There are journeys we make with our feet — and others we make with our tongue.
This one began, oddly enough, in a Spanish class in Barcelona, where I, a wandering Sicilian trying to tame verbs and accents, kept coming across familiar sounds. Words that felt like cousins who had emigrated years ago and suddenly knocked on my classroom door.
Oftentimes, when Vania — a warm, smiling teacher — introduced a new Spanish word, a small breeze rose in the back of my mind, like an old friend whispering: “But wait… we say this too in Sicilian” One day, my classmate Chiabi, a bright Hungarian with the curiosity of a linguist, turned to me and asked: “Is Sicilian actually a language?”
Ah, the temptation. I nearly unleashed a full disquisizione — footnotes, historical detours, maybe even a cameo from the Opera dei Pupi. But I behaved. I simply told him: Yes. Sicilian is a language. A complete one. With its own grammar, syntax, and dictionaries.
And in that moment, I remembered the treasure I keep at home with almost devotional care: my five-volume Vocabolario Siciliano, over six thousand pages — five monumental tomes that weigh as much as a small donkey and contain centuries of stories, migrations, kings, farmers, sailors, and winds from every corner of the island.
For a second, I imagined pulling all five out of my backpack — abracadabra! — and placing them gently on the classroom table. But then I remembered Peter — a very likable classmate from Sheffield, blessed with classic English humour — gets suspicious around anyone displaying signs of intelligence above room temperature. So, I toned it down and did the next best thing… I opened my laptop and began searching for a digital Sicilian vocabulary to show him.
So I began my online pilgrimage: a little Google here, a little academic database there. And then — unexpectedly — I fell into a rabbit hole. One click led to another, and suddenly, as if some librarian-angel in another timezone whispered “try this one”, I landed on a scanned 19th-century Sicilian vocabulary preserved by the University of Illinois. Yes, Illinois.
A treasure printed before Garibaldi was even warming up his horse. The dictionary belonged to Conte Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani di Gualdana, a Lombard aristocrat with no Sicilian origins — yet his private library of 50,000 books included rare Sicilian glossaries. From Sicily to Lombardy to Illinois… and now to my kitchen table in Barcelona.
My curiosity started with one of my favourite words: gana — appetite, desire — a word I knew had a Spanish heartbeat. And there it was: gana, quietly waiting on a page that had travelled farther than I ever had. Some words have more frequent-flyer miles than we do. And you think, language is not a list of words. It is a journey. And sometimes that journey takes you from Palermo to Barcelona… and unexpectedly through Illinois.
But a language is also History. History doesn’t always shout; sometimes it murmurs through syllables. As you know, Sicily is a mosaic of tongues: Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, Catalan, Spanish. Each left a sediment, a trace, a whisper. Let me share a few “Spanishified” ones.
Sicily first fell under Aragonese rule in 1282, after the famous Vespri Siciliani, the revolt that expelled the French from the island. From that moment, the island entered a long Iberian orbit: first under the Crown of Aragon (1282–1516), then under the unified Spanish monarchy of the Habsburgs (1516–1713), and finally under the Bourbon dynasty of Spain (1735–1860).
With only a brief interruption by the Savoy (1713–1720) and the Austrians (1720–1735), the Iberian presence in Sicily lasted, remarkably, almost six centuries. During that vast stretch of time, countless soldiers, merchants, priests, sailors, clerks, and administrators crossed the sea.
They didn’t leave behind grand cathedrals or imperial arches; they left something more subtle and more stubborn: words. Vocabulary, idioms, and grammar patterns slipped quietly into the Sicilian language and settled there, surviving long after the coats of arms were pulled down and the flags changed colour.
What remains today is a kind of linguistic sediment: Spanish roots growing in Sicilian soil. And now, studying Spanish in Barcelona, I feel this curious sensation — as if the language I’m learning is not entirely foreign, but rather a distant cousin of the one I grew up speaking.
