If you ask Google Maps how to get to Mondello Beach from Cafe Latino, it will tell you to walk down Via Vittorio Emanuele to Via Roma, cross past the corner that always smells of horse urine (which is not a detail Google seems to care about or track), turn either left or right, and take the 101 or 102 bus north to the stop just outside Giannettino, at Liberta’ Notarbartolo. From there, you take the 806 to Mondello. This will absolutely get you to the beach, but if you follow these directions, especially just after the high schools get out for the summer, you will arrive at Notarbartolo and see thirty-seven other tourists standing around, waiting for the 806 in shorts, flip-flops, sunglasses, and overstuffed backpacks. When the 806 arrives, every seat will already be taken by locals, and your children will need to stand or be held for the 45-minute drive – and the bus will get more and more crowded, more and more uncomfortable, and hotter with every stop. Italians love children, but they will not give up their seats for a mother holding a two-year-old, and people standing in the space marked for buggies will not move out of the way for an actual buggy. Any parents in this situation, particularly Germans and Australians, will get visibly and vocally frustrated. At some point during the trip, at least two Sicilian teenagers in the back will start playing music through their phones or bluetooth speakers; a few of their friends will start vaping, knowing that the conductor will never come back to stop them because he – and all the conductors we saw were men – can’t get through the mass of bodies crowding on the bus towards the cool beach breeze.

The better thing to do is to have an adorable five-year-old who wants to learn Italian, and an incredibly adorable pre-verbal two-year-old who observes everything and smiles. Make some flash cards of words that the five-year-old wants to learn – ambulanza, macchina della polizia, impalcatura – and, while standing with him on the 102, go through the cards to distract him from the fact that he is standing on a bus, which he hates. Do it quietly, and, if anyone else looks at you, smile at them. An Indian guy next to you may ask if you are going to the spiaggia; say si, and he will suggest that you get off with him, this is the stop. Google Maps says he is wrong, but he is insistent.

And it is not your stop. You will get suspicious, and keep your wits about you as you follow him across two blocks, past a vacant lot, in generally the right direction but just…a bit off. He will say very little until you turn onto Via Alfonso Borelli, which spits you out onto a large square, all roads and plants, and you see the statue of Francesco Crispi that you passed before, on the way to the Giardino Inglese, and his reticence may be that he doesn’t speak much English, or it could be more sinister. But then he will walk with you to the 806 stop, and explain that it is the inizio de the bus; said 806 bus will arrive, completely and totally empty, and you will line up with him and a handful of others, all speaking Italian or Hindi, and join them on the completely and totally empty seats in the back. You will ask, and he will confirm, that he works on the beach, with other Indians, selling food, trinkets, blankets, bluetooth speakers – a low-paying job that must, somehow, be worth it to him. When the seats are full, the bus starts up, drives 20 meters, makes a right, drives another 20 meters, and you recognize that you are outside Giannettino – or, if you had listened to Google, you got on the bus a 30-second walk away from being forced to stand for the entire journey. When your savior gets off near Mondello, you grazie him a mille, and promise, in your mind, to buy something from him if you see him, but you never see him again, which makes you sad.

You use his route to the beach for the rest of your stay – and luckily, this was the second time you went to the beach, and you have almost a month left. Twice, you see other families waiting with small children, and you try to tell them to come around the corner to the beginning of the line, but both times they demur, they look at their Google, they say “OK, we wait here,” and then a few minutes later, when you are sitting and they are standing, you will make eye contact with the fathers and they will look quickly away.

