I arrived in Italy with jet lag and questions. The main question is: do I have Italian blood? I’m looking for proof. I need stronger proof than zings, the first of which I felt in 1996. I’d used the Emergency Credit Card of my mother (getting out of Geneva for a weekend sure felt like an emergency), and part of me will forever be zinging in Riomaggiore. Being with Edith in Rome was one of the best weekends of my life, navigating our path using the old pictorial map she and her husband had used decades earlier. Every moment of my time in Florence with Saudamini, who brought me to Venice as a surprise one weekend, zinged. I’ve brought myself back to Venice 3 times since, sometimes for 24 or 48 hours after seeing Edith and Julian, and now for two whole weeks, caring for cats in an intimidatingly beautiful home.

I’m trying to work out why my family changed their story on official documents about where and when they were born – in Italy or the UK, in Trieste or Messina? My great grandmother Emma stretches her age by 14 years in various census, marriage and death certificates, and changes her story about being born in Sicily or Austria (Trieste didn’t officially become part of Italy until 1954).

Just by chance on a walking tour in Palermo, the guide brought us into the city archive, housed in a building that was a synagogue. It was full to the brim, room after room of leather bound official documents, floor to ceiling. Italian birth certificates from 1861 on, are detailed half-page documents, very hard on the eyes when digitised, but my eyes ached looking up and up at those volumes and volumes in Palermo. Will I ever find the truth? If it’s here, it’s somewhere in a room like the one we accidentally wandered into in Palermo.

In between giant sleeps on trains and in hotels, I spooked myself inhaling Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily that masterfully explains the mafia’s cultural and political garotting of the place, jumping straight into The Leopard and then The Day of the Owl. All this reading, duolingo Italian and a sore knee, sees me feeling older and much less adventurous. I got into Agrigento at noon on one day and split at 6 am the next, but did wander around the Valley of the Temples, shrines to the impermanence of empire, of which only religious and political rubble remain. While joining tourists juggling cameras, bags and plastic bottles, I’ve thought what does it matter where my blood is from? Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s fear of belonging to a place made so cynical from the brutal corruption found here, or maybe it’s disbelief that I could belong to somewhere of such elegance, beauty and inspired genius.