‘Sicily Can Be Very Seductive’: The White Lotus and the Transnational ‘Making’ of the Mediterranean

ABSTRACT This article examines how, in the second series of The White Lotus (2022), Sicily is portrayed as a backdrop for wealthy North Americans to live out touristic fantasies. This relies on a stereotypical portrayal of Sicily as a repository of ‘pre-modern’ gender roles and racial dynamics. The Sicilian setting facilitates the series' critique of white, male privilege. Although the series uses irony to satirize North American attitudes towards, and beliefs about Sicily, it ultimately ‘recycles’, however knowingly, familiar clichés about the island, particularly ones that recur in twentieth-century films. Thus, while at first glance The White Lotus appears to critique its characters' conception of Sicily as a Mediterranean playground or ‘an idealised space of tourism’ (Hom, p. 52), upon closer inspection the series is ultimately an extension of a long line of transnational portrayals of Sicily that rely on familiar stereotypes, made by and for English-speaking observers.


Introduction
The second series of The White Lotus, 1 a critically acclaimed television drama made by the US network HBO, is set in Sicily: mainly in Taormina, on the east of the island.In the first episode, the action 'flashes forward' to a guest named Daphne, who finds a floating body in the sea.The following seven episodes then recount the weeks leading up to that discovery, culminating in the revelation of the dead body's identity.Entwined in this plot line is a satirical critique of North American wealth, whiteness, and male privilege.
Many non-Italian viewers of The White Lotus are intrigued by the symbols of sicilianità, or 'Sicilian-ness', which draw attention to the particularity of its setting.This is evident in the quantity of 'explainer' articles published in the English-speaking media in the wake of the series: 'The Eerie Symbolism of The White Lotus's Sicilian Palazzos' (sic); 2 'Unpacking the Symbolism of Those Head-Shaped Vases'; 3 and 'The Meaning Behind the Testa di Moro Head Statues', 4 to cite but three.Teste di moro, or 'Moors heads'painted vases in the shape of a head, typical of Maiolica, a Sicilian ceramic traditionare a particular object of interest in these 'explainer' articles, and an especially prominent symbol of Sicily in the series (see Fig. 1).
The White Lotus' main setting is a luxury hotel, itself called The White Lotus.It is based on a real hotel in Taormina, the San Domenico Palace, located in a former monastery, and currently run by the Four Seasons hotel group.The palace was also used as a setting in L'Avventura: 5 a critically acclaimed Italian film released in 1960, frequently referenced in The White Lotus.The wealthy guests at The White Lotus are predominantly white and North American.Like many non-Italian viewers, they too are interested in the symbols of Sicily that pervade the hotel.'What is it with these head things?' asks Ethan, one of the guests, in the first episode.
The very premise of the showthat travelling to a new land reveals existential truthsgives substantial importance to place.The questions that thus emerge are, to echo a line of questioning used by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover in their analysis of Call Me by Your Name: 6 What does The White Lotus do with Sicily?If this series critiques white, male privilege, 7 how does Sicily, as a setting, function to make this critique?What version of Sicily is represented to make this satire work?
We argue that the teste di moro often represent sicilianità in The White Lotus.Thus, understanding what the teste di moro symbolize helps us to ask what characteristics and values Sicily itself conveys in the series.Given the series' international popularityas of December 2022, The White Lotus attracted over ten million viewers per episode 8 understanding what image of Sicily emerges from the series provides insights into how the island is represented on a contemporary transnational stage.
This article is based on a critical, intertextual analysis of The White Lotus, using transnational and cultural studies approaches, alongside some empirical observations from our respective ethnographic research in 2021 and 2022.It begins by situating The White Lotus within an array of historic representations of Sicily by non-Italians.We especially consider representations of Sicily as a locus of tourism, and identify some common threads within these representations, which are continued by The White Lotus.These include the perception of Sicily as a romantic coastal tourist destination, and as a repository of various 'pre-modern' and 'exotic' characteristics.In particular, we are interested in how these characteristics contribute to the series' critique of wealth, whiteness, and patriarchy.
In the subsequent section, we provide background on the teste di morothe preeminent symbol of sicilianità in the seriesand on their contemporary (and contested) popularity among Sicilians and tourists.The teste di moro convey complex and sometimes contradictory meanings in Sicily today: they can connote gender politics, the island's much-feted 'multicultural' history, and Sicily's contemporary imbrication in Europe's racialized power structures.A central claim of this article is that little of this nuance is represented in The White Lotus.On the contrary, we demonstrate that only one of the teste di moro's many possible signifiedsa rigid, patriarchal attitude towards gender, which is a central feature of both the teste di moro origin story and of the plot of The White Lotusis foregrounded in the series' representation of Sicily.By contrast, there is next to no discussion of immigration or race.
