Sicily's Palermo Cathedral survived heavy wartime bombing by the Allies. (Photo by Gene Santoro)

For my father, as for many of Patton’s troops, Operation Husky was a surreal entrée to his parents’ homeland, which he’d never seen

Just after midnight on July 10, 1943, American troops crossed the 90 miles of Mediterranean separating North Africa from Sicily in one of the largest amphibious invasions to date. My father, a medical technician, shipped out almost two weeks later to Palermo—Sicily’s capital, and a major Axis supply point of arguable operational value for the Allies—where his 9th Division would join Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s Seventh Army. By then Patton had charged north across the island’s middle to capture its capital, and was turning east to race his British rival, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, to Messina. The Yanks beat the Brits by a nose; war-weary Italian soldiers surrendered to GIs by the tens of thousands; and the Germans, skillfully sabotaging as they withdrew, escaped Patton’s pincers across the narrow straits to Italy’s boot, where they fought for nearly two more years in one of the war’s more grinding attritional campaigns.

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For my father, as for many of Patton’s troops (culled to be disproportionately of Italian descent), Operation Husky was a surreal entrée to his parents’ homeland, which he’d never seen. For Sicilians, the devastation wrought by Husky was another mala fortuna, the wheel of fate’s latest turn through a long, cruel history of invasion by the Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Normans, Swabians, Aragonese, Angevins, Bourbons, Spaniards, Italians, English, and Germans. This spring, I went back to Sicily to retrace some of his, and history’s, footsteps.

After Mount Etna’s cataclysmic 1908 eruption, my grandparents joined the exodus fleeing downtrodden Sicily for the American Dream. The future looked brighter than they’d dared hope. But history, as Sicilians know well, loves irony. My grandfather died in a Mafia “accident” while working on the Brooklyn docks: nestled among emigrating hordes, the transplanted Sicilian bane was battling to control New York’s port. Mala fortuna. My grandmother spoke no English and had eight kids, the youngest two months old at the time. Four of her six boys served in World War II. My father went first, drafted in December 1940, slated to be discharged December 1941. Mala fortuna. He survived North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, the Bulge, and, like his GI buddies and island forebears, was a fatalist. Shipboard in Palermo’s harbor in 1943, he looked out on the smoking, cratered shoreline through hazel eyes clouded by war and the past.

For centuries, Palermo was Sicily’s most attractive, envied spot. Fronted by a gorgeous natural port, the Conca d’Oro, the city of almost 700,000 is somewhat off the beaten tourist track, but remains a historical, architectural, and culinary treasure trove. Carthaginians founded it; Greeks ruled it; Romans annexed it. Their traces linger at sites like Villa Bonanno, a beautiful public garden set amid the ruins of ancient houses. But Palermo didn’t become a major urban center until the saraceni, as Sicilians called Muslims, took the Vermont-sized island away from the Byzantine Empire in the ninth century.

To the ancient Greeks, Sicily’s first serious colonizers, cities like Siracusae (Syracuse) and Akragas (now Agrigento) were far more important. Under a timelessly brilliant Mediterranean sun, I walked the ruins of Akragas, the Valle dei Templi, where magnificent, remarkably preserved temples form the apricot-toned heart of a fifth-century-BC sandstone metropolis that stretches for three miles. A mile up the road at “modern” Agrigento, a medieval town with ridge-perched piazzas, I gazed down at the Greek monuments (spectacularly lit at night) and the Mediterranean, and pondered fate’s turns.

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