How Sicily Cemented an Unlikely Friendship
'For our first-ever Love issue, we asked four authors to recount times when love and travel intersected in their lives: Alexander Chee writes about a possible betrayal in Spain. Jami Attenberg recalls how a friendship deepened in Sicily (below). Sarah Hepola remembers a road trip — and an uncertain future — in Mexico. And Sloane Crosley looks back at a relationship that took three trips to kill.
We also have six writers recounting transformative moments that happened while traveling; a roundup of new hotels and resorts for all kinds of relationships, and a collection of readers’ stories of loves found and lost on the road.
We met in Toronto, Viola Di Grado and I. We were attending a literary festival, and I saw her across the room in a crowded hospitality suite at a harborfront hotel, amid all the writers eagerly suckling the free liquor. She was 15 years my junior, an Italian baby goth princess: pin thin, long blond hair, a childlike face, wearing dark eyeliner and a dramatic black Victorian gown. I immediately thought: Her, I must know. We talked briefly and had an instant ease around each other, a major triumph among writers. (Most of us are inherently awkward creatures.) The next day we became friends on Facebook. It is always good to have a new contact in a foreign country, I remember thinking at the time. What more could I expect from this stranger I met for only a few moments?'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/travel/palermo-sicily-jami-attenberg-friendship.html?