do was talk about like a few things
that people might not know about from Sicily. And I'm
guessing you know all about Sicilian ice creams.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Right, I know a lot. I know a lot about
Sicilian ice cream. So I took the kids there and
you will hear them on the podcast, and they're little.
I took three children under the age of six to
solve a Sicilian murder mystery, which is what they get
to talk about in therapy in about twenty years and
so we had Sicilian ice cream about twice a day.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
One of the things I really love is that Sicily
apparently is the first place where brain freeze is documented.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Freeze shut your mouth. I didn't know that. I didn't know.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
It's from this book called Frostbite, How ref Changed Our Food,
our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilly, and it has
all these great documented examples, because eating something that cold
was unusual in the eighteen hundred and seventeen hundreds. But
she talks about this description of brain freeze from the
seventeen seventies, and it's an account of a British naval
(18:19):
officer taking his first bite of ice cream at this
formal dinner and this is what it says after he
took his first bite. Quote, at first, he only looked
grave and blew up his cheeks to give it more room,
but then quote the violence of the cold. Soon getting
the better of his patients, he began to tumble it
about from side to side in his mouth, his eyes
(18:41):
rushing out water. Shortly thereafter, he spat it out with
a horrid oath meaning I guess he was swearing, and
in his outrage, had to be restrained from beating the
nearest servant. Wow, that description is so insane.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Wow. Oh wow, that's great. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
Well, you know, I've heard I've heard a lot of
descriptions about cold things in Sicily, you know, Mount Etna,
because the grenita is the other big dessert in Sicily,
which is shaved ice. Okay, and you walk through the
streets of Palermo and literally men make you a greanita
by hacking away at ice with a machete. It's so
violent and so delightful. But grenda originated from the snow
(19:24):
and ice on the top of Mount Etna. They're volcano.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
That's very cool, Pretty cool, right, yeah, So well, fact
you have next Well, you know.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Since Dylan got his hands on those special Sicilian pistachios,
I do think it's worth talking about them a little.
Sicilians use pistachios in everything, and I mean, this is
a good time to point out we talk about this
in the podcast and in the book. Sicilian food is
very different from Italian food. Okay, there's no heavy red sauces.
(19:53):
It's a lot of influences from North Africa, from other
parts of the Mediterranean, and from the French, you know,
because the were indeed conquerors of Sicily for quite some times.
So you do see pistachios and crushed pistachios in lots
and lots of dishes, I mean almost every dish, and
so Sicilian pistachios or bronte pistachios are often referred to
(20:13):
as green gold because of their delicious and intense flavor. Now,
pistachios obviously grow in Iran, California, lots of other places,
but the reason that the nuts taste so intensely sweet
and meaty is because, of course, the soil from Mount
Etna is just so so nutritious and delicious, and that
(20:35):
soil gives a lot of Sicilian foods their distinct flavor,
from Sicilian wines and liquors to the local honey and
the strawberries the rich volcanic soil is not only super fertile,
but it also imbused foods with a complex earthy goodness.
And actually, just as an aside, I gotta say, Mount
Etna also plays a role in Greek mythology.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Did you know this?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
I did not.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
The green thought that it was where Hephestus, the god
of blacksmiths, had his workshop and his forges, which is
why you can almost always see the smoke billowing out
of it like a chimney. But back to the pistachios.
The Romans originally brought pistachios back from the Middle East,
(21:19):
but they were mostly forgotten. And then when the Arabs
came to Sicily in the ninth century, they could not
help but notice the incredible flavor of the nuts, and
they kicked the cultivation up into high gear. And today
the Sicilian pistachios are still harvested entirely by hand, which
you know, oh wow, which sounds beautiful, right, I mean,
(21:41):
we love thinking about things that are done with our
actual hands and not machines. But it is intensely labor heavy,
intensely labor heavy. And then they spread out these big
cloth canopies when they collect them and shell and chop
them by hand, or sometimes they send them to the
factories to be turned into paste.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
But because it does take.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
So much labor, and because it's intense on the land,
it only happens every two years to protect the trees
and improve the flavors. And this is why Sicilian pistachios
are a little bit pricier.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
That's funny, I didn't realize. So they're kind of expensive.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
They are, they are, and they're too expensive to use
in things like cannoli, even though I do it, or
or or ice cream over here, unless you're paying like
high end luxury prices. And The Times has an article
where they point out one businessman actually compared the price
of pistachios to find jewelry, which makes sense because, as
the Times rites in their very timesy and way, the
(22:39):
beautiful little nutmeats grown around Bronte a variety called smeraldo,
meaning emerald, So.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
The jewels of the jewel nut kingdom.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
They are truly the jewels of the nut Kingdom.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
I also like the word nutmeats.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
The nutmeats, my friends.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
So I'm gonna skip forward to a fact that makes
me think of your uncle Joe from the show and
how he talks about how maybe there's a vendetta against
your family and this long held grudge against your great grandmother,
and this fact is about revenge. So apparently Cicily is
home to one of the narrowest houses in the world.
