IN THE SPRING OF 2003, Canadian writer Michelle Orange boarded a plane bound for Italy. The Sicily Papers is a series of letters she wrote while traveling alone throughout the region. Though originally meant to reassure an anxious correspondent, over time the letters, both high-spirited and frank, searching and satisfied, grew into something larger than the sum of their parts: a love letter to Italy, to an uncertain future, and to the lost art of letter writing itself.

“Dear B, …The shower wars continue. Now when I turn the water on, the men all congregate in the atrium outside my bathroom, but instead of hollering they begin singing. When I hear a 3-part harmony there may be some kind of reward in order.”

“Dear B, …I don’t know why leaving things hurts me so much, but leaving a beautiful island on a large boat isn’t doing myself any favours, and the three little boys who were standing way out on this little apse of land they would have had to court treachery and broken teeth to get onto…didn’t help matters. It was like they were waiting for me. I felt very close to a sort of swoon, a collapse…little Italian boys get me. It felt big, the boat pulling away from a gorgeous, forgotten island and these kids calling out to me.”

The Sicily Papers is uniquely and beautifully designed, resembling a passport; a small, 4x6 perfectbound paperback with rounded corners and gold lettering stamped on textured navy cloth, and including full color maps of Sicily and the areas Michelle visited on her travels.