There are many Italian study-abroad programs. These programs, primarily set on the mainland, offer students an opportunity to immerse themselves in the nation's rich culture.
A few institutions, including New Jersey's Montclair State University, offer a study-abroad program in Sicily. Montclair's program has introduced both high school and college students to a place uniquely shaped by numerous rulers and wayfarers who left their mark on its food, customs, and architecture.
I recently met with Montclair Department of History Professor Dawn Marie Hayes to discuss Study Abroad in Sicily, Italy.
Dr. Hayes, whose family is from Palermo, also leads The Norman Sicily Project, which uses print, photographic, web, and geolocation technologies to document Sicily's cultural heritage during the 11th and 12th centuries, a time of enormous transformation for the island.
We discussed her interest in Sicily, how Montclair's Sicily study-abroad program got started, the impact of The Norman Sicily Project, and what she hopes people will take away from her work.
Tell us about your interest in Sicily.
I'm Sicilian American. I'm actually a dual U.S. Italian citizen. I was raised in a Sicilian-American house but wasn't always interested in my Sicilian roots. And it took me quite some time to get around to actually being interested in them. I always joke that my high school offered three languages, and I took French and Spanish. I was not going to take Italian, which I didn't want. But back in 2004, I received an NEH award, and I was studying at the University of Cambridge that summer. My husband, a software engineer, worked with a colleague, and we became very friendly with his family. They had just bought property in Sicily in a small town called Campofelice di Roccella. He said, before you go home back to the States, come to Sicily; we'd love to show you around.
So we went, and my heart's been there ever since. I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it. It's an extraordinary place.
Where did the idea for the Study Abroad in Sicily program originate?
I got my Ph.D. in '98 and was a specialist in English and French, especially French history. When I went to Sicily, I was fascinated to see these medieval monuments, and after 12 years of college, I learned nothing about them. So, as a scholar, I started to become very interested in learning more about Sicily's medieval past.
At that time, compared to Sicily and Southern Italy, a zillion people were working on medieval England and medieval France. And so I decided to change my field of research very slowly, which meant learning Italian, especially the ability to read it, starting to make contacts, and getting a sense of the period's historiography. And that took some time, especially since I was teaching full-time by that point. So, I wasn't just a student anymore.
As I was doing that, I also started to think about the vast number of Italian-Americans in this country. I was exploring where U.S. colleges and universities had a presence in Italy. And, of course, there are a zillion schools that have campuses in Rome, or they have programs in Florence or Venice, but as you go south of Rome, they become fewer and fewer. And in Sicily, there were just about none.
So I went to Montclair's administration - I guess it was in the fall of 2004 when I came back - and I pitched this idea: "We'll be distinctive, having one of the few American programs in Southern Italy."
We had just received a significant amount of money at the university from an Italian-American gentleman, Joseph Coccia, who has funded an institute at Montclair.
Another Italian-American family, the Calis, has been incredibly supportive of MSU for many years. In fact, we now have a music school named after John Cali, one of the university's benefactors.
John's brother, Angelo, was very proud to be Sicilian. And when he heard through the grapevine that I was starting this program, he wanted to come to campus and offer financial support. How often do you find a benefactor wanting to come to you? He did. And I was so grateful for that.
Angelo gave the program $15,000 that year. He advised that the first 15 kids to sign up each receive a thousand dollars to offset their program costs. And that's what we did.
In 2006, the program's first year, I took 15 students, and it was fabulous. All sorts of things happened. They fell in love with the place. I fell in love with watching them fall in love. We were there for about three to four weeks and they really enjoyed it.
We went on a couple of field trips. We went to Agrigento and Piazza Armerina because I wanted them to see the Greek and Roman remains in Sicily. We went to Palermo, and I think we went to Monreale as well, but our base was always Taormina. I've been working with the same language school, Babilonia, in Taormina for 20 years now.
I ran the program for a couple more years and then took some years off. But I recently started it up again, and we ran it last year, and we ran it this year. It's been a joy.
You also ran a high school program. Tell us about that experience.
This summer's program was fantastic. I developed it last academic year and ran it this past summer with Dominique Houze, our Senior Director for Strategy and Program Development (Summer and Winter) in Academic Affairs. Many of the students actually had tears in their eyes the night before they left. They didn't want to leave. It was nine days. They took one course and got three college credits for a course on Italian history, language, and culture.
Before they began the program, I assigned them a book to read: Sicily: A Short History, from the Greeks to Cosa Nostra. So they came to Sicily with some background. They did some cooking. They did some Italian language learning, too.