And now the 806 crawls along Via della Libertà until Piazza Vittorio Veneto, with its Statua della Libertà in the huge empty circle, and then up Via dell’Artigliere to the most complicated intersection in Palermo. A teenage girl might get on with her friends; she might see Nick and gasp and say, “ciao, bello,” and spend the rest of the trip sneaking glances at him, trying to touch his hand. Once through the intersection, it is as if the bus has released its brake; it shoots up Viale Diana and then suddenly there is a campground and scrub and you are in the countryside. The brush is dense, and tinder-dry, and, on the right, Monte Pellegrino rises so steeply that you can’t see the top from the bus. You continue on, cruising now, until the road opens up again into residential neighborhoods, and the first stop comes. Two or three beach-bound tourists will get off, thinking it is Mondello, not knowing that they will now have to walk five more blocks to see the sand. You’ll go around Piazza Valdesi, then up Viale Principe di Scalea, one block from the beach, a stop every block or two, until the very last stop on Via Teti. You’ll be the only one to call back into the bus and thank the driver, who will look up, smile, and wave, not used to appreciation. Marcello will meet you on his scooter, walk you to your umbrella, give your kids a treat, and then shake your hand; you’ll see him shaking hands up and down the beach like a politician, and the people he knows, having seen him with you, will look over and nod and smile, and you think that you might now have people here.

After a few trips, the beach routine will be established. All stuff is dropped, the backpack is opened, and the tote bags – one each for bathing suits, sunscreen and beach toys, water bottles and snacks – will be hung up on the very convenient hooks under the umbrella between the two beach chairs. A quick trip to the changing room, which is pitch black compared to the beach, and then the slathering of sunscreen, with a 15-minute timer set; the boys will play in the sand, and then, when the timer goes off, there’s a race to the water, a quick splash, and then more playing on the sand.

For me, time was mostly spent watching the kids. Once settled, there would be one or two hours before lunch, and then we would go to Le Lunette Mondello, getting a Caprese sandwich for Alice, a sausage and chips sandwich for Daniel and Nick, and a couple arancini for me. Because the beach chair rental place had a “no outside food” policy, we would take the food to the edge of the water and eat it there. Then, there would be an hour to digest, and then we might rent a paddle boat for the kids from the family that ran the first stand south on the beach. They would remember that Daniel was insistent on having a life jacket, and Nick would give them high-fives, and they would tell us we had an hour, but would pat me on the shoulder to know they were flexible. We would paddle out, me and Daniel on the paddles, or Daniel and Alice, and look at things. When we returned, the men would make a big production about Daniel and Nick getting back from a voyage, and there would be the shaking of hands and we would walk back to our umbrella.

Then I would go for a long swim. The water at Mondello is the clearest water I have ever seen, perhaps matched only by water in Mauritius. I would wade out to my waist, then turn around to wave to Daniel, who would be watching me from just past the waterline; I would flip my goggles down, start my watch, wave again, and then fall forward, feeling the coolness of the sea suck me in. I’d crawl out another 20 meters, then turn right, down toward the giant restaurant on the pier, and then start really swimming.

Because it was so clear, I could see three or four meters to the bottom, which was mostly white sand, with occasional dark spots of seaweed bubbling over with fish. Because it was so clear, and the sand was not rocky, not dirty, I saw everything. Once, from the paddle-boat we rented, I saw a flash of light that was not quite natural; later, I swam back to the spot fifty meters from shore and dove down and found a pearl earring, fallen from an empty ear. I found friendship bracelets dropped by the sellers who plied the waterfront, one of which I have on my right wrist right now, its rainbow coloring a reminder of the Sicilian sunsets. Once, swimming past the restaurant, I saw something almost human floating in the water. Getting closer, I saw that it was a pair of Levi’s, the cuffs bobbing at the top of the water, the waist weighed down by a leather belt, the pockets emptied. I pulled the belt off and let the jeans float away. On that southern side of the bay, there is a giant sandbar rising up fifty meters from shore that is so shallow that you could stand up and the water would only go to mid-calf; I took the belt to the sandbar to examine it, then wrapped it around my waist. North-west of Mondello, there is a ridge of high, steep mountains, so steep that only a few roads switchback up their feet a bit and then end, as if defeated by the brutality of the Sicilian stone. While I was standing on that sandbar, I looked up to see the beach and the mountains; clouds were pouring over the tops, streaming like a waterfall down the rock face, and then disappearing. I took my goggles off, not fully understanding; yes, the clouds were appearing, then disappearing. I could only reason that they were coming off of the cool Mediterranean or Atlantic, then, as soon as they got over the mountains, the heat of Mondello caused them to evaporate. I watched for probably ten minutes, stunned by nature, and then swam back, past the jetty with the restaurant, listening to children playing among the pylons. When I got back to our AirBNB, I cut the buckle off the belt with a chef knife and attached it to my own Amish belt from Eli Miller, where it is now, reminding me every day of the way the clouds evaporated in the heat.

I found other things at Mondello. Walking back to the bus, I found two clippings of jade plants on the sidewalk; I looked around, and there were no jade plants anywhere else, so someone must have tugged them off of a plant, brought them to that point, and dropped them. It reminded me of my first real girlfriend ever, who worked for a congresswoman in California, canvassing door-to-door. One day, she was having a really tough time, and she got to one home with a friendly family who said they would support her candidate. She noticed a huge jade plant, and asked if she could take a branch to grow to remind her that there were good people in the world; that was the first time I had ever heard of propagating jade plants from clippings. She kept it alive for years; I wonder if it is still alive. I picked the clippings up from the sidewalk, put them in my water bottle, and brought them back to Edinburgh, where they are growing on my windowsill.

And Mondello provided some challenges. Back in 2001, Patagonia was just getting a purchase on the small, private liberal arts college market, and a few people had Patagonia clothes. In the spring, my suite had a party; when I woke up in the morning, and went to the toilet, someone had torn apart a small pile of beef jerky and left it on the top of the toilet. I looked behind the closed door and saw a Patagonia jacket on a towel hook, perhaps from the jerky shredder. Nobody ever came back to reclaim either of these items, and I was a vegetarian, so I kept the jacket, and still have it; I don’t know what happened to the beef jerky. Later, I somehow came across this video of a man who had bought some Patagonia board shorts and then kept repairing them until they were like the Ship of Theseus.

And in 2012, ahead of a family reunion in Mauritius, I got a pair of Patagonia board shorts to swim in. In 2022, they ripped really badly, so I repaired them; the fabric felt delicate, though, and I knew they would be damaged again. I brought them to Italy, and, on a swim in Mondello, they ripped again – a huge gash down the butt. I brought them to a tailor in Palermo, who said that it would take a week to repair – she was absurdly busy. I wanted someone in Palermo to repair them, but that meant that I would not be able to swim…without another swimsuit.

So I went to a sporting goods store just north of Parco Piersanti Mattarella. Growing up, the stereotype was that Europeans and Australians wore Speedos, while Americans wore more conservative shorts; I thought, “I am never going to be able to do this again,” and I got my first pair of swimming briefs. I never actually wore the shorts again; while Europeans wore far more shorts than Speedos, the briefs were easier to swim in, and that made the difference. The board shorts now have a beautiful blue-and-white piece of Sicilian fabric covering the tear, and, while I want to wear them, the sky-blue briefs really are nicer to swim in, so I wear them.

On the last day of our stay, we went to Mondello. I started my swim, and was immediately diverted by something that looked like a robot face on the bottom of the bay. I dove down, and pulled up a combination mask/snorkel that turned out to be just the right size for me; someone must have dropped it off the side of a boat. I looped my own goggles around my wrist and put the snorkel mask on, and decided to just go as fast as I could, able to power through and breathe hard. I found another pearl earring on that swim, and, at lunch, bought two litres of white vino sfuso, some of which was consumed and some of which was brought back to Edinburgh and turned into white wine vinegar. I sent the first earring to my sister and the second to Bianca; Bianca’s package was stolen, so she didn’t get the 1930s Italian school pen with its English nibs, or the Abracadabra bag from Tigota in Milan, or the friendship bracelet I found on the beach and sent to remind her that we have been friends for 25 years.

And those are the souvenirs of Mondello.