Posted by cellat on Friday, June 3, 2016 in Blog posts.

I decided to interview our professor, Vittoria. Vittoria is from the village of Aspra, which has a population of around 5,000 people and is about 65 km from Cefalù, where she has worked for the past fifteen years. She mentioned that the village was once much larger, as it was a fishing village specializing in anchovies, but when the market was overtaken by the North Africans, the town shrank, and now its only real connection to the industry are packaging and the anchovy museum we went to on our firs site visit. When I asked what she liked about her village today, Vittoria said that she likes it due to the quiet nature of Aspra and its proximity to Palermo, as it is only sixteen km from Aspra, but she spends most of her time in Cefalù anyways, so she didn’t have a very strong opinion. Vittoria currently lives with her mother, who is rather elderly and has a nurse help take care of her during the day, and her son Davide. Vittoria also has another son who lives on his own, and two brothers: one who lives in Aspra and one who lives in Tuscany. Fortunately, Vittoria is close with all of her family, even her brother in Tuscany and his family. However, Vittoria spends most of her time away from Aspra, as she leaves for work at 7:00 and typically comes home around 19:30-20:00 in the summer, but in the winter she tends to come home earlier. Probably the most shocking part of the interview was that despite all of her time in Cefalù, she has not gotten close to anyone in the town, stating that the populace is rather insular and unless your family is close to people in town or the resident is young, they do not get more invested than simple pleasantry. Vittoria also recalled back to when her sons were young and they would spend the summer in Ficuzza, locals and visitors would sit on opposite ends of the piazza, with no interaction. In fact, the only person that she befriended in the couple of summers that they spent in Ficuzza was the woman who now runs the bird sanctuary, and she is Austrian. When I asked why this might be, Vittoria said that it may be because of the tourism in these towns, as the locals see people every day that they will never see again, so they tend to be reserved when interacting with outsiders, as they will most likely leave.

Vittoria also had an interesting view on the education system in Sicily, as she grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s and had children who went to school in the 1990s and 2000s. When Vittoria went to school, she mentioned that parents were hardly ever involved in their children’s schooling, stating that children as young as six would walk to and from school with other children, and that parents might show up once a year for a parent-teacher conference, but they also might blow it off. Contrast that with the consistent parental interaction with her children’s schooling, which shocked her, since that was a point of mockery in her schooldays. She told me that one day one of her children didn’t complete an assignment, and she was astonished to find the school called her to make it her responsibility, to which she replied that it was her son’s, drawing on her own experiences. Vittoria also told me that when she was young, the expectation was to at least complete scuola elementare, which goes through age 10, since most parents had that level of education, whereas now you have people staying in university to avoid unemployment, and the legal education requirement is through age 16. Overall, Vittoria thinks that the change in parental involvement is a good thing, as she believes that parents should support their children in their endeavors, but she fears that the change may overcorrect.