"Don't be daft, Poldi," Teresa lamented in her best Munich dialect, "why would you want to live out there, all on your lonesome? Move in near us, then you'd always have someone to chew the fat and play cards with and you can do everything on foot. Theatre, cinemas, supermarket and hospital?—everything's practically on the doorstep. We've even got a few good-looking policemen, too." 

Not a chance, though. Poldi's private agreement with her melancholia stipulated a sea view, and a sea view was what she got, together with a breathtaking panorama from her roof terrace. The sea straight ahead and Etna behind?—what more would anyone want? The only snag: with her bad knee, Poldi could hardly make it up the stairs to the roof. 

A sleepy, friendly little town on the east coast of Sicily midway between Catania and Taormina, Torre Archirafi is unsuited to any form of tourist exploitation, gentrification or vandalism because of its coastline, which consists of massive, jagged volcanic cliffs. Or so one would think, anyway. This doesn't, in fact, deter the inhabitants from dumping their rubbish on the beach, making life as difficult for each other as possible, and, in the summer, shoehorning timber platforms and snack bars into the gaps between the cliffs. On weekends families and young people from Catania throng there to sunbathe, eat, read paperbacks, squabble, eat, listen to the radio, eat and flirt, forever bombarded by the thump of indeterminate bass rhythms and dazed by a miasma of coconut oil, frying fat and fatalism. And, in the midst of it all, my Auntie Poldi. She liked the place, I've never known why. 

Winters in Torre, on the other hand, are dank. A sea the colour of lead snarls at the projecting breakwaters as if intent on swallowing the whole town, and its moist, salty breath adorns every ceiling with black efflorescences of mildew. Air conditioning and feeble central heating systems don't stand a chance. My Auntie Poldi had to have the whole house whitewashed the very first April after she moved into the Via Baronessa, and again every year thereafter. Winters in Torre aren't much fun, but at least they're short. 

For shopping one drives to nearby Riposto, or, better still, straight to the HiperSimply supermarket, where everything's on tap. All Torre itself has to offer is Signor Bussacca's little tabacchi for basic necessities, the Bar-Gelateria Cocuzza presided over by the sad signora, and a restaurant even the local cats steer clear of. Torre Archirafi does, however, boast a mineral-water spring, and although the bottling plant down by the harbour was closed in the seventies, Acqua di Torre still means something to my aunts. Protruding from the side of the old building is a row of brass taps from which the inhabitants of Torre can still draw their own mineral water free of charge. 

"What does it taste like?" I asked politely, the first time Poldi enthused about the public mineral water supply as though speaking of a chocolate fountain. 

"Frightful, of course; what do you expect? Still, local patriotism makes folk thirsty." 

Excerpted from Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions by Mario Giordano. Copyright by Mario Giordano. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.