And yes, I did grow up with it. I won’t even try to list every similarity, but a few of them deserve to be mentioned — especially for the memories they carry. Some of these words are completely different from Italian, yet when I hear them in Spanish, they sound like home. They sound like my mother, my grandmother, speaking to me in the warm streets and sun of Sicily.
If I had to begin somewhere, I’d start with rina.In Spanish it becomes arena, in Italian sabbia — but for me, rina is much more than just “sand.” It is the heart of my childhood. The essence of who I am. Growing up in a small village on the Sicilian coast, rina was what warmed our bare feet, what we touched before diving into the sea, what marked entire days of summer spent on the beach.
Lastima! There is no equivalent in Italian! That’s my grandmother Joachina and granfather Toto’. This word carries the weight of old sighs. My mother less so; I barely say it anymore — a gentle erosion across three generations. But hearing lástima appear so casually in my Spanish class made something inside me wake up. I told myself: I should start using làstima again. Some words deserve resurrection — especially the ones that once carried our family’s tenderness and melancholy. And in the Illinois vocabulary, làstima was right there, waiting like an old postcard.
Limpiar – This memory surfaced when I was trying to find the Spanish term for “cleaning lady” — mujer de la limpieza — and suddenly realised how close it sounded to the Sicilian limpiari. Same meaning, same melody. No trace of this in Italian, which instead uses pulire.
And hearing limpiar brought me straight back to my aunt in Montedoro, that little hilltown in the heart of Sicily where my father was born. Not because she was a cleaning lady — but because the word carries with it the atmosphere of that place: houses with their doors thrown wide open, freshly washed floors glistening under the midday sun, waiting only a few minutes before the warm Sicilian summer wind swept through and dried everything as if by magic. Madonna santa, I can still smell it — that mix of soap, stone, sunshine, and home.
And then there is rasca. When Vania — mi profesora buenísima — was guiding us through the vocabulary of the barrio, she casually mentioned the word rascacielos. I hesitated. In Sicilian, rasca means “to scratch.” So a rascacielo is literally a sky-scratcher — a skyscraper with nails. The same verb that lives in Sicilian had simply climbed a few more floors.
And then there is zita — one of the most romantic echoes of all. In Spanish, cita means a date — the moment two people decide to meet. From this meaning, the Sicilian word zita was born. But here is the beautiful twist: in Spanish, cita can also mean an appointment — with a doctor, a lawyer, a government office. A perfectly ordinary, everyday slot in the calendar. In Sicilian, zita lost all those practical uses. It kept only the “romantic” heart of the word. Zita is never an appointment. It’s your date.
Maybe my last discovery came thanks to my cousin Salvatore, who also lives in Madrid. I wrote to him: “To, send me a few Spanish words that sound Sicilian to you.” The first one he sent was strafalario. I burst out laughing. “Is that really Spanish?” I asked. “Claro,” he replied. In fact, it comes straight from the Spanish estrafalario — eccentric, odd, delightfully bizarre in appearance or behaviour. And the funny thing is: we Sicilians still use strafalario in exactly the same way today. Another little linguistic migrant, alive and well on both sides of the sea.
I could fill pages with these mini-stories — little words that have travelled farther than I ever have, each with its own anecdote, each carrying a secret passport: cucchiara – cuchara (spoon); arbolu – árbol (tree); palumma – paloma (dove); abocar – abbuccari (to pour); smammare – desmamar (which can mean get lost, go crazy, or freak out). But perhaps it’s better to save the rest for a glass of red wine, in some cosy bar in Barcelona, while I go on learning this idioma and its culture, one delightful echo at a time.
Soon I’ll share another journey — a glance at some of the grammar we share, where Sicilian and Spanish mirror each other with almost mischievous precision. Stay tuned.
Studying Spanish in Barcelona brought me back to Sicily — and Sicily quietly pointed me towards a library in Illinois. Three places with one memory thread. Words don’t die; they simply slumber. And when we speak them again, we bring them home.
