Sicilitude

Our new website is officially online!

We've redesigned sicilitude.com to make it easier for you to discover your Sicilian roots and plan your journey back to where it all began.

Go take a look, we'd love to hear your thoughts

A lot of people say, “Ellis Island changed our last name.”

In many cases, that is actually a myth. Passenger names were generally recorded on ship manifests before arrival, not changed on the spot at Ellis Island.

Over time, many surnames changed for other reasons: pronunciation, paperwork, simplified spelling, adaptation, or family choice.

That is why one Sicilian surname could evolve into several American forms across
generations.

A changed spelling does not erase your origin. Sometimes, it is the first clue that helps reveal it.

Sicilitude can help trace your family line, even when the surname has changed over
time.

Let’s clear this up:
Yes, Sicily is a place travelers visit every year safely and confidently.

Like anywhere else, smart travel habits matter. Crowded areas can mean pickpocketing, and
basic awareness is always a good idea. But Sicily is not the outdated stereotype some people still imagine.

What most visitors actually find is something very different:
👉🏻 warm hospitality
👉🏻 deep culture
👉🏻 incredible food
👉🏻 beautiful towns
👉🏻 a strong sense of place.

The real Sicily is richer, more welcoming, and more human than the stereotype.

Day two was what we call the Sicilitude touch.

Private site inspections at our partner hotels, a boat tour straight from Minareto to Area M, and a terrace in Ortigia at Grand Hotel Des Étrangers Siracusa that you don't forget easily.
This is what we build for travel professionals who want to bring their clients somewhere real. Not a checklist. An experience worth talking about when you get home.
Thank you Kayla for trusting us with your time and your curiosity.
We can't wait to welcome your clients.

Some trips are about seeing a place. Others are about understanding it.

When traveling home mom came to Sicily, we wanted to show her the second kind.

Kayla is a travel advisor with a deep connection to the American-Italian experience. So we built something around that — an itinerary focused on one of the most powerful chapters Sicily and the United States share: the Allied Landings of WWII.

Day one was Catania. The Museum of the Landings, the Commonwealth War Cemetery. The kind of places that stop you mid-sentence and make you think about everything that happened here.

Between one visit and the next, we stopped by Piazza Scammacca to give Kayla a taste of the very best of Catania’s traditional cuisine, because Sicily without food simply wouldn’t be Sicily.

On day two we showed her what we call the Sicilitude touch. But that's a story for next time.

We updated our logo.
We want to tell you why.

When we started Sicilitude we knew what we wanted to do, help people with Sicilian roots find their way back.

What we didn’t expect was how deep that journey could go.

We’re not a tour operator. We work with identity, memory and family stories that got lost somewhere between one generation and the next.

👉🏻 A surname in a church record.
👉🏻 A village on a map.
👉🏻 A cousin they didn’t know existed.

That’s not a trip, that’s a return.

The old logo was beautiful and unmistakably Sicilian, but it stopped telling the whole story.

We needed something that spoke less about the island as a postcard and more about what we actually do.

The prickly pear is still there.

Same plant, same roots. Just seen differently, because that’s exactly what we’ve learned to do.

Discover your roots.