Midnight in Sicily

'When travelling, always take with you a book set in the place you're going to.' 

This is one of those bits of advice that I always plan to follow, but when the day of departure arrives it never seems to happen. Sometimes I've forgotten my passport, and have to get back off the the bus, cross the road and catch another bus home to retrieve it ten minutes into my journey (Berlin, Christmas 2006). Sometimes I've moved house that morning, and all my books are in boxes that have been drop-kicked into the new flat before the door is slammed and the van is returned to the hire company, minus its rear vision mirror (Australia, January 2007) . Usually I just forget. 

But as I packed for my last trip, although I omitted a lot of other – in retrospect very useful– things... sunscreen, a hat, summer shoes, snorkelling gear – I did remember that a friend had given me a copy of Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily. As we were on a Ryanair flight bound for Palermo, I stuffed it into my already overstuffed handbag. 

This book is a gem. Whether intentional or not, the writer has somehow mirrored the character of Sicily in his work – it's rambling, meandering, confusing, beautiful and almost too atmospheric. He veers, with no apparent design, from a discussion of the perfect espresso to the Mafia trials of the 90s, to a meeting with a Palermo transsexual, to a sobering account of a magistrate's murder. As a reader you simply follow him. 

I love his descriptions of food. He writes like a person with a healthy appetite and his description of pasta con le sarde had me peering at menus until I found it for myself. It's a mix of spaghetti, fresh sardines, saffron, wild Sicilian fennel and plump raisins. Found, ordered and swiftly eaten in the town square of Cefalu, where Cinema Paradiso was filmed, it certainly lived up to his prose – though not for very long. 

When he writes about his own experiences in Sicily and Naples he is brilliant, but I found the overview of Cosa Nostra less engaging. Perhaps he was writing for readers with a better general understanding of the organisation's history than I have. Or perhaps it is simply that Cosa Nostra is impossible to grasp, let alone articulate. It makes sense when he writes of a well-known mafia mantra: the best word is the one not spoken.