I will never forget my trip to Sicily. My yoga teacher, whose family was originally from that island, gave me the idea of writing an historical novel about the Tarantella, the Sicilian dance caused by the bite of a Tarantula spider. And so, I decided to journey there myself.
My husband and I flew to Paris, where he was to spend some time hanging out and meeting friends. The very next day, we went to the Gare de Lyon to get on the Parigi-Milano train. The train left around lunchtime and didn’t get into Milano until the evening, but the scenery was glorious, with views of the Alps and Lake Geneva.
My husband and I left the US on 17 April 2012, and I seem to remember I arrived in Milano (my first visit) during the Fashion Week, meaning that hotels were very hard to come by and those in the downtown area were exorbitantly expensive. So I found a little place out in the suburbs, and the following morning took a taxi to Milano Centrale, taking the train all the way down the spine of Italia to Taormina Sicily. It took about twelve hours to do this, and near the end of the journey, the train rumbled down into the bowels of a ship to cross the straits of Messina, before coming up to take us the rest of the way to Taormina.
I must have arrived at around nine o’clock in the evening, but Madama helped me to find a delicious meal at a restaurant in town.
The next day I set out to explore Taormina and was charmed by the beauty of the place. But it wasn’t right for the novel I wanted to create. It took me a while, but I finally found the perfect place for my story at the Castello di Lombardia in Enna.
The castle sits high on a hilltop surveying the surrounding countryside. It has a prominent tower that everyone can see when they approach it. (This tower is square, but I made it round for my novel.) Opposite the castle is a rock called Ceres Rock, where devotees of Ceres/Demeter worshipped in the Ancient World. This place is old. A castle has been here since the first century BCE, and it sits on top of a temple to Ceres, suggesting that there were secret passages that led from the castle, down underground and up again to the rock that lies just outside the castle grounds.
All of this fueled my imagination and inspired some scenes in the first volume of my TWELVE CURSED SISTERS series, which I hope to release in the not-too-distant future!