They landed in Palermo on a Saturday, and we stayed overnight. Then, we did a walking tour of the Centro Storico before going to Monreale. By Sunday afternoon, we got back in our van and went to Taormina.
The night we were in Palermo, we went to a local restaurant, which was wonderful. They did karaoke. They had the traditional Sicilian samplers, and those who wanted to sing could sing.
The next morning, we went to some of the UNESCO heritage sites in Palermo, Monreale, and Taormina. And so the round-trip airfare, the hotel in Palermo, the guided tours in Palermo, the trip to Taormina, and then the hotels in Taormina, all food, a boat excursion off Taormina's coast, and then the field trips to Piazza Armerina, Agrigento, Syracuse, and Mount Etna, which was very active this summer, and three college credits—all of that we did for $5,650. In some schools, you would pay $5,650 just for three college credits. So I was really proud of that, and it was a success.
Will we be doing it in 2025? No. The university wants to review a few administrative matters first. Unique programs like this require lots of planning and fine-tuning. So, we are on an administrative pause for summer 2025. But I am hopeful that as of summer 2026, the high school program will begin to run regularly. I will, though, be offering the college program in 2025.
How is the college program different?
The college program is run a bit differently (two courses instead of one). But one of the courses, HIST 299, "History Study Abroad," is similar to the high school program. One significant difference between them, however, is that this is team-taught, and my colleague, Professor Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, spends some time on the current migration crisis in the Mediterranean, looking at the testimonies of migrants who have arrived on Sicily's shores. For this, they write essays as well as do some data visualization based on the information in the migrant histories they are assigned.
They also do some travel journaling for me about how Sicilians have preserved and asserted their cultural identity historically, as well as about a particular experience they've had personally that they believe captures/reflects Sicily's history and/or culture. Beyond this, they also spend some time in the classroom learning Italian and, in a typical Sicilian restaurant, learning how to make traditional foods.
Why did you choose Sicily for these trips?
There's still not a great presence in Sicily of American colleges and universities, though this has begun to change over the past two decades. Yet, at the same time, the influence of Italian-American culture has been so profound in this country. For example, you could argue that The Godfather is, if not the most famous movie produced in the past 50 years, certainly one of the most famous. This movie has been followed by numerous other TV programs and films focusing on Italian-Americans and their culture.
So, very often, Americans think they understand Southern Italian, including Sicilian culture, well despite what many of them have seen in the media as inaccurate and distorted representations. I want to challenge the perceptions promoted in various media—especially in TV and film. Are there problems in this region? Yes. Is there organized crime? Absolutely, yes. But that's not all that Sicily is—not by far.
Also, being in the Mediterranean lets them relax a little bit in a way that I think they're able to absorb more because it is a slower society than if you are getting on and off subways in northern Europe, for example. I think the environment lends itself to connecting to the culture in profound ways.
The last thing I'll say is that, compared to many other places in Europe, there hasn't been much work done on Sicily (though this, too, has begun to change over the past two decades). So, even as a scholar, it's important to me because it needs attention. It absolutely needs attention, and it needs English language scholars speaking with the natives there, which hasn't happened often.
You also run the Norman Sicily Project. Tell us about that.
Back in 2019, I got a $50,000 NEH grant to map Sicily's medieval monuments. What had happened, in a nutshell, is that as I was going to see friends in Sicily and leading these programs, I would stay on. I was able to visit these medieval monuments that most people never get to see because you have to find the person with the key, show up on the right day, etc. For years, I have been accumulating these images. I started to say to my husband, who is a software engineer, "We really need to make these available to the public. I feel guilty sitting on them."
In 2015, we started a project called The Norman Sicily Project. I got 50 grand, and we did a prototype. This particular NEH competition is very competitive; they have an 18% funding rate, and of that 18%, most of the projects are American-focused, which makes sense. But we did a good job with that money - credit goes to the fantastic team I worked with from 2019-2021 - and this April, I was able to win a Level II award of $350,000 to take the prototype to full implementation.
So, I have been traveling around forgotten parts of Sicily for many years, and my cousins in Palermo always say, I know Sicily better than they do because I go to these places where there's no one but where there are these abandoned monuments. But that's what I do. And so I'll be doing that with a scholar and two graduate students from the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill in Barbados for the next three summers, too.
The project is an attempt to document medieval Sicily by geolocating its buildings and creating a genealogy of its people, having those two databases speak to each other. Because of the massive work by one scholar in the thirties, we were able to create the monastic database fairly easily. That was the focus of the prototype. Since then, I've begun to develop a database for the fortifications. Now, we are in the process of surfacing the churches, which is a massive task.
