“Window on the Sea”

This colossal sculpture is called “Window on the Sea” but when I walked by it in Torremuzza Reitano today I thought I’d rename it “Manueliana” in tribute to the love story I’d just heard.

There are five ristorantes/pizzerias/trattorias in San Stefano di Camastra on Sicily’s northern coast. But the only place you’ll ever catch me eating in this town is Manueliana.

This isn’t because the owners, Manuel and Eliana, refused to take any of my euros for the tasty tuna tagliatelle they served me at lunch today as I regaled them with a few anecdotes from “The Idiot and the Odyssey” and described my ongoing walk around Sicily (“I haven’t even driven around Sicily in a car,” confessed Eliana. “I wouldn’t ever let anyone who’s walking around it pay for lunch in my restaurant!”).

Nor is it because Eliana complimented me on my Italian and Manuel cracked up when I mentioned a few of the reasons that I think Sicilian males are the most macho on earth.

It’s because Eliana, 30, spun one of the sweetest love stories to come out of Italy since the era of Romeo and Juliet.

“Manuel and I took snapshots of each other when he came here on vacation from Northern Italy with his parents in August 1990,” Eliana said as I began to slowly consume my first liter of water after having walked 13 kilometers on the rocky coast from Caronia. “I was only ten at the time and he was thirteen. I forgot all about him until I saw the photos a decade later and realized that something in my heart told me I needed to see him again.”

It took Eliana a while to track Manuel down but when she located him they spent two years courting by telephone until Eliana, who was born in San Stefano and had never left Sicily, made the trip to Lombardy.

“I hated northern Italy because the people are cold and the weather is colder,” Eliana continued. “But I loved Manuel and after two years together we decided to return here, where the weather is hot and the people are hotter, to get married. Now a love story that began twenty years ago with a photo has given us a three-year-old daughter and a lovely family restaurant where I can buy you lunch.”

Don’t blink, even if you’re slowly walking through San Stefano, or you might miss the lovers, their story, their daughter and Manueliana at Via Marina, 15.

Text and Photos: Joel Stratte-McClure

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About Joel

Joel Stratte-McClure has been a global trekker since the 1970s. He lived in France for over 30 years, working as a journalist, before he turned his attention to a unique life-time-project of walking the shores of the Mediterranean. The first 4,401 kilometers are explored in his inspirational and entertaining first book "The Idiot and the Odyssey: Walking the Mediterranean." The next 4,401 kilometers are covered in the gods-filled sequel, "The Idiot and the Odyssey II: Myth, Madness and Magic on the Mediterranean,” published on Valentine's Day 2013. The last 4,401 kilometers will be discussed in the last book of the trilogy currently entitled "The Idiot and the Odyssey III: Alexander the Great Walks the Mediterranean."