Today’s story could be titled Two Gentlemen from Verona. Except they aren’t from Verona. One is from Costa Rica, the other from Sicily. Two citizens of the world. Nonetheless, it is the story of two gentlemen.

Our story began, in fact, a month ago at our twin sons’ high school graduation. After the ceremony we hosted a cookout for some of their friends and their friends’ families. One of the guests was their classmate Sebastian, who attended New York boarding school all the way from his distant home in Costa Rica. And also in attendance was his father Carlos, a successful businessman from Costa Rica whom we had gotten to know a little over the years.

During the cookout Carlos asked about our summer plans and I mentioned, among other things, that we would be in Sicily for a week. Surprisingly, Carlos responded that he, too, would be in Sicily and noted that our schedules overlapped. We promised to stay in touch and see if there was any possibility that we could get together during our respective visits to the island. I was hopeful but somewhat skeptical, as Sicily is huge for an island, taking some four hours to cross from west to east. It’s like saying to someone “I am going to be in New England, too! Let’s definitely do lunch!”

But Carlos also mentioned that he was going to spend a few days with an old friend of his, with whom he attended college many years ago. A man who, after graduating, joined the family business and who devoted his life to making wine in Sicily. The friend was a member of the Planeta family, one of the most important names in the wine business in Sicily. I was somewhat familiar with the Planeta family story, having recently read a book called “Palmento,” about the Sicilian wine business. They were definitely a family I was interested in learning more about.

So while planning our trip I checked the Planeta website and found the family owned a portfolio of properties stretching across Sicily where they produced an incredibly broad and sophisticated variety of wines. And the family seat appeared to be in western Sicily, around the town of Menfi, less than a half hour from our villa in Triscina di Selinunte. The possibility of a Sicilian rendezvous with Carlos and a visit to the Planeta winery seemed a much more likely possibility.

So after a series of emails over the past several weeks, we awoke to a sun drenched Sicilian morning, the main event on our day’s itinerary to make a visit to Planeta with our group of six. Our improbable meet up with Carlos and our introduction to the Planeta family was going to happen.

* * *

The villa Zeffiro, our home for the past several days, is a 70’s style beach house directly on the beach in a lazy little Sicilian beachtown called Triscina di Selinunte. The village is, at least in late June, hot and dusty, and decidedly raw. Locals walk about in shorts or a shabby bathing suit and nothing else and the small handful of tourists, typically renters like ourselves dress indistinguishably from the natives. The only way to tell the locals from the natives is to watch them walk on the hot sand between the street and the beach. Locals have accumulated scar tissue and callous on the bottoms of their feet that allow them to walk on the lava-hot sand with nary a reaction. Tourists, on the other hand (or other foot), hop up and down on tiptoe, erupting with a stream of epithets, a syncopated rhythm of cursing that follows each, brief foot planting.

But as hot and dusty and raw as it all is, it is completely authentic here. And it is in that authenticity, the simple recognition that all one needs is a shabby bathing suit or that it is perfectly ok to dance and swear your way from the house to the cooler sand by the sea that one finds a measure of complete relaxation and complete contentment here. The fact that right next door to the house is a national park housing the ruins of a Greek civilization that vanished over two centuries ago is almost irrelevant once you enter this alluring house. Almost but not completely. For as tempting as it is to simply lounge on the large, shady terraces that ring the house, to curl up with a book or to plunge into the bracingly cool waters of the Mediterranean, the wanderlust that brought you to this remote island with an incredible history of occupation and subjugation whispers in your ear that you must explore, you must learn, you must experience.

And so in the morning we give in to that impulse, most likely because Carlos has called and suggested that we meet at the entrance to Selinunte, the great lost colony of Greece and spend some time together there with his friend Giovanni Planeta before having a visit at the family’s winery.