I work with my husband, Joseph Hayes, on this. He's the chief technical architect. But then I also have two Sicilians working on the project. One in a technological capacity, another programmer, Salvatore Buffa, who has his degree from the University of Palermo, and Alessandra Faranda, also an alumna of the University of Palermo and now a graduate student at Bocconi University, who does a lot of the translations and some of the outreach work. We also have Pratt Institute working with us, which has done some of the work on the project for free in the past through their UX/UI design program for their master's students. They've given us a lot of really good feedback over the past couple of years, and now we have money to pay for people to actually implement that. So Pratt is on the grant as well.
Pratt's Dr. Craig MacDonald will be helping us identify grad students for the next three years. We also have Dr. Casey Allen from the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, who is a cultural stone specialist. And he and his students will be reading the stones of subsets of the buildings.
We've divided Sicily into thirds: the Val Demone, the Val di Noto, and the Val di Mazara. For the next three years, we'll focus on a subset of buildings in each of these regions, with each summer dedicated to one region. We will study the remains with LiDAR technology and make reports available to the Soprintendenze in case they want to act on them.
We also have a mathematician on the grant, a colleague at Montclair, Dr. Deepak Bal. He is applying network analysis and different analytics using graphs to try to discern patterns between different places and people and places the human mind would not automatically pick up on. So, he'll be applying them to see if there are relationships that have escaped us.
The project is pretty ambitious. As we go into the field, very often, we'll start up conversations with locals, and they have a wealth of knowledge. One of the other things we're doing with this project is capturing that local memory. When it comes up in the database, I'm indicating what's been shared and whether it's corroborated by a published source. Scholars could look at this and say, "Oh, look. Someone from the area has suggested that there are medieval remains—human or otherwise—buried in this location even though this information isn't in the written record." And they could look into it further. So it's there, and it allows Sicilians to contribute to and participate in the reconstruction of their own history.
Down the line, we're hoping to employ machine learning, maybe scanning the charters and attaching them to the people in places. The people graph right now is a bunch of spaghetti and meatballs. It's very hard to read. This is one of the things that we're working on with Pratt.
As of now, I've created records for about 1,350 people who lived in this Norman Society. This 150-year period was arguably Sicily at its finest hour. It was ruled by people who were ruling Sicily for Sicily's own sake, and that gives me a special feeling for the Normans. They built up this kingdom, which was just extraordinary, and so we're trying to reconstruct that special moment in this island's fascinating and very long history through interdisciplinarity supported by the best tools technology offers at this time.
It's an interesting project because it is so interdisciplinary. For example, the Italian government does very good work with seismic data, which we've been recording, too, as we attempt to signal the threats to conserving—and preserving—this built culture.
With Dr. Casey Allen, we will also examine, based on our observations, whether wildfires are threatening what remains. Is it animals? Is it human beings? Is it Mount Etna? These are the kinds of things that we are doing. So, it's a marriage of the humanities and the sciences.
Do you integrate certain components of the project into the study abroad program?
Yes, I do try to integrate these. Ultimately, what would be really wonderful is to have Sicilian students work on this as well and teach them. One of the really cool things that Dr. Allen has done is help develop an assessment tool, the Cultural Stone Stability Index, that can be used pretty easily. You don't need a Ph.D. in earth science to evaluate monuments or sections of monuments. This opens itself up to what my science colleagues call "citizen science." And Casey Allen has been part of a team that has done this remarkably well in Jordan.
What's important about this approach is that you can very easily go into economically underprivileged places like Jordan or even Sicily. You don't need a gazillion dollars, and you don't need PhDs to be around all the time, which gets costly, but you can train locals to do this stuff.
Sicily has a wealth of locals who just really have an attachment to the place they live. I think it's one of the most endearing things about that society. They love their towns, and so this is something that we can teach them as well.
What do you hope people will take away from your work?
There are all sorts of challenges in higher ed right now. In a world where, for various reasons, we can struggle to reach our students, I find that this is a way I can have a significant impact on their young lives, and it reinforces in me those feelings that I have had since the time I decided to get a Ph.D. and become a professor.
I really leave there with satisfaction because my hope for my students is that they come to appreciate the South, realize that there's incredible beauty there, and that they also leave with an understanding that the world is a big place and that I want them to travel again. I want them to leave with a sense of wonder and an interest in learning about other places, maybe more deeply about Sicily and Southern Italy, but also about other places, too. Ultimately, I want them to go on to share this experience and these desires with their own families as they move forward with their lives.
An interesting aside. I had an MSU student couple who got married as a result of this program. They met in Sicily, fell in love, and got married a few years later. These are the kinds of life-changing experiences that I want my students to leave Sicily with.
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