The White Lotus appears to distance itself from historical transnational representations of Sicily by and for English-speaking audiences.As our final section demonstrates, it employs irony and parody, including through collage.Based on our analysis, however, we conclude that the series in fact reinforces centuries-old stereotypes of Southern Europe.As such, it does little to complicate the predominant idea of Sicily as a quasiexotic tourist destination.Instead, it perpetuates a series of stock characters and stereotypes that have long been used to characterize the island as exotica place of pre-modern gender and race dynamicsand backwards, for the purposes of Anglo-American entertainment and moral storytelling.

Tourism, Film, and the Transnational 'Making' of Sicily
The White Lotus echoes, addresses, and plays on imaginings of Sicily that have been established through tourism, travel logs, and other forms of visual and literary representation.While a full overview of these representations is beyond the purview of this paper, here we introduce a few to show how they are reprised by The White Lotus.Some tourism-inflected representations of Sicily date from at least the late eighteenth century, before the Risorgimento, although many emerged during the nineteenthcentury Grand Tour. 9 Since then, literary and visual representations by visitors to the islandincluding paintings and etchings, travel diaries, and, more recently, filmhave been dispersed transnationally, to a global audience.These latter, cinematic representations are most familiar to the audience of The White Lotus, which consciously echoes such iconic twentieth-century films as The Godfather (1972), 10 the successful US crime drama filmed in Sicily and New York, or L'Avventura (1960), often celebrated as a classic of Italian cinema, filmed in Sicily and Rome.Crucially, these depictions of Sicily were often made by, and intended for, outsiders: be they Northern European or North American visitors on the Grand Tour writing for their co-nationals; Italian emigrants and their descendants making and viewing twentieth-century Hollywood films; 11 Northern Italians directing films for an international audience; or protagonists in a twenty-first-century global industry in which film, tourism, and branding bleed into one another.
The White Lotus takes tourism as its main theme, and at least in part, it can be read as a critique of the travel industry.That its gaze is 'touristic' is therefore self-evident.In their analysis of Call Me by Your Name (2017) 12 another production set in Italy, with an international audience in mind -Galt and Schoonover argue: 'If we simply read its Italian locations as "touristic" and hence as imposing an outsider perspective, then we miss several ways in which the film deploys the pleasures of place to more complicated ends'. 13Accordingly, we have chosen to focus precisely on what image of Sicily emerges, and how this image is constructed.
As Stephanie Malia Hom 14 writes about Italy more broadly, the history of imagining, representing, and making Sicily has helped to create 'simulacra' of the place.The Sicily depicted in many of these accounts, as in The White Lotus, has little to do with the Sicily 'on offer[,] but rather the dream' of Sicily, 15 as both a tourist destination and a fantasy world ready for North American and Northern European consumption.While all representation is distinct from 'reality', what is important here is what is included or excluded, and to what effect.Again, borrowing from Hom, we find the 'structur[ing of] the fantasy of an Italy that does not fully take part in' contemporary social issues.For Hom, these social issues include the 'inequality between rich and poor', 'the escalation of environmental catastrophes related to climate change', and the fact that these are 'direct consequences of globalisation and its underpinning ideology, neoliberalism'. 16imilarly, The White Lotus overlooks themes of race and immigration.At stake is not merely an issue of 'authenticity', but the image of Sicily that emerges as a result: a locus of emigration, whose beautiful shores are suitable for a short tourist stay but not for modern, future-oriented, ambitious young people.'You would have left', the Sicilian-American character Bert Di Grasso tells his son, when they go to visit the small Sicilian town of their ancestors. 17In the series, Sicily is also constructed as a place of pre-modern gender relations, where North American visitors imagine they can somehow 'get back in touch' with their more primal, sexual selves.
Illustrative scenes and leitmotifs running through the series reprise classic narratives and established imaginings of Sicily, which echo the history of how the island has been portrayed.We explore this in more depth by analysing the use of the teste di moro vases, but first we show briefly how some of these fantasies of Italy, of Sicily, and of the Mediterranean more generally show up in The White Lotus.