The house is only about three feet wide from the outside,
(23:22):
and it's two stories high. I'm sure you've seen it
or been there, but I have. Indeed, yes, I wanted
our listeners to hear this because it is so incredibly
narrow that two people can't walk through it, and there's
nothing in it except a staircase and some windows. So
you might ask why did you build a place? The
name will tell you. The house in Sicilian is called
(23:44):
Casa du Karivo, or House of Spite. And this is
the story I got from this site. I like Audity Central.
The owner of the house in the nineteen fifties want
to expand his place to a second story, but per
the village rules, you had to get permission from your
neighbor to build upwards. But the neighbors did not get along.
The neighbor obviously said no. But there's a loophole that
(24:06):
if you build something a certain distance from your neighbor's property.
You don't need permission. So the owner basically built out
despite this narrow three foot side extension on the side
of his house two stories high, just to block the
view of the village below. And he painted the back
of the extension totally black, so when the neighbor looked
(24:28):
out their window, that's all they could see. It is
so horrible and wonderful.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I mean, it's horrible if you don't think grudges are
you know a thing that we should do.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
I a the most beautiful grudge possible.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
It's the most beautiful grudge I've ever heard. And you
know I talk about that.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
I have this line in the Sicilian Inheritance book that
grudges are our national pastime. In Sicily, grudges are our golf.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So I love this fact that brings me so much sjoy.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
That's really funny. It also reminds me of that Larry
David in Career Enthusiasm starts that Spike coffee. I just
love the idea of like spike businesses.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
I love business.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
You know, I've recently started a war with Philadelphia Magazine
and I because they didn't get the Sicilian Inheritance in
like a book list that they were doing. And I'm Sicilian,
I hold grudges, right, and so I started a war.
I started my private war with them. I don't even
know if they know where it or And I'm like,
I'm just going to launch a Spike magazine in Philadelphia,
a whole Spike magazine of my own. I will launch
(25:30):
a competitor magazine just to just to hold this grudge
against you.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Will writing two books and parenting.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
Three absolutely whatever, I can do it. All right, let's
move away from something spiteful to something something really cute,
which is do you know about Sicily's dwarf elephants.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
I do not dwarf elephants, my friend.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Just think, just just picture this, okay, teeny tiny elephants.
According to the Smithsonian, the elephants were the size of
Shetland ponies. Oh it is a really small quite quit dwarfs, Okay,
dwarf elephants. And they once roamed all over the islands.
But you know, eventually they did, they did indeed go extinct.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
So was this like fairly recently, like in the last
hundred years or two hundred years?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Is something No, No, this isn't like the thylacine, of
which you know obviously the Tasmanian tiger. The thylacine last
died out. This was at least fifty thousand years.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
Ago, which is, you know, quite some time.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
And it wasn't like sure the Sicilians kept them around
the house like pot pelly pigs, but I would I
mean if I would keep.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
The dwarf, course, a dwarf elephant.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
But what is fascinating is that scientists have clearly wondered
how did these elephants get so small? And in twenty
twenty one, they analyzed a tiny elephant's skull found in
the Pentali Caves and discovered that the dwarf elephants evolved
from one of the largest elephants ever, straight tusk elephants,
which were freaking massive, thirty thousand pound creatures. And what
(26:56):
the DNA showed was that the animals which either crossed
land bridges to Sicily or swam there, they went from
being thirty thousand pounds to these tiny two thousand pounds
elephants and about forty generations. And for scientists it's just
this mind blowing example of how quickly animals can change
shape entirely and evolve.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Oh that's really fascinating and so cute. So I like,
that's so cute. So, you know, I didn't think we'd
be speaking about evolution on this episode exactly. But I
know what you're gonna get. I found this fact about
eels that I'm gonna read to you because it's scribbled here.
