Theresa Maggio

Funeral and burial today for Favour Nike Adekune, a 20-year-old victim of human trafficking from Nigeria. She was tricked into moving to Italy then forced into prostitution. Two years ago, a client picked her up, drove to the outskirts of town, and she was never seen alive again. The next day, her fiance was  Read More 

I need my Sicilian grandparents' birth records to start my quest for dual Italian-USA citizenship. I requested these documents of the Santa Margherita di Belice records office. My grandfather's birth record, I was told, if it still exists, is inaccessible in the archives, and my grandmother was apparently never born.
Here is the e-mail reply from an employee at the town records office, copied and pasted just as I received it:

Egregia sig.ra

dalle ricerche effettuate presso questo Ufficio di stato civile si comunica che:
- qualora esistesse (Terremoto e traslochi vari) il registro di nascita del 1879 si potrebbe trovare  Read More 

It was a beautiful day with cumulus clouds in a cerulean sky, the bees buzzed around the spring flowers, the cattle lowed and far off we could hear the tinkling of brass bells on sheep, but Favour could hear none of it. She was killed two years ago by a client who covered her  Read More 

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Found this shepherd upside down taking the sun today. I bought ten artichokes for two euro, about $3.80 at today's exchange rate.

I just spent four days in S. Margherita di Belice, my paternal grandparents' home town, with relatives. I was on a mission to get three documents from the town records office to aid me in my quest for Italian citizenship.

No, I was not able to get the documents, yet. The woman who was  Read More 

A beautiful sight. The landscape around S. Margherita is breathtaking.
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I need to take the AST bus to San Giueppe Jato today. The AST website, when it is working, gives the bus schedule but not the ticket price, nor the location of the ticket office, nor the location of the bus terminal, which could be in a side street somewhere. Naturally they do not answer  Read More 

A chair in the street means "Don't park here, this is MY spot." Never mind that the spot is in the middle of a striped pedestrian crossing, where it is illegal to park anyway.

On my way to the protest I passed this beautiful example of Liberty style, which is what Sicilians call Art Nouveau design. It is a fabric store that has lasted all these years in Via Maqueda, near the Teatro Massimo.