What Claudio Fogu and others refer to as 'Italia balneare' 18 or 'Italy-as-destination' is foregrounded in the series. 19The Mediterranean-as-icon of Italia balneare is, Fogu tells us, 'connected to the flocking of Northern European tourists to Italian beaches and islands', and the 'global consumer industries of cinema, tourism, and cuisine have enthusiastically participated in making Italy the Mediterranean destination par excellence'. 20This is the same idea that L'Avventura reproduces, for instance, as it depicts well-to-do Romans who choose a Sicilian island for their summer holiday.The White Lotus echoes this image, this time on a transnational (and transcontinental) scale: first, with its pans and close-ups of the luscious, sun-filled, evocative Mediterranean shore, its sparkling sea, and recognisably Mediterranean flora: notably bougainvillea and prickly pears.Second, The White Lotus is obviously a show about tourists.Despite its clear satirical ambitions, this in itself reinforces the characterisation of Southern Italy as a (desired) travel destination.Finally, it is the characters themselves who selfmythologize or romanticize their vacations.For instance, Daphne, during her last day on the island, assures new arrivals that they are going to have a wonderful time: 'Italy's just so romantic, you're gonna die'. 21he White Lotus plays on an idea of Sicily, propagated at least since the Grand Tour, as a place out of time, connected to Ancient Greece and its mythology as few other places are.Travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were particularly taken with depicting volcanoes in paintings and visual imagery, as well as in written work; in Sicily this meant Mount Etna, which some travellers connected to locals' supposedly passionate and fiery character. 22Images of Taormina, viewed from above or from the Greek Amphitheatre, surrounded by sea, with ruins in the foreground and the volcano in the background, are common from this period. 23Such images are reprised in The White Lotus, both in its choice of location (Taormina) and in the camera shots, which often focus on the volcano or centre on ruins.We see this when the Di Grasso family goes to visit the Greek Amphitheatre, but also through shots of ruins even within the hotels and tourist locales.The White Lotus shows actual ruins, including still-standing columns, and uses ruin imagery in the series' opening credits, which take their inspiration from frescoes on the interior walls of a lavish Sicilian villa. 24he fascination with such landscapes may be in part due to what Fogu calls 'the Grand Tour's passion for the picturesque and the Enlightenment's search for the balance between the forces of nature and man'. 25However, they also point to 'othering' depictions of Italy, in particular of Southern Italy. 26Such depictions, and a Romantic fascination with the ruinous past, partly served to contrast Northern Italy, Northern Europe, and North America from the South and the Mediterranean.Some travellers' accounts and depictions might be compared to the works of early anthropologists who saw the future of their own societies in the present of what they deemed 'primitive' societies, and used their ethnographies to forewarn audiences at home. 27This went hand in hand with ideas of Italy's 'moral degradation', as depicted in Madame De Stael's 1807 novel Corinne, or Italy, 28 for example.
The romanticisation of places like Sicily also permitted visitors to voyeuristically 'experience' poverty, or a 'foreign' set of gender relations, but in removed terms.These elements are not treated, as they might have been in their own countries, as social issues that a citizen might want to challenge.Rather, they become part of the overall décor and 'pre-modern' setting of a place like Sicily, and contribute to making it into a fantasy land.As Agatha Palma notes, this was 'partly produced by Northern European tourists in search of the "exotic"' 29 and led to the establishment of the Mediterranean as a racialized space.In her exploration of William Von Gloeden's nineteenth-century photographs of Sicilians, Palma notes how his portrayals of barefooted youth in Sicily, often carrying sexually symbolic objects such as vases, and in suggestive poses, contributed to a sexualized portrayal of Sicily: one that also romanticized poverty.She also shows how these images served to foment Italy's tourism industry, which included a sexual tourism industry, particularly in Taorminathe setting of The White Lotuswhere enforcement of laws against sodomy was lax.The list of Von Gloeden's notable guests, Palma notes, included Oscar Wilde, indicating the wide geographic reach of Taormina's reputation.
Again, these topoi reappear in The White Lotus.The very presence of a group of gay men who come to rescue (or kill) Tanya re-awakens old stereotypes about the Mediterranean cicisbeo: a man who accompanies a married woman in public, feigning homosexual traits to 'allow the cuckolded husband to save face', which 'projected the idea of an emasculated, morally deprived, and sexually permissive people'. 30The presence in the series of the sex workers Mia and Lucia likewise recalls the idea of the Mediterranean as a sexual playground.This Mediterranean playground is re-depicted in The White Lotus as a place where men (perhaps women, too, as in the character of Portia) can play out their sexual desires and fantasies.The Di Grasso men, as well as the character of Cameron, for instance, fit this bill.
The White Lotus also invokes the specifically Sicilian stereotype of the Mafia, notably as mediated through Hollywood films, especially The Godfather, in which the Mafia is related to themes of power, criminality, honour, and gender.In The Godfather, as in The White Lotus, Sicily is alternately beautiful and grotesque: enticing and seductive, but also violent and repellent.The Sicily of The White Lotus is seen as a setting for individual transformation, just as it was transformational for the character of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.This comparison is clearly intentional: echoes can be noted both through meta-inclusions of scenes and references to The Godfather, and through plot twists that play on North American expectations of Sicily, themselves rooted in popular representations of the island.As Gregory Lucente argues with regard to The Godfather, so too for The White Lotus we might note that the 'impact of Sicily as a geographic landscape with a psychological, moral, and even religious power plays a central role in the formation of the characters' identities'. 31ike Michael Corleone, the Di Grasso family are returning to their ancestral homeland of Sicily.The three generations of Di Grasso men, along with their new friend Portia (who often wears a 'The Godfather' T-shirt), go to visit the setting of the famous, transformational scene, in which Michael Corleone's wife is blown up in a car bomb that was meant for him.Here they physically retrace his steps, in what some theorists would call an example of 'dark tourism'. 32n another plot line, Tanya's would-be killer is portrayed as a mafioso.Here, the topos helpfully works as a plot device: we are never sure whether he was actually part of the Mafia, or whether he was presented as such to Tanya in order to scare her.As our analysis shows, although The Godfather is a subject of debate in The White Lotus, the series echoes the film's overall use of Sicily as a key device for plot and character development.