This is from the Margin Ilion, which is a great site.
But apparently eels have baffled civilizations forever. They are super
(27:40):
shy creatures. They're really hard to observe. Also, obviously they
can be dangerous and they look kind of serpent like.
So there's always been this like lore and myth and
you know, dangerous feeling around them. Aristotle thought they emerged
from mud, as did Egyptians. But as science evolved, one
of the big questions became how to eel spawn because
they have no visible genitalia. People have spotted eels with roe,
(28:04):
but male eels hadn't been very present, and it became
this big mystery in science. And then in eighteen seventy six,
this young brilliant scientist, a med student named Sigmund Freud,
decides to take up the case. He's only nineteen years old.
He just becomes obsessed. He starts trying to figure it out.
He moves to Triesta in Italy to do more study.
(28:24):
He starts his days gathering eels from local fishermen. Every morning,
at dusk, he takes them to a shack. He studies
them in bulls and on counters and dissects them and
observes them. Then he takes a one hour lunch break
and studies for another five hours every day. Like he's
devoted to figuring out do mail eels exist? And he
just can't crack the case. And there's this writer, Patrick Spenson,
(28:47):
who wrote this book, the Book of Eels, And this
is from Marginal Elliot. This is what he says. What
neither Freud nor other scientists at this time knew was,
of course, eels have no visible sex organs until they
need them. Metamorphosis is not just superficial adaptations to new
life conditions. They're existential, and eel becomes what it needs
(29:08):
to be when the time is right. And twenty years
after Freud's failed effort, a sexually mature male silver eel
was finally found off the coast of Messina in Sicily,
and thus the eel had finally become a fish, a
creature not so dissimilar from others, and I don't know,
I know it's like a kind of a gross creature,
(29:28):
but I think there's something wonderful and fitting about the
fact that, like Sicily is this land of myths and magic.
And also the fact that the answer to why an
eel isn't just a monster that comes from Sicily is
kind of wonderful.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
I love that, I really do.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
You know.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
I talk about this in the podcast.
Speaker 5 (29:45):
I talk about it in the book.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
You know, Medusa is on the Sicilian flag, and I
love the idea of turning around the Medusa myth to
be like was she a monster or was she a
woman who wasn't going to let people mess with her?
Speaker 3 (29:57):
And you know she has the snakes in her hair,
but some Sicili and think that they may be eels.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Oh that's really interesting. I had no idea. So I
know We've got a few more facts before we close
this out, but let's take a.
Speaker 6 (30:07):
Quick break first.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
It sounds good.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
Welcome back to part time Genius, where I'm talking about
things you definitely don't know about Sicily with my pal author, journalist,
podcast or influencer Joe piazza. So, Joe, We've talked pistachios,
We've talked tiny adorable elephants, we've talked Canoli's in space.
So what fact do you want to end on?
Speaker 2 (30:42):
This is hard, This is really hard because I mean
there's just there's so many wonderful things about Sicily to
talk about. But we haven't talked about the Sicilian Arches
of Bread festival yet, have we.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
No, Well, you need to know this.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
The Sicilian Arches of Bread festival is very similar to
you know what.
Speaker 3 (30:59):
It sounds like.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
It's where the local people construct large structures out of
bread and make chandeliers out of dates. Yeah, I mean,
it's kind of like the American county fairs where you
make stuff out of butter, but with bread. So you know,
love that one. And then of course there's the the
(31:21):
Icarus myth.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
You know that one.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
I mean, it's really about Sicily because you know, Icarus
got burned by the sun, his wings melted, he fell
into the ocean and perished, but his dad, Datalus, allegedly
landed in Sicily, frankly, in Culta Balota, the town where
my family is from my town, and the legend is
(31:44):
that he built the town of Caltablota to be amazed,
much like the labyrinth that he constructed.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
There's a lot we can talk about, but give me,
give me a b you go first, you tell me
what you want to talk about.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Those are two great facts already, but I like that
you've got a bigger one coming out were I do so.
I know, we didn't really want to talk too much
about the mafia, because you know, there's some more stuff
out there. But I thought this was kind of funny.
