I have only a week left here. I'm planning to go back to America for Christmas before flying to India, not only because I can't stand the thought of spending Christmas without my family but also because the next eight months of my journey—India and Indonesia—require a complete repacking of gear. Very little of the stuff you need when you are living in Rome is the same stuff you need when you are wandering around India.
我在这里的日子只剩下一个星期。我打算回美国过圣诞，之后再飞去印度，不仅因为我没法容忍不和家人过圣诞，也因为接下来为期八个月的旅行——印度和印尼——需要重新打包行装。住在罗马需要的东西，和你周游印度需要的东西是两回事。

And maybe it's in preparation for my trip to India that I decide to spend this last week traveling through Sicily—the most third-world section of Italy, and therefore not a bad place to go if you need to prepare yourself to experience extreme poverty. Or maybe I only want to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: "Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is."
或许是为了印度之旅预作准备，我决定最后一个礼拜去西西里旅行——意大利境内最第三世界的地区，因此如须让自己做好体验赤贫的准备，这是不错的地方。也或许我去西西里，只是因为歌德说过：没去过西西里，便无从清楚了解意大利。

But it's not easy getting to or around Sicily. I have to use all my finding-out skills to find a train that runs on Sunday all the way down the coast and then to find the correct ferryboat to Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, "It's not my fault I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!") Once I've arrived in Messina, I have to find a bus station (grimy as a smoker's lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the ticket booth, mourning his life, and see if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs and beaches of Sicily's stupendous and hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina, and then I have to find a taxi and then I have to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of whom to ask my favorite question in Italian: "Where is the best food in this town?" In Taormina, that person turns out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things anyone can ever give me in life—a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant written on it, a hand-drawn map of how to find the place.
然而去西西里旅行并不容易。我得用尽所有的探知能力找到周日一路南下抵达海岸的火车，然后找到正确的渡轮前往墨西拿（Messina；一个恐怖可疑的海港城市，似乎从堵住的门后咆哮：丑并不是我的错！我经历过地震，遭受过地毯式轰炸，还惨遭黑手党蹂躏！）。一抵达墨西拿后，得找到公车站（和吸烟者的肺一样肮脏），找到坐在卖票亭里自怨自艾的男人，问他能否卖我一张开往滨海小镇陶尔米纳（Taormina）的车票。公车在西西里锋芒毕露的东海岸沿着峭壁和海滩颠簸行驶，直到抵达陶尔米纳后，我得找到一辆计程车，然后找一家旅社。而后得找对人，用意大利语问我最爱的问题：镇上 哪个地方东西最好吃？结果在陶尔米纳找到的人是个睡眼惺忪的警察。他给了我最好的东西——一张纸条，上面写了一家地处偏僻的餐厅名字，并有指出餐厅方位的手写地图。

Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting ready for her evening's customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet, trying not to knock over the Christmas crèche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I don't need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this is my first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in Sicilian dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of twenty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I've eaten yet in all of Italy. It's pasta, but a shape of pasta I've never before seen—big, fresh, sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope's hat, stuffed with a hot, aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey, oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit, stewed in thyme.
结果是一家小酒馆。友善年长的女掌柜正在为当晚的生意做准备，她穿着长袜的脚站在桌上，一边擦拭餐厅窗户，试着不碰倒圣诞耶稣像。我跟她说我无须看菜单，请她为我拿来最好的食物，因为这是我在西西里的第一个夜晚。她欣喜地摩拳擦掌，用西西里方言朝她在厨房的老迈母亲叫喊；然后在二十分钟内，我忙着享用在整个意大利吃过最让人惊奇的一餐。是面食，却是我从未见过的形状——又大又新鲜，一片片像意大利饺子（虽然尺寸不尽相同）般折叠成教皇帽子的形状，内馅是甲壳动物、章鱼和乌贼熬煮而成的又滚烫又香浓的泥末，和切丝蔬菜拌在一起，浸泡在橄榄风味、海洋般的汤汁里。下一道菜则是百里香炖兔肉。

But Syracuse, the next day, is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here in the cold rain, late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand years of history under my feet in Syracuse. It's a place of such ancient civilization that it makes Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that Hercules once slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called "a city not in the least inferior to Athens itself." Syracuse is the link between ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Many great playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps "by some divine fate" rulers might become philosophers, and philosophers might become rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.
可是隔天的锡拉库萨（Syracuse）更是精采。公车在傍晚的冷雨中让我在某个街角下车。我立即爱上这个城市。锡拉库萨的三千年历史就在脚下。这儿的古老文明使罗马看起来就像美国的达拉斯。传说狄德勒斯（Daedalus）从克里特岛飞到此地，赫丘力士（Hercules）曾睡过这里。锡拉库萨曾是希腊殖民地，修昔底德（Thucydides）说它是丝毫不逊于雅典的城市。锡拉库萨是联系古希腊和古罗马的纽带。许多古代剧作家和科学家曾住在此地。柏拉图认为它是实现乌托邦的理想地点，或许藉由某种天命，让统治者成为哲学家，哲学家成为统治者。历史学家说，修辞学的发明是在锡拉库萨，而剧本的情节亦然（这只是一桩小事）。

I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can't answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he has stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in her mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly, I ask this fisherman where I should eat tonight, and I leave our conversation clutching yet another little piece of paper, directing me to a little restaurant with no name, where—as soon as I sit down that night—the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari house specialty.
我从这座脆弱城市的市场走过去，看着一位戴黑色羊毛帽的老人为顾客剖开鱼肚（他叼着烟，就像裁缝师缝制衣服时叼着针；他持刀把鱼片切得完美无缺），令我心中洋溢着某种无法回答或解释的爱意。我羞怯地问这位鱼贩今晚该去哪儿吃饭，我们谈过话之后，我取了张纸条，指引我去一家无名小餐馆。我一坐下，服务生便拿来一团团松软、撒有开心果的瑞科达（Ricotta）乳酪，面包块漂浮在芬芳的油中，一碟碟肉片和橄榄，佐以生洋葱与欧芹的冰橘沙拉。之后，我才听说鱿鱼招牌菜。