Having analysed how The White Lotus echoes earlier representations of Sicily, the following section shows how the series' treatment of the teste di moro mirrors its attitude towards Sicilian culture more generally.We summarize the central origin myths surrounding the teste di moro, and the various signifieds that these ceramic vases convey.By showing how some of these facets of contemporary Sicily are foregrounded, while others are omitted, the remainder of this article then goes on to examine how the Sicily that serves as a backdrop in The White Lotus is, as we have suggested, an 'idealised space of tourism', 33 with important ramifications for the transnational perception of the island and its inhabitants.

Teste di Moro: Material, Myth, and Contested Identity in Sicily Today
Testa di moro vases, which figure heavily in The White Lotus, are real ceramic objects that are ubiquitous in contemporary Sicily.Typically, they are portrayed in pairs: a woman's head next to a man's head.As the name 'Moor head' implies, the male head in particular is depicted in such a way as to reference his ethnic, racial, and cultural background: this is done through a certain style of facial hair, an elaborate headscarf, and an exaggerated eye shape.The earliest Moor head vase still in existence today depicts the head's skin as white, 34 but today these vases are painted in a spectrum of skin tones.
While the earliest known examples of teste di moro date back to the eighteenth century, 35 their popularity has exploded in the twenty-first century.This is due in part to the influence of Dolce & Gabbana, the fashion brand that has used these vases in various set and fashion decorations in and beyond Sicily (Domenico Dolce, one half of Dolce & Gabbana, is Sicilian). 36Today, it would be easy to mistake them for tourist tat, as they are sold in obvious souvenir shops, or in ceramic stores that partly cater to tourists.However, these vases are also popular with a local audience, many of whom keep them in their homes, including as a marker of Sicilian identity.If, as the character of Ethan does in The White Lotus, one enquires about these vases, the usual response refers to a myth.There are different versions of this myth, themselves variations on other mythological or folk tales set across Sicily.Versions were also taken up by Giovanni Boccaccio 37 and John Keats. 38n a common version, the setting is mediaeval Palermo, around the year 1000, during the time of Muslim rule.The story centres around a young Sicilian girl, implicitly Christian, who was so beautiful that her father and brothers wouldn't let her leave the house unaccompanied.As a result, she spent her days tending to the flowers and herbs she grew on her balcony.One day, an occupying soldierthe 'Moor' of the storysaw her and fell in love.Charmed by his attention, the young girl likewise fell in love.They were happy together until one day, the Moor told the Sicilian girl that he had to return home.In some versions, this is because he tells her he has a wife and family back home; in other versions he is depicted as a libertine, who has been cheating on her.To prohibit him from leaving, and to be with him forever, the Sicilian girl cuts off his head one night as he is sleeping.Ever the gardener, she puts his head out on her balcony and plants basil onto the top.It grows so well that the neighbours decide to follow suitthus beginning the tradition of creating ceramic vases in the shape of a head.In some versions of the story, the girl is herself then killed by Sicily's Muslim rulers as punishment for her crime, which explains why the heads come in pairs.Similar stories about inter-religious couples exist in Sicilian folklore, implicit reminders of Sicily's multicultural past.For example, there is the tale of Mata and Grifone, considered the founders of the eastern Sicilian town of Messina.In the story, a supposedly cruel Moor general, Hassan, crosses the Strait of Messina to conquer the city.He falls in love with Mata, who is sceptical of him, so Hassan learns that he must be kind if he wishes to 'conquer' her love.He eventually does so: she falls in love with him, he converts to Christianity and takes on the name of 'Grifo', and together they found the city of Messina.Their children are thought to be the city's first inhabitants.As in the material culture surrounding the Moor head vases, the two are often figured together: he darker-skinned, and she lighter-skinned.Both myths reference a common history: the oft-celebrated period of Muslim rule in Sicily.
The style and depictions of the vases, as well as the related myths, have implications for understandings of identity in Sicily, and specifically for considerations of gender and race.Clearly, as we explore further below, these folk tales are 'morality' tales, which portray women according to classic honour/shame models of gender in the Mediterranean.These tales warn against out-of-wedlock lust, or portray the woman as a salvific, beatifying force, or else play on notions of the cuckolded male.
Race also emerges as a central contested dimension of the vases, in academic discussion that takes a decolonial or postcolonial lens, as well as in contemporary public discourse.For Laura Ingallinella, these vases, 'their surrounding folklore, and the pleasure in their ownership and display testify to processes of racial commodification and self-exoticisation'. 39 Ingallinella notes that Sicily has a long 'history of complex negotiations with its African heritage', and that today it has become a border zone of Europe, with complex and often xenophobic immigration politics, including 'episodes of xenophobia and racism directed against migrants from Africa and the eastern Mediterraneanthe very places teste di moro fetishise'. 40uring our respective periods of fieldwork in Sicily, we witnessed or were told about the reactions of North American tourists, who were offended by what they perceived as an exaggerated representation of cultural and biological traits of Arabs and Africans.These objects were sometimes likened to 'lawn jockeys': small statues, today understood to be racist, of Black caddies or servants, with exaggerated features. 41hese were often used as lawn ornaments decades ago and are associated with the Jim Crow era in the US.Considering the violence that immigrants face in, and on their way to, Sicily, as well as the fact that to some observers, teste di moro resemble items that stand as symbols of racism in the US context, such reactions are understandable.