Apparently in the two thousands, the FBI realized that the
American mob was sending their men to study abroad in Sicily.
(32:18):
According to one source high up in the Sicilian mafia quote,
they send them here to make them become men of honor,
to make them practice because in America there's not that
feel for values and there is no more respect, which
I love that American mafia are traveling for these like
master classes in Europe to become more honorable in their
(32:40):
chosen line of work.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Yeah, yes, my friend.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
I mean those original rules that the mafia had with
regards to honor and respect were you didn't look at
the wives of friends. You treat your wives and all
women with respect, you answer questions truthfully, never be late
for appointments.
Speaker 1 (32:57):
There was there was really punctuality.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Punctuality was very important.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
There was honor baked into it, you know, also extortion,
racketeering and murder. Actually, I do need to tell you.
There's two main no mafia museums in Sicily. And you
walk into the one in Corleone, which is the town
where the Godfather allegedly from, and the first room you
walk into is pictures of all of the natural beauty
(33:22):
of Corleone, to try to say, this is what we're about.
We're about these beautiful cathedrals. Where about these rolling hills
and these vineyards. And then you walk into the second
room and there's pictures of Francis Ford, Coppola and Mario
Puzo on.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
A wall of shame, an actual wall of shame.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, that is amazing. So tell me, how how do
you want to end this?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
You know, like I said, there's a lot of ways
that we could go. How about talking about one of
the world's greatest scientists, a Sicilian you might know as Archimedes.
Speaker 6 (33:57):
I like that.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
It's funny because obviously the.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Is one aspect of Sicily, and it's prominently known from
movies like The Godfather. And I've got to say I
was actually reading this site called Cecilia Anita, and the
writer writes, quote, think of Sicily as a place that
gave Europe a taste for sanguinelli, the blood oranges that
grow only there, a place that made things sweet when
(34:20):
the Arabs began to cultivate on its soil, that made
it possible for Europeans to wrap their bodies in the
luxurious feel of silk. Think of Sicily as the place
where spring is born when Pluto releases Persephone from her
infernal captivity. Yes, also also Persephone, the whole Persephone myth
that takes place in Sicily too. And so the author
(34:42):
goes on to point out that Sicily was first at
a lot of things. The first volcano, scientists, the first
solar clock, the first census, the first map of the world,
the first labor union, the first cookbook. All of these
things come from Sicily. And of course, as she pointed out,
the ice cream. And then there is Archimedes of sarah Cusa.
I mean, this guy figured out Pia. Okay, he figured
(35:06):
out how to burn Roman ships by using metal to
redirect the sun's rays. He discovered pulleys and levers and
the idea of water displacement. And did you know that,
like when he figured out water displacement, that is when
this man ran through the streets naked after hopping out
of his bath, shouting eureka.
Speaker 6 (35:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
And according to the legend, even though Roman soldiers were
given orders not to kill him, when one did approach him,
he was so deep in thought with calculations that he
didn't see the assassin coming.
Speaker 6 (35:39):
That is so crazy.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Yeah, I mean, we're like first and everything.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Okay, So even though you can think of Sicily as
this great tourist attraction and land of incredible food and
history and beaches and Greek ruins like it would just
be nice if people remembered it as the land of
math and science.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
That's really wonderful. I like that. And we started and
ended on a science fact, so that's pretty great to
that end. But I am, of course going to have
to give you this week's trophy, Joe. Thank you so
much for being here. It's really a pleasure to have
you on.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Thank you for having me. I love it. I can
talk about Sicily forever, my friend.
Speaker 1 (36:14):
Well, we can take that offline. But for those of
you looking for a terrific beat read this summer, go
out and buy The Sicilian Inheritance. I'm going to put
the first episode of the podcast Joe made in our
feed as well. And if you want to tell me
something about your Sicilian heritage, things you learned on a
trip to Sicily, or anything else, don't forget We get
our emails sent to our moms at pet Genius moms
(36:36):
at gmail dot com. They want to hear from you,
and we want to hear from you from Will, Dylan,
Joe and Me. We'll be back next week with a
new episode.
Speaker 6 (36:46):
Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongas
Chatikler and research by our goodpal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's
episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan
with support.
Speaker 6 (37:17):
From Tyler Klang.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvel
and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay
Trustee Dara Potts and Viney Shorey For more podcasts from
Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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