A few days ago, I visited the MAXXI museum for the exhibition dedicated to Franco Battiato.
What I’ve always loved most about Battiato are two distinct phases: his experimental work in the 1970s, and the later period shaped by his encounter with Manlio Sgalambro—the Mediterranean nihilist who turned Italian songwriting into a vehicle for metaphysical reflection.
Recently, I found myself revisiting some of Sgalambro’s writings, especially his idea of the “Theory of Sicily.”
For him, Sicily is not just a place—it’s a metaphysical condition. An island floating on instability, suspended over shifting waters, like a ship destined, sooner or later, to sink. From this fragility emerges what he calls historical weariness: a quiet, melancholic awareness that time passes without redemption.
That’s why, he argues, Sicily truly exists only as an aesthetic phenomenon—in music, poetry, and art—but never fully within history itself.
Now.
A few days before that visit, I had read an excerpt from Agnes Callard’s essay The Case Against Travel. Her argument is striking: travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves, while convincing us we’re at our best.
And she’s not alone in this view. Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” G.K. Chesterton believed it narrowed the mind. And perhaps most radically, my beloved Fernando Pessoa wrote that travel is for those who lack imagination.
Ironically, I work in travel. And yet, the feeling persists that Sgalambro and Callard grasped something that global tourism now makes impossible to ignore.
The “island mindset” is not just Sicilian—it’s the mindset of those who observe history rather than inhabit it, who turn destiny into scenery. And that is precisely what contemporary tourism does.
We travel to change perspective, yet we reproduce the same patterns everywhere: the same hotel chains, the same brunches, the same photos in front of the same landmarks. It’s a global industry of superficial variation.
Here lies the paradox: tourism promises discovery. But perhaps its real function is something else entirely—to turn the world into a sterile museum.
See you next week,
Simone
SIMONE PUORTO