However, for some interlocutors, the reaction was different.Some Sicilians spoke of teste di moro as symbols of Sicily itself, particularly its meticcio, or mixed, past: a past that, as the mythologized narrative goes, is what makes Sicily 'Mediterranean': a crossroads of civilisations and cultures. 42For one Palermo ceramicist, the teste di moro represent 'the difficulties of living together across difference', or convivenzathat is, 'co-existence'.The analyses offered by some Siciliansnew Sicilians, including some African immigrants, and old Sicilians, by birth and ancestrydid not relate the teste di moro to contemporary immigration, except insofar as they propagate an idea of a 'welcoming' and/or 'mixed' Mediterranean Sicily.
This background on the teste di moro vases serves as a cultural and ethnographic counterpoint, against which we might compare their treatment and symbolism in The White Lotus.It also introduces themes of immigration and race, which impact notions of how Sicilian identity is being re-conceptualized in the context of contemporary immigration.These themes are elided in The White Lotus, which instead trains its focus on gender, and ignores racism in the age of trans-Mediterranean migration to Sicily.

Gender and Mediterranean Fantasies
In Episode One of The White Lotus, Rocco, a hotel employee, recounts a simplified version of one of the teste di moro origin stories to a group of guests: '[t]he story is, a Moor came here a long time ago and seduced a local girl.But then she found out that he had a wife and children back home.So, because he lied to her, she cut his head off'.
'So, if you put one of these outside of your house, what are you saying?If you come into my house, don't fuck my wife', summarizes Ethan, one of the guests.His friend's wife, Daphne, interprets the moral of the story differently: 'It's a warning to husbands […] screw around and you'll end up buried in the garden'. 43Both of these interpretations, and indeed all of the aforementioned versions of the teste di moro origin story, make the most sense in a society in which 'families associate their honour with the virginity of unmarried daughters, and with the chastity of these women after marriage', 44 a preoccupation which, according to Jane Schneider, has historically been a unifying feature across the Mediterranean. 45In other words, they imply a particular form of patriarchy, which English-speaking observers have long associated with Sicily and its neighbours.'The Mediterranean peoples', in the words of the anthropologist John Peristiany, 'are constantly called upon to use the concepts of honour and shame in order to assess their own conduct and that of their fellows'. 46he teste di moro are the ideal leitmotif for The White Lotus, the plot of which is overwhelmingly driven by infidelity and its repercussions.Almost all the hotel's wealthy North American residents are affected by extra-marital affairs.Tanya suspects that her husband, Greg, is having an affair, and she too ends up having sex with a Sicilian man during her holiday.Dominic's wife is no longer speaking to him because of his past infidelities, and he hires two sex workers during his time in Sicily.His father, Bert, also staying at the hotel, was unfaithful to his wife when she was alive, but believes he hid it successfully.Ethan and Harper, a couple staying at the hotel, both become convinced that the other has been unfaithful.Ethan's friend, Cameron, with whom they are on holiday, is sure that 'everyone cheats', and he is no exception; it is strongly implied that his wife Daphne has done the same.Teste di moro in The White Lotus recur almost exclusively in scenes that involve or foreshadow sex, and especially in scenes referring to or threatening marital infidelity and consequent revenge.
The interplay between the aforementioned teste di moro origin myth, and the infidelity-driven plot of The White Lotus, is extensive.Teste di moro do not just convey a cautionary tale about infidelity or dishonesty.They also reflect a value system that regards so-called 'honour-based' violence as a just and necessary repercussion of 'shameful' behaviour.The physical fight that breaks out in the sea between Ethan and Cameron, after it emerges that Cameron attempted to seduce Ethan's wife, mirrors this value system, albeit non-fatally.The implicit conclusion is that, as much as liberal North Americans, such as Ethan, believe themselves to be above such notions of honour and shame, they have either failed to transcend this model, which has been revealed by their presence in a 'primitive' location like Sicily, or else they have 'become Sicilian' in their attitudes.The idea that Sicily gets under its visitors' skinthat it 'corrupts' their moralshas centuries-old precedents in Northern European Protestant fearmongering about the risks of what was routinely portrayed as a decadent locus of temptation: immoral and dangerous, and therefore thrilling and exotic. 47As we have mentioned, the same topos is also used in The Godfather.
