Sicily during Prosperine and Violetta’s flight is more than a point on a route: it is an ancestral landscape marked by disaster, a port of departure for those seeking a different life, and a refuge that offers safety without erasing the danger left behind. Through Mount Etna, the emigrating Tempesta brothers, and the flight of Prosperine and Violetta, the island gathers together distinct histories of loss and escape.

Setting and inherited disaster

The island enters the family narrative through Mount Etna, whose eruptions form part of Domenico Tempesta’s childhood understanding of the world. His maternal grandparents, Alfio and Maricchia Ciccia, were landowners whose hazelnut and almond groves were destroyed by lava in 1865. The eruption also killed his grandfather and three of his grandfather’s sons; his grandmother, overwhelmed by grief, later died by suicide. The disaster thus reaches beyond immediate destruction: it removes a family’s livelihood and alters the lives of those who survive it.

Domenico’s account centers on his mother, Concettina Tempesta, the youngest and sole surviving member of the Ciccia family. As a child, she escaped the lava by climbing a cedar tree. In trying to retrieve a rag doll she had dropped, she severely burned her right hand, and the doll was lost. She survived, but the scar remained with her for life. The remembered hand makes Sicily’s catastrophe intimate and enduring: the landscape’s violence is carried into family memory through a mark that Domenico repeatedly saw and heard explained.

A point of departure

Sicily also figures as the point from which the Tempesta brothers set out for America. In Giuliana, Domenico read what he could find about America and imagined it as a country of abundant land and opportunity, where he might fulfill his ambitions away from earthquakes and the hostility he associated with home. Relatives who had emigrated earlier were already prospering there, and his brothers Pasquale and Vincenzo also wanted to leave.

In July 1901, the three brothers signed on as steerage passengers aboard the SS Napolitano. They sailed from Catania on September 11, 1901, despite their mother’s fierce opposition. Her fear was that their departure would leave her destitute and abandoned. As the wagon carried the brothers and their belongings from the village toward the port, she called after them in grief. The departure makes Sicily a place they leave under the pressure of family need and conflict, not simply a homeland they freely discard. Their mother’s protest follows them into the story of their American lives as a memory of the cost of going.

A refuge reached by flight

For Prosperine and Violetta, Sicily becomes a destination reached in circumstances unlike the Tempesta brothers’ planned emigration. After escaping from Pescara, the women run through the woods to the docks and rely on the fishermen there to get away. Prosperine’s father has given her coins and urged her to flee; his gesture remains a last memory of his love for her. Their escape is presented as the only way to get clear of the danger surrounding them.

They travel from boat to boat down the coast, pass Bari and Brindisi, and cross the Strait of Messina. The journey makes Prosperine a Sicilian by circumstance: she has come to hide. At first, the women find work on a wealthy man’s olive farm near Catania, where Prosperine works among the laborers. Their safety is temporary. The farmer’s foreman grows curious about Violetta, while his wife begins asking questions about the women’s origins. When suspicion rises, they steal money and escape again by train, this time to Palermo.

In Palermo, both women work at an inn: Violetta as a servant and Prosperine as a laundress. The city’s movement offers a degree of cover, but their lives remain governed by fear that someone from Pescara will recognize them. Prosperine’s new location does not bring an uncomplicated release from the past; she is homesick and longs for the places she left behind even as she worries that familiar faces may expose her. Sicily is therefore both shelter and anxious in-between space, allowing the women to survive while requiring them to keep moving and watchful.

Sicily in the wider narrative

The island’s different roles resist a single meaning. For the Tempesta brothers, it is the starting point of a chosen passage toward America, though departure wounds the family they leave behind. For Prosperine and Violetta, it is a necessary hiding place reached through flight, where work and anonymity provide only provisional protection. In Domenico’s recollection, meanwhile, Mount Etna links the family’s origins to an earlier loss of land, livelihood, and life.

These strands make Sicily a landscape in which movement does not cancel what has been left behind. The brothers carry their mother’s grief across the sea; Prosperine and Violetta carry the danger of Pescara into Catania and Palermo. The island is not a final resolution for either story. Instead, it marks a transition: a place from which one generation departs, and to which two women flee, with safety and belonging remaining uncertain.