The Sican Network: partners
The Turin girl from America
with a passion
for “Sicilian-ness”
Laura Massoni has lived in Sicily for seven years
and runs
a tourism services company
A Turin native by birth, who grew up in the shadow of Lingotto during the most intense years of labor protests, Laura Massoni was nourished by “Sicilian-ness” even before she knew Sicily, where she now lives and runs her tourism services company, Pure Sicily in Sant’Angelo Muxaro, the lead partner in the Sicani Villages project.
“When I was a child,” she says, “in my neighborhood I was surrounded by ‘mandarins,’ as the Sicilians who lived in Turin were called then and whom I adored: I loved their way of being together, of experiencing family. Sicily was already in my heart, but it would be many years before I really got to know it. After graduation, I went to the United States to improve my English and study tourism. To support myself, I was working as an au pair with a very wealthy California family: two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, complete with going out driving a Porsche to run errands at the time. The idea was to stay for a year, but instead I stayed in California for a quarter of a century. What happened was that I fell in love with a nice guy from San Diego and we started a family: today we have four children, the two youngest still in school.”
The idea of returning “home,” which used to peep out every now and then, became more and more present as time went on. And so, seven years ago, the change of course. “My husband and I,” says Laura Massoni, “decided to try living in Italy for a year. The biggest concerns were about the kids’ education and the climate: my better half, as a good Californian, had no intention of feeling too cold. So once we chose Sicily and identified an international school, we were off. Now we have been here for seven years, and the strange thing is that neither I nor he have any relatives on the island; you could say that we chose it on the wave of my adolescent fascination with that ‘Sicilian-ness’ made up of warmth and joie de vivre, which I used to breathe in the Lingotto neighborhood.”
Thus was born Pure Sicily, which handles high-level international tourism, especially North American. “Those who decide to come to the Sicans,” says Massoni, ” are travelers, not hit-and-run tourists. These are people who really want to get to know the area, those who live there and the excellent products that are produced there. Wines, oil, cheeses, perhaps the fruit of the work of those returning Sicilians, who today carry on the family business in an innovative way and on the back of the experience gained abroad.”
After the success at the TTG Travel Experience in Rimini, where Sicani Villages attracted the attention of numerous tour operators from different countries around the world, the next important appointment for the Sicani Network project is at the 27th edition of the Mediterranean Tourism Exchange in Naples (March 14-16 at the Mostra d’Oltremare in Viale Kennedy). Three days in which a turnout of about twenty thousand professional visitors is expected; the last day, Saturday, March 16, will also be open to the public: one more opportunity to promote directly to potential customers vacation proposals for the upcoming Easter. In short, a good showcase for the Sicans.
“Connected to the fair in Naples,” says Laura Massoni, “there are four educationals, that is, four scouting trips of our territory by sector operators. The first, to be held in early March, is dedicated to the world of information: from Giuliana to the Andromeda Theater, to the Bovo Marina coast and Borgo Giallonardo… We will bring specialized journalists to the heart of the Sicans to introduce them to a precious and unusual Sicily; also involved in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento is Casa Barbadoro. Great attention is paid to nature tourism: one of the four educationals is dedicated exclusively to equestrian tourism enthusiasts.”
Text by Angela Mannino