In Episode Three, while Harper and Daphne visit Noto, The White Lotus almost directly recreates a famous scene from Antonioni's L'Avventura. 48Claudia, played by Monica Vitti, is ogled by a crowd of men under the steps of Noto cathedral.In The White Lotus' recreation of the scene, Harper spells out what L'Avventura leaves implicit: 'a lot of horny dudes in Noto'.The characterisation of 'the Sicilian man' in The White Lotus is sometimes threatening, as in this echo of L'Avventura, but not exclusively.Portia, a dissatisfied young assistant to a wealthy older guest, admits fantasizing about being 'thrown around by some hot Italian guy'. 49Elsewhere, she dreams about meeting a man who is 'totally ignorant of the discourse', which we take as a reference to Anglosphere discussions on social justice. 50If Sicily's usefulness as a backdrop derives from the perception that it is a repository of archaic gender rolesa public sphere dominated by aggressive menthen, perhaps surprisingly, this characterisation is not entirely negative.There is something seductive, and not just for the Italian-American men looking to live out their Godfather fantasies, about the form of masculinity The White Lotus' visitors expect to find in Sicily.
Across the series' seven episodes, one character in particular undergoes a transformation from a liberal Californian archetype into a man who displays characteristics the series suggests are 'typically Sicilian'.The transformation of this character, Albie, is especially significant because his family's Sicilian heritage is emphasized throughout the series.Albie's grandfather, Bert Di Grasso, is shown introducing himself to hotel staff as 'Sicilian, just like you'. 51Albie seeks to distance himself from his disgraced father and his womanizing grandfather.He insists that 'gender is a construct', implying that succumbing to his ancestors' patriarchal attitudes is not inevitable. 52We might note here that this already tallies with historic characterisations of the Mediterranean: 'it is typical of the Mediterranean that the father-son relationship is somewhat strained and potentially competitive', argues Schneider. 53onetheless, Albie ends up mirroring some of his father's and grandfather's behaviours, including by sleeping, albeit unknowingly, with the same sex worker his father had hired earlier.In the final episode, it is made clear that his transformation is complete.At the airport, all three generations of men are shown exaggeratedly turning their heads to gaze at a young Sicilian woman.Despite his Stanford education, which his grandfather suggests has 'brainwashed' him into becoming a critic of machismo, Sicily has turned Albie into a Di Grasso.It is Sicily that acts as the backdrop and the catalyst for this rite of passage.
The idea that Sicily is dangerously seductive is personified in the character of Lucia, a young Sicilian woman.Lucia first has sex with Dominic, who knows she is a sex worker, and then later in the series with his son, Albie, who is oblivious until after the fact.Lucia convinces Albie, and then the rest of his family, that she is being controlled by Alessio, who readily fits into the North American men's stereotype of Sicilian men as both aggressive and criminal.By playing on this North American family's preconceptions of Sicilianness, she convinces Albie to 'save' her by sending her $50,000.She adopts the persona, legible to Albie and his family due to their own emigration history, of a poor Sicilian desperate to leave.'I always wanted to go to Los Angeles.That is my dream', she tells him. 54lbie's fantasy of 'rescuing' a sex worker has obvious cinematic precedents -Pretty Woman 55 and Moulin Rouge 56 to name but twobut is also reinforced by his specifically North American gaze on Sicily.The anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argues that North American culture uses the idea that Muslim women need 'saving' to justify US intervention in the Middle East. 57Sicily is outside the North American understanding of the 'Middle East', and is predominantly Roman Catholic, but is also characterized as ambiguously or incompletely European, even 'quasi-oriental'. 58This, in turn, informs the English-speaking world's gaze on Sicily.As the English journalist and author John Hooper notes: 'the presence of Muslims over a period of centuries is often cited as an explanation for the traditionally low status of women in Sicily'. 59No wonder Albie is so ready to believe that Lucia longs for a North American knight in shining armour to whisk her away.
In the end, the joke is on Albie.He convinces his father to pay Lucia $50,000 as a 'karmic payment': a reparation of sorts, for the women his father has wronged in the past.Lucia does not follow Albie to Los Angeles, and appears more than happy to stay in Taormina with her windfall.Her friendly interactions with Alessio in the final episode, furthermore, reveal the mafioso pimp story to have been a necessary ruse.Although Lucia has got one over on Albie, and his family can well afford the $50,000, her character reflects an ancient idea of sex workersperhaps especially Mediterranean sex workersas 'scheming' and 'wily'. 60n The White Lotus, Sicily emerges as 'very seductive', to use the words of Quentin, the gay English Italophile played by Tom Hollander.The makers of The White Lotus attempt to distance the series from its characters' own notions about Sicily and Sicilians, by showing that they are inaccurate, like the idea of Alessio as a violent, controlling pimp, and based on little more than Hollywood stereotypes, like the revelation that Bert's idea of Sicily comes primarily from The Godfather.Nonetheless, the series' portrayal of Sicily as a place where sexual temptation meets fraud and extortion ultimately serves to reinforce, rather than complicate, the North American gaze on Sicily.