* * *

We arrive in the late morning and buy our tickets and wait for the arrival of Carlos and Giovanni and their wives and a few minutes later they do arrive. And just like this island, both our friend Carlos and our new friend Giovanni are completely natural, completely comfortable. They greet us as the friends we are and the friends we are going to be and within minutes our group, which is now 10 is sitting on the back of a large motorized tram that will take us from the visitor’s center to the first temple, the romantically named Tempio F. But no matter what you call it, this sole remaining standing temple is overpowering. Easily as large as the Parthenon in Athens and in excellent repair, the simple doric temple dominates the hill, indeed the entire countryside and engenders a hushed reverence in its presence. As we wander around and through the temple, Giovanni acts as an impromptu tourguide, sharing facts about the origins of the temple and the Greek colony that felt it would be a good idea to build it. He tells of the recent project that reconstructed the temple from the pile of pieces that had been strewn about nearby, speculating that the temple’s destruction may have come as the result of an earthquake, a tsunami or possibly even from manmade forces. And only a hundred yards away the debris of other temples, some day perhaps to be called Temple D and Temple E is lying in immense piles, sections of columns lying on their sides and against one another, enormous capitals projecting upside down from the rocky earth and friezes, triglyphs and metopes punctuating the heap here and there.

We reboard the tram and head to the acropolis hill, the promontory nearest our villa where the remains of a single colonnade stand against the sky. It is a familiar site for all of us. It is the colonnade that we can see from the terrace of the villa at all hours of the day and night. It is our neighbor and now we are able to walk up and touch it. It is an incredible experience, one that has made the long journey to the southern coast of Sicily worthwhile.

* * *

Our makeshift group, now suitably culture-fied is ready to begin its second chapter in the day’s adventure. A visit to the Planeta winery. We get in our cars and follow Giovanni down Sicilian roads that wind over rocky hills flanked by lush green vineyards and burnt golden fields of grain, the vast openness and expansiveness of the terrain and its seeming dearth of human imprint adding to its sense of quietude and melancholy. It is a beautiful landscape but a slightly forlorn one, obviously a place where it takes a great effort to establish and maintain a human presence. And if you doubt this, ask the next Greek you run into from Selinunte.

After a while a large town appears, pouring down a hill in the distance. It is Sambuca di Sicilia, Giovanni’s ancestral home and a typical Sicilian looking town, unruly in its cascading from the top of the hill. The whole scene, with its cement block buildings, steep dusty streets and cars parked on sidewalks, in walkways and every whichway seems so typically Sicilian. When I say to Giovanni that his hometown is a very nice town he emphatically disagrees. “It is not very pretty here. But on the other side and in some places it is very pretty.” Giovanni, Carlos and I share a beer in a small bar where we pick up a box of “junk food,” as Giovanni calls it – an assortment of simple panini, and typical Sicilian treats including chick pea fritters called panelle and fried rice balls called aranciata – for our lunch at the winery.

A few moments later, as we arrive at the Planeta cantina, Giovanni’s words that “in some places it is very pretty” come to life. The Sambuca cantina is a complex of low buildings ringed by some 300 hectares of gently rolling hills covered with grape vines. We enter the main gate, a single door that grants entry into the courtyard and a 16th century stable-turned-tasting room. Sicily may be inhospitable and difficult for man to tame, but when you walk through that single door you can see that the Planeta family has done so with a grand measure of success. Amidst the rocky hills, the blazing sun, the heavy air so thick with dust and grit, the Planetas have, in this little corner of this great island, brought something so special and so fundamental to man. Civilization.

* * *

For the next couple of hours we eat our “junk food” and taste a few wines from among the dozens that the Planeta family makes here in Sambuca and across the island at its half dozen estates. We listen to Carlos and Giovanni share stories of their days in University together and of the reestablishment of their friendship nearly a decade ago, a friendship that they willingly share with our group of strangers. We drink in the wine, the cool, crisp air, the simple and fundamental humanity of it all.

And after the lunch, after the tasting, after the chatter, after the visit to the winery we buy some wines to take back to Triscina with us, some simple whites from local indigenous grapes unknown to us before, some rich, velvety cerasuolo from the center of Sicily and a couple of bottles of syrah, like us a non-native grape that the Planetas brought to their island and which now feels as comfortable and at home as the exotic grapes that have been here since time began. We say our goodbyes to these two lovely gentlemen and as quickly as the day’s adventure began, it is over. But it is an experience that will linger on, that will leave a deep impression on each of us, even after its physical manifestations are gone. If you don’t believe me, just ask the next Greek you meet from Selinunte.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy