My Italian Roots Run Deep in Sicily
My ties to Italy — to Sicily, specifically — don’t come from a place of choosing. They come from blood. I was born in the southeastern corner of the island, where my parents were born, where their parents were born, and theirs before them, back further than anyone in my family has bothered to count.
When I finally took a DNA test, it came back 96% southern Italian, concentrated almost entirely in the Sicilian Hyblean Plateau — the same handful of square kilometers my family never really left, even when they left it. Even my last name carries the land in it. Giannone. Bongiovanni, my maternal grandmother’s name. And on my other grandmother’s side, Moncada — a name that sailed in with the Aragonese in the late 1200s and never left the island since. Three names, three threads, the same stretch of coastline running through all of them.
I didn’t need the test to tell me that I belonged. I felt it long before I saw it on paper.
What My Parents Carried With Them from Italy to Canada
When my parents landed in Canada, I don’t think I understood, not really, what they’d left behind. Family. Security. A sense of self that had been handed down, unbroken, for generations. A tie to land that didn’t need explaining because everyone around you had the same tie. They came with a few suitcases and a stubborn belief that they, their daughter Michela, and whatever children came after her deserved more room to grow than the old country could give them.
And they worked. Decades of it, hard and unglamorous, grateful for every inch of the life Canada gave them. But they never let go of home. Not really.
It lived in our food and in our festas, in the stories told at the table, in the card games that ran late into the night. Family was the centre of everything — not a value we talked about; it lived in us before we had words for it.
Returning to Sicily Always Felt Like Coming Home
As I grew into an adult, I never lost that thread either. I was fortunate to be able to go back again and again, and every single time, Sicily welcomed me. It never once felt like a place I was visiting — it felt like a homecoming. Familiar sights, sounds, and people.
I remember always catching sight of Etna from the plane window as we flew over her — a muntagna, my parents called her, “the mountain,” like she was a relative you kept half an eye on. Quiet then, mostly. I remember the long drive south on dirt roads in pitch dark, no streetlights for miles, overgrown branches slapping the side of the car. I also remember there wasn’t always water for a shower when you most wanted one, because the infrastructure back then couldn’t always keep up with demand.
None of it mattered. Not one bit. What mattered was arriving in Pachino and seeing my grandmother’s face. My aunts, my uncles, and as many cousins as possible. Of course, there was never enough time to see everyone. What mattered was the table — always the table — everyone wanted to invite you for dinner, and afterward, walking to the piazza for the passeggiata, that slow, unhurried evening stroll.
I Was Never Michelle. I Was Michela.
“Michelle” was never used by my family — I was Michela. And I never stopped calling myself Sicilian, but I was cautious in the years when it wasn’t popular to say it. I never understood the stigma. To me, Sicilians were the real thing — warm, generous, fiercely proud, and very loud. Yes, occasionally, they were the first to start a fight worth finishing. And I wouldn’t have traded a single one of those qualities.
Then Puglia, Italy Became Part of My Story
Then, thirty-four years ago, I married a man from Puglia — born ten minutes outside Bari — and just like that, I inherited a second family and region to love.
People always ask which I love more, Sicily or Puglia, as if I’m required to pick a side in a war between in-laws. I’m not. They’re not competitors. They’re siblings who grew up in the same house and turned out completely different. Sicily is drama and heat — sun-bleached Baroque towns, rebuilt proud after earthquakes flattened them, Arab and Norman history still carved into the stone. Puglia is quieter, flatter — whitewashed trulli scattered through silver-green olive groves, an Adriatic that’s calm rather than dramatic, orecchiette rolled by hand on a floured kitchen table. Sicily grabs you the moment you land. Puglia lulls you in, and then you’re in for the long haul. I’m grateful I get to love and experience both, without ever picking a side.
Why Italy Still Feels Like Home
When I land in Italy now — either coast — I exhale. Something in my shoulders drops. My sense of belonging doesn’t dim with distance or time; if anything, it’s sharpened by both. I love speaking to fellow Italians and watching their faces light up when they learn I was born in Sicily, not just descended from it. And I’ve watched, over the years, as the old stigma has quietly disappeared — as more people have actually visited and sat at a Sicilian table. That’s the Sicily I carry with me now, wherever I am in the world — and it’s the reason this business exists at all.
Why I Created Italy to Roam
The name “Italy to Roam”? Because Italy — specifically Sicily, Puglia, and so many more regions — isn’t just a destination I sell. I always say Italy is my wheelhouse, the place I’m tied to by blood and by choice, even though I’ll happily take you anywhere else in the world you want to go. That’s Your World to Roam.
Sense. Savour. Surrender.
Why Sense. Savour. Surrender? Because that’s how I plan every single trip, for every single client. Time to sense everything around you — the heat, the noise, the particular way light hits old stone in the late afternoon. Time to savour it — the food, the wine, the conversation that runs long because no one’s watching the clock. And time to surrender to it — to stop directing the experience and just let the place hold you for a while. That balance, between doing and simply being, is the whole philosophy. It’s not a tagline. It’s how I travel, and it’s how I want every client to feel when I send them there.
Want to know a little more about the person behind Italy to Roam? Meet Michelle.