An Absent Presence: Overlooking Race in the Imagined Sicily of The White Lotus
If gender is a central theme of The White Lotus, by contrast, racethe other key dimension raised by the teste di moro leitmotif and mythis absent.The teste di moro origin myth, as we have seen, involves coupling across race, ethnicity, religion, and cultural background.But the series omits references to their contested racial dimension.As Alessandra Di Maio writes, when teste di moro are presented elsewhere on a transnational cultural stage, such as in Dolce & Gabbana's presentation of their Spring/Summer 2013 collection, their usage 'caused extraordinary scandal' in 'nations historically sensitive to racial discourse and representation of the black body'. 61he elision of race and immigration may not in itself seem a ground for criticism.Indeed, our intention is not to critique The White Lotus on the basis of a presumed 'inauthenticity'.As Galt and Schoonover observe, accusations of inauthenticity 'conjure an authentic alternative that should be championed, a politically progressive representation', and risk evaluating works of fiction 'purely in the terms of social realism'. 62Similarly, we do not mean to suggest a purposeful elision of issues of race in Sicily on the part of the series' creators.Instead, we argue that the lack of engagement (deliberate or not) with race and immigration contributes to a specific representation of Sicily and of the Mediterranean: a fantasy land of premodern gender and race dynamics where wealthy, white (or 'white-passing', as one character puts it) North American and Northern European travellers can live out their desires.This elision is surprising given that The White Lotus can be interpreted as a critique of white privilege: a privilege that relies on the exploitation of marginalized communities.
We see this elision through the characters' reactions to the teste di moro.As mentioned, the North American tourists portrayed in the series linger on the gendered dimensions of the story, while glossing over the race element.Not even Portia, who often serves as the series' young political conscience, makes any remark.Furthermore, The White Lotus only shows teste di moro with white-painted skin, although on the market, they exist in a wide variety of skin colours.It is implied that the (male) heads are of 'Moors'.Together with their literal painted whiteness, this disassociates them from contemporary, politicized understanding of categories such as 'Black', 'Brown', or 'Arab'.The implication is that they are pre-modern, i.e. that they are not relevant in a geopolitical sense today: supposedly unlike, for example, the aforementioned lawn jockeys in the US context.Similarly, in another scene when the guest, Tanya, asks reception for an 'old school, gypsy, psychic, fortune-teller', the viewer has the impression of being immersed in another world: one that is backwards in time.Tania's assistant, Portia, objects to the terminology, but the idea of Sicilian race politicsas either wholly absent, or a quaint anachronismremains.
Again, our point is not that the series should have offered a more authentic representation of modern Sicily, but that the treatment of the teste is emblematic generally of the series' omissionwilful or notof Sicily's complicated racial politics, and that this leads to a particular representation of the island.Crucially, it marks a contrast to the first series of The White Lotus, set in Hawaii (thus on US soil), in which race and ethnicity were central to the plot.In the second series, contemporary racial politics appear to have been left behind in North America, with very few exceptions (the character of Harper, for instance, remarks that she and Ethan are Daphne and Cameron's 'white passing' friends, but little more is made of this comment).
What emerges is an anachronistic and Anglo-American fantasy of Sicily and of the Mediterranean as a place of escape and wish-fulfilment.It is perhaps most glaring when we consider the opening scene of the very first episode: the image of the floating body in the Mediterranean Sea.Viewers see only a white leg, and this death becomes the premise for the mystery that drives the series' plot.The depiction of a rich, white, North American body floating in the Mediterranean is jarring in light of the seemingly ubiquitous depiction of floating bodies in international media, but the connection is never made.The image of the white leg that opens The White Lotusand indeed has become emblematic of the seriesthus seems to override the thousands of individuals who have died crossing the Mediterranean.
Since at least 2015particularly in Europeimages of Black and Brown immigrants floating in the Mediterranean Sea have been prominent in news and social media.These imagessuch as the now-famous photograph of the young Syrian child Alan Kurdihave acquired symbolic importance as rallying points for pro-migration movements.A discussion of the value and ethics of these images is beyond the purview of this article.Our point is that today, by locals and a broader European public, the Mediterranean is often conceived of as a 'graveyard' or 'cemetery'. 63The association would likely be immediate for the Sicilian staff at The White Lotus hotel, on discovering a dead body in the Mediterranean, but is never discussed in the series.
The sea is an important leitmotif in the series: it usually brings with it a threat, psychological or physical.After all, we know that one of the characters will die, and even the surviving protagonists undergo turbulent character developments.In a strong echo of the images of the sea in L'Avventura, a film similarly based around the disappearance of one character, each episode of The White Lotus opens and closes with shots of the sea.These shots of waves crashing against the shore, or else of underwater, deep sea, are accompanied by a variation on the series' unsettling, ominous title soundtrack.
