And maybe it's in preparation for my trip to India that I decide to spend this last week traveling through Sicily--the most third-world section of Italy, and therefore not a bad place to go if you need to prepare yourself to experience extreme poverty. Or maybe I only want to go to Sicily because of what Goethe said: "Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is."

But it's not easy getting to or around Sicily. I have to use all my finding-out skills to find a train that runs on Sunday all the way down the coast and then to find the correct ferryboat to Messina (a scary and suspicious Sicilian port town that seems to howl from behind barricaded doors, "It's not my fault I'm ugly! I've been earthquaked and carpet-bombed and raped by the Mafia, too!") Once I've arrived in Messina, I have to find a bus station (grimy as a smoker's lung) and find the man whose job it is to sit there in the ticket booth, mourning his life, and see if he will please sell me a ticket to the coastal town of Taormina. Then I rattle along the cliffs and beaches of Sicily's stupendous and hard-edged east coast until I get to Taormina, and then I have to find a taxi and then I have to find a hotel. Then I have to find the right person of whom to ask my favorite question in Italian: "Where is the best food in this town?" In Taormina, that person turns out to be a sleepy policeman. He gives me one of the greatest things anyone can ever give me in life--a tiny piece of paper with the name of an obscure restaurant written on it, a hand-drawn map of how to find the place.

Which turns out to be a little trattoria where the friendly elderly proprietress is getting ready for her evening's customers by standing on a table in her stocking feet, trying not to knock over the Christmas creche as she polishes the restaurant windows. I tell her that I don't need to see the menu but could she just bring me the best food possible because this is my first night in Sicily. She rubs her hands together in pleasure and yells something in Sicilian dialect to her even-more-elderly mother in the kitchen, and within the space of twenty minutes I am busily eating the hands-down most amazing meal I've eaten yet in all of Italy. It's pasta, but a shape of pasta I've never before seen--big, fresh, sheets of pasta folded ravioli-like into the shape (if not exactly the size) of the pope's hat, stuffed with a hot, aromatic puree of crustaceans and octopus and squid, served tossed like a hot salad with fresh cockles and strips of julienned vegetables, all swimming in an olivey, oceany broth. Followed by the rabbit, stewed in thyme.

But Syracuse, the next day, is even better. The bus coughs me up on a street corner here in the cold rain, late in the day. I love this town immediately. There are three thousand years of history under my feet in Syracuse. It's a place of such ancient civilization that it makes Rome look like Dallas. Myth says that Daedalus flew here from Crete and that Hercules once slept here. Syracuse was a Greek colony that Thucydides called "a city not in the least inferior to Athens itself." Syracuse is the link between ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Many great playwrights and scientists of antiquity lived here. Plato thought it would be the ideal location for a utopian experiment where perhaps "by some divine fate" rulers might become philosophers, and philosophers might become rulers. Historians say that rhetoric was invented in Syracuse, and also (and this is just a minor thing) plot.

I walk through the markets of this crumbly town and my heart tumbles with a love I can't answer or explain as I watch an old guy in a black wool hat gut a fish for a customer (he has stuck his cigarette in his lips for safekeeping the way a seamstress keeps her pins in her mouth as she sews; his knife works with devotional perfection on the fillets). Shyly, I ask this fisherman where I should eat tonight, and I leave our conversation clutching yet another little piece of paper, directing me to a little restaurant with no name, where--as soon as I sit down that night--the waiter brings me airy clouds of ricotta sprinkled with pistachio, bread chunks floating in aromatic oils, tiny plates of sliced meats and olives, a salad of chilled oranges tossed in a dressing of raw onion and parsley. This is before I even hear about the calamari house specialty.

"No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens . . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?

Of course, one can't live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortality will interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty, real life is never far from anyone's mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from its............