Posted by seryna on Wednesday, May 31, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

Nadelina Wine Bar is directly below the apartment I live in, so I see Marco Martina (the owner) almost every day. After a week I realized he speaks English well and gets to see an interesting side of Cefalu. Every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night the wine bars on the street below our apartment are teeming with tourists and locals alike, and I was curious if there were noticeable differences between the two. When I was originally brainstorming on what to interview him on, I thought I wanted to see how the nightlife scene in Cefalu compares to the scene in the U.S. I thought I would get information that reaffirmed the notion that Americans have much more excessive lifestyle habits, including drinking, than Europeans. However, throughout our interview I ended up learning more about what it is like to be a native Sicilian and start/own your own bar in a town where tourism is the main industry.

Marco was born in Palermo in 1976 and stayed there until recently. He went to the University of Palermo where he studied the arts, a topic he is still very passionate about. Around ten years ago he moved to Cefalu to open a bar (not Nadelina). A few years after moving to Cefalu he opened Nadelina and has been there ever since. He lives about 6km outside of Cefalu and makes the commute every night to open his bar at 7:00PM. Around eight years ago he went to America for three months to stay with his cousin and decided to teach himself English. He has never formally studied English, but picked it up trying to communicate while in America and gets to practice with English speaking tourists who come to Cefalu.

Our conversation began with comparing life in Cefalu to life in Palermo. The main difference he noted was the increased presence of tourists in Cefalu. In Cefalu, the majority of jobs work with and around tourists, whereas in Palermo he said they work with a lot of locals. He states the organization and business side of owning a bar in Palermo and Cefalu are the same, but the people you work with are different. One of the most interesting comments he made was he prefers to work with tourists over the locals. He said that his interactions with tourists are simpler and less disruptive. He also enjoys getting to see all the different types of people that come through Cefalu. He likes meeting people who think differently than him. Talking to Marco about his preference for the population he works with was especially interesting to me. As I have mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, I am from a town in California that thrives on tourism. However, I have never met someone who says they prefer to work with the tourists over the locals. The mentality of enjoying meeting people of different cultures and from different places does not necessarily transfer over to the tourist towns I have experienced in America. I think this has a lot to do with the different lifestyles in America versus in Sicily. People in Sicily are less wrapped up in their own lives and take the time to get to know people and appreciate their experiences. In America, it is “every man for himself” type mentality that I have yet to see in Sicily.

Next, we moved onto the topic of how he ended up in Cefalu, and what it was like opening a bar there. When I asked him what he had to do to open a bar, he immediately mentioned the multitude of steps involved and how slow the process is. He said it felt like every time something would get approved there would be another step. He said the whole process was “slow and difficult”. When he mentioned to me that the whole process was very slow and difficult I was not surprised. I have noticed things tend to move at a slower pace in Sicily than they do in America. My aunt opened a store in California and the whole approval process was fairly speedy. However, Marco mentioned that he felt like he had to wait months in order to get approval to open his first bar. In Sicily, I have noticed that people do not have the same need to get things done as quickly as possible as they do in America. At home, people would get highly impatient having to wait so long to get things done. There are very different paces of life in America versus in Sicily.

Overall, my interview with Marco ended up leading me in a direction I did not foresee. What I thought would be him supporting the notion that Americans and Sicilians have very different nightlife habits turned into me learning more about what it is like to be a business owner in a small tourist town. I think that while America’s efficiency and rapid pace of life are great when things need to get done, we can often miss the simple day-to-day interactions that Sicilians seem to appreciate so much. I felt like my life was put in slow motion when I first arrived in Sicily, but now I have come to respect the way they take their time to appreciate the simple interactions in their lives.

If you are interested in listening to the full interview you can find it here!