But the racial politics that have become an important dimension of academic and public discussions of the Mediterranean are absent.By way of contrast, we might consider that some scholars advocate using the term 'Black Mediterranean'an extension of Paul Gilroy's 'Black Atlantic'as a way of politicizing this sea, which is otherwise depicted, as in The White Lotus, as a luxurious beach and tourist setting. 64As Ida Danewid has written, the 'Black Mediterranean' instead 'invites us to place the contemporary migrant crisis in the context of Europe's constitutive history of empire, colonial conquest, and transatlantic slavery'. 65icily, like other border zones, is a context in which migrants, asylum seekers and refugees face violent border regimes and a rigged, exploitative labour market. 66This broader context is similarly erased from the series, despite its apparent critique of privilege.People of colour do not even appear in social roles that are strongly figured in The White Lotus: sex workers, cleaners, or mobile beach sellers.These sorts of jobs, which Jeffrey Cole and Sally Booth call 'dirty work', 67 are overwhelmingly carried out by immigrants in Italy and have become racialized social roles.
A generous reader might argue that the series' depiction reflects a fictionalized Italian luxury hotel's attempt to project whiteness as a signifier of class or 'Italianness' to a foreign audience.Perhaps this is even an attempt at authenticity, although we can only speculate: in our fieldwork, for instance, many young African immigrants explicitly stated that hotels and restaurants did not put their Black employees in public-facing positions that would have rendered them visible.Still, the series set in Sicily gives us no clues that it is aware of this intended projection, in contrast with the previous series set on US soil.The different treatment of North American and Mediterranean contexts is itself instructive.
Where any semblance of racialized discourse does appear in The White Lotus, it is largely through hackneyed, if tongue-in-cheek, references to behavioural and biological differences between Northern and Southern Europeans or Italians.These interchanges point to an open, yet often unacknowledged, reference to civilisational hierarchies based on hegemonic ideas of development, showing awareness of processes of racialisation.Take this exchange between Valentina, the Sicilian hotel manager, and Daphne and Cameron, the newest North American guests to disembark at The White Lotus: This exchange 68 is likely intended to be humorous, and possibly even to mark the ways in which the Sicilian hotel staff play on stereotypes about Italy and Sicily in ways that may be strategic for themselves.It refers to discourses of Southern, particularly Southern Italian, disorganisationas compared to a Northern European functionality, represented by the metonymy of 'Munich'.Slightly more troubling, perhaps, due to the way it stereotypes biological traits, is the assertion by Bert, the grandfather of the Di Grasso family, that he can tell that Isabella, the receptionist at The White Lotus, is Northern Italian because of her features.Both scenes point to the same thing: while The White Lotus, as we show in the following section, takes an ironic distance from such stereotypes of Southern Italians, it also builds on centuries of tourist, traveller, and anthropological depictionsoften North American and British onesas well as diasporic representations. 69uch depictions of Southern Italians are racializing, although the series does not allude to these effects: perhaps in recognition of the fact that Italians (and Italian-Americans) have been 'whitened' in the US context. 70Ultimately, such episodes indicate that the creators of The White Lotus are knowledgeableas one Atlantic review put it, 'erudite' 71about the Sicilian context, and about stereotypical depictions of Southern Italy.This makes their omission of contemporary immigration and race politics even more glaring, and a question that merits our attention.
As we argue in the following section, the omission of race in Sicily, in favour of a focus on gender, provides a lens for understanding the depiction of Sicily and the Mediterranean in the series.The gaze on Sicily may be considered humorous, ironic, or indeed postmodern.But the omission of contemporary racial politicsjuxtaposed with a depiction of Sicily as disorganized, depopulating, and 'backwards' from a gender standpointare ultimately crucial to its depiction as a locus of emigration: an island frozen in the past, in which the contemporary issues that are alive in North America do not exist.This turns the Mediterranean into a place of wish fulfilment for an Anglo-American gaze: be it the gaze of the characters, or, indeed, of the viewing audience.

Conclusion: Subverting or Reinforcing Destination Sicily?
As we have noted, The White Lotus' engagement with its Sicilian setting is anything but superficial.On the contrary, the series is self-consciously erudite.Its Italianlanguage soundtrack, for example, is tailored thematically to the scene at hand: among many such instances, Fabrizio de André's 'Bocca di Rosa', a 1967 song about a sex worker whose arrival in a village causes chaos, is used to introduce the characters of Lucia and Mia, whose arrival at the hotel has a similar effect.The aforementioned cinematographic 'nods' to Italian film history, particularly to L'Avventura, are likely to prompt a knowing smile in connoisseurs, but not to the extent that The White Lotus' intertextuality impedes the enjoyment of casual viewers unfamiliar with Italian cinema.
The White Lotus can be viewed as a collage of historical representations of Sicily, from the classical -'Hades raped Persephone right here in Sicily', the character of Bert Di Grasso reminds his family 72 to the very recent.There is even microcollage within this collage: the series' opening credits, for example, combine frescoes from Palermo's Villa Tasca, used as a setting in Episode Three, with pastiches of that same style, which were devised by the production team to allude to plot points in the series. 73What emerges is an intricate web of self-conscious references, making well-informed viewers aware of the series' artifice.As Linda Hutcheon puts it: 'a rummaging through the image reserves of the past […] show[s] the history of the representations their parody calls to our attention'. 74In the case of The White Lotus, the series' heavy intertextuality draