I could walk through this whole section, so many kilometers on the beach or overlooking the coast, and not consider them at all. Find no trace of them, really. And I guess that’s kind of the point, by all involved.
But they have been here and will be here again. The desperate and the hungry, taking a steep personal risk in pursuit of opportunity, crossing a large sea and an even greater political barrier. The Strait of Sicily, separating Tunisia and Sicily, or Africa and Europe, is just 145 kilometers wide, roughly equivalent to what I walked over three days between Catania and Gela. Even more than the main island, the small southern outpost of Lampedusa, just 120 kilometers from Tunisia, has served as the most popular entry point over the years, even drawing a new Pope Francis’s attention in 2013. Just hours before he arrived, a rickety boat with 166 more African refugees touched down on shore. Francis bemoaned how, “We have lost a sense of brotherly responsibility,” and “forgotten how to cry” for the many who have died at sea. The flow into Lampedusa continues, largely unabated. Last year, for example, 333 arrived in a single night, pushing the island’s African migrant population to 1263, including 157 unaccompanied minors.
While Lampedusa is the most popular point of entry, the southern Sicilian coast draws plenty of its own traffic. Leaving Gela, it took me a while to reach the beach. Having been thwarted on wifi the night before, I made my typical detour into McDonald’s, sitting on the western outskirts just off-route, in order to take care of some business, and then loaded up on supplies for dinner. The Via wouldn’t bring me past another supermarket all day. From there, the route takes a minor paved road out of the last bits of Gela and then climbs atop a substantial hill, allowing a look back at the town and the Mediterranean. Had I been here 20 years ago, I might have seen a brutal sight–the bodies of 11 African migrants, including a number of teenagers, washed up on shore on Gela’s beaches. 140 others were rescued, all of them coming from Eritrea at the cost of roughly $2000 USD, in an attempt to escape decades of war and chronic instability. They would be shipped back home afterward. The lucky ones.
Soon after, the Via Fabaria descended to the beach, and it stuck to that narrow, sandy thread for most of the remainder of the day. As is often the case, a hike on the beach sounds more idyllic than the practical reality. The waves lapped at the very edge of the shore, resulting in a meter-wide, sharply angled section of firm sand. This was the only area good for walking; everything else was soft and rather miserable to plod through. However, every seventh or eighth wave blasted right through that zone, and of course the slanted track made for uneven steps. Still, after all those kilometers on busy highways around Catania, this was a delight!
At one point, I was forced to abandon the beach because of a deep river crossing, and unfortunately this came at the worst time, forcing a 2.5-kilometer detour inland to the highway and the nearest bridge. Fortunately, though, this worked out perfectly, as it delivered me onto that highway just in time to be spotted by Canadian pilgrims David and Colleen, something we had hoped to work out through pure happenstance. Even better, the day’s lone bar was just down the road, offering a much better rendezvous site than the narrow shoulder. As we talked over drinks, I laid out my remaining schedule, noting that I would be maxing out my Schengen window, flying out on day 90. “What happens if you stay one day too long,” David wondered, and I’ve had similar thoughts, imagining the consequences of a flight delay holding me in Italy through day 91. “Well, it’s better to be facing European immigration,” I said, “than American immigration right now.” Wincing laughs all around. After all, we’re the desirable immigrants here, on the Sicilian coast.
I spent the night at a pilgrim-friendly B&B, the only guest in a place that seemed like it had been vacant of visitors for a little while. Still, it was perfect for me, with a spacious room, unshakeable wifi, and a balcony overlooking the sea. I watched the sun set over neighboring Licata, which I reached an hour into the next day’s walk, and thought about the record-setting ship that slipped into its port just before midnight 19 years ago, carrying 648 immigrants into town.
A steep ascent marks the exit from Licata, climbing an old road up past the Church of Santa Maria, around the old Castel Sant’Angelo, descending back past an archaeological dig, and then plunging towards the Cimitero di Marianello–one of the most stunning cemeteries you’ll ever see anywhere. Even here, a hundred meters above the beach, death comes into view. No, it dominates the view–demands attention from wherever you stand.
While this second day on the coast lacked the sustained stretches of beach-walking that characterized yesterday, most of the walk remained in close proximity, and the changing levels of perception–sometimes ten meters above, sometimes a hundred–made it a much more visually striking one. The lack of towns has also made this a desirable area for so-called “ghost landings” of immigrant ships. In 2017, the newspaper La Stampa explained, “Thousands of people, almost all Tunisian men, disembark at dawn or in the middle of the night from their wooden vessels or small fishing boats on the shores and then disappear. About 5,000 of these “new” migrants have been counted: 2,100 on the coast of Agrigento, 2,800 on the island of Lampedusa and some on the small and very isolated Linosa.” The Agrigento prosecutor bemoaned this “dangerous” trend, asserting that the immigrants “aren’t arriving in Italy for just economic reasons. Among them there are people who do not want to be identified, people who have been previously expelled from Italy, people who have been granted amnesty from Tunisian prisons or perhaps who took part in the riots of 2011.” That language of risk, of threats, of bad hombres slipping into our homes, escalated in the coverage in Italy throughout the 2010s.
After the small enclave of Torre di Gaffe, the trail ascends over a large coastal hill, and then plummets back into the interior valley, amidst a sea of greenhouses, all bursting with crops. The town of Palma di Montechiaro sits on a hill away from the Mediterranean, the lone detour in this section from the coast. It also stands out as the most pro-immigrant community, with a mayor and contingent of Cabrini lay missionaries who have made taking care of unaccompanied minors their unshakeable mission. Through their efforts, they won funding from the Italian government to take care of all living expenses for these young immigrants for the past three years.
I loaded up on supplies for dinner from the last supermarket in Palma and then began my trek back to the coast, having to creatively navigate around some clay bogs along the way. Just as I was preparing to ease into my home for the night, I encountered something unexpected–a barbed wire fence and private property signs. Right in the middle of the trail. And so I found myself scrambling up an overgrown hillside, and when that progress became untenable I slipped through the barbed wire. Even then, though, the “trail” required a scramble bordering on a climb, up and over a protruding boulder, with the barbed wire fence wedged into the side. I ended up using the posts as climbing aids, finally crossing up and over. I thought all was well, until I discovered that I was on the driveway leading out of the private property… right up to a large locked gate! And so I scrambled back down into the brush–because, of course, the property owner was working close by–and found a gap in the fence that I could slip out through.
Fortunately, my destination, Punta Bianca Beach, was just around the corner at this point, and with the lone dirt track leading in completely submerged in quicksand, I could rest easily knowing that nobody would be slipping in late to crash the party. I found an abandoned house, the coastline eroding just beneath its outer foundations, and–even better–I found a broom head that allowed me to tidy up the old patio tiles before unrolling my bivy.
People don’t only reach Punta Bianca by car or foot. They come by sea as well. In 2019, fifty Tunisian immigrants disembarked here, right in front of some surprised beachgoers. Some managed to slip away and disappear completely; others were ensnared by Carabinieri as they followed the highway–the same one I ended up on briefly–into Palma.
What happened to those who managed to evade capture and settle into life in Sicily? Many ended up in the Campobello di Mazara migrant camp, west of Agrigento, a place InfoMigrants claims is a “no man’s land,” so dangerous that “even the police don’t go there.” Many come to participate in seasonal labor, most notably the olive harvest between September and December. With roughly half of them bearing no formal status, they also have effectively no rights, and they are thus at the mercy of whatever willing employers they can find for off-the-books labor. Back in Gela, reporting has highlighted the persistence of the gangmaster, or caprolato, system. This has included 53 documented instances of exploitative working conditions between 2018 and 2020 alone.
And again, many of those people are the lucky ones. In 2013, a shipwreck that resulted in the deaths of 366 people, mostly Eritrean, occurred near Lampedusa. And in 2015, a court in Agrigento–I could see that town, my next destination, high on the hill in the distance as the sun set and the full moon rose behind me–found the Tunisian Khaled Bensalem guilty of the catastrophe, cramming far too many people onto a boat that was utterly unseaworthy. He will serve eighteen years in prison.
As I fell asleep, I listened to the waves crashing into the shore below, cognizant of the fact that they had already, long ago, eradicated all indication of my passage over these past two days, as they did with the many who preceded me. I, however, would get to return home, of my own volition.
