The taste of the landing

Inspired by Leonardo Sciascia’s novella ‘The American Aunt’, this article offers a new perspective on the 1943 Allied landing in Sicily, reading it through the lens of food practices and migration. Blending literary and historical analysis with the testimonies of direct witnesses of the landing, the article explores the role of food (access, products, symbolism) during late Fascism, the actual landing, and the post-1943 and post-Second World War era. The picture that emerges is a variegated landscape of experiences, pointing to starvation among the poor but also to food access for those Sicilians who lived in the countryside away from the bombarded cities, and in a Sciascia-like ironic twist, to the Sicilians’ offer of fresh flavourful food to US soldiers weary of the military pre-packaged food. The article complicates the assumption that all Sicilians were starving at the time of the landing and waiting to be fed by the American soldiers coming from the Land of Abundance, a representation created by a mixture of one-sided perspectives of the war along with decades of emigration to the United States.