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Their laughter echoed through the empty automated gas station. Two old men, who had been sitting with their customary olive wood canes and black hats under an orange tree older than them, were calling me after seeing my puzzled face. There is a certain calm, a certain familiarity in the gestures of Sicilians, that can be found in few places in the world. It is a way of moving and behaving with the world as if one knew, on autopilot, what one had to do, but not necessarily when. Coming from London, a city made of queues and clocks, of more whens than whats, this feeling was more than welcome, even if at the moment it was playing against my favour. “Turn it on”, one of them shouted with a grin after my explanation, using his walking stick to support his argument. The sun tends to shine brightly during the Sicilian mid-August, but there is a special kind of heat that one can only feel in the pores of the head and the neck after making an easily avoidable mistake. His advice did make sense. It is ferragosto after all, and during ferragosto, all of Sicily stops. After the failed phone call to the rental and insurance companies, I didn’t have that many more options. “We are sorry to be unable to help. No mechanics are available today. Just drive to the airport and we will fix it there.” “But that is the reason for my call. I can’t really get there.” “There is not much we can do. It’s ferragosto. There are no tow trucks.” Shit, I thought. Thank you, I said. My attempts at explaining the problems originated from almost topping up a petrol car with diesel had failed to generate any sort of response from them. I looked at my girlfriend, sitting bored in the curb, celebrating her 25th birthday with a mix of boredom and a lukewarm bottle of water. I watched her slowly walk away from the car, scared, the face of the two old men halted in tension while I decided to trust in the wisdom of old age. I turned on the engine. The car was purring like a street cat in heat. I kept pressing the gas pedal as if against Hamilton in the last race of the championship. After five or ten seconds that felt like forever, it was on, hesitatingly, but on. The most talkative of the two old men got up and walked slowly towards the car with a cheeky smile. I rolled down the window and awaited his arrival. He seemed happy, content with something happening in front of his bench. I attempted to understand his Italian, heavily seasoned with Sicilian dialect, as best as I could. “Fill it with as much petrol as you can, and finally put in a bit of oil. Shake it and ecco!” He finished his sentence and stayed there, as if to see us off. I smiled, thanked him, and drove off with as much caution as a first-time father holding a baby. The car moved north steadily across the hills of central Sicily, towards Palermo across winding roads in fields of wheat and citric trees, with glimpses of shiny sea and blue skies as pure as an old man’s laughter. Every time we had to stop for gas (and some oil) the explanation brought laughter, good mood, and a few helping hands in the shaking of the cocktail-car. Slowly, carefully moving through the rural parts of the island, inhabited by basically everyone from Greeks to Vikings, from Arabs to Spaniards, it´s difficult not to enjoy the pace generated by mild inconveniency. It seems like, sometimes, too much organisation will not allow space for the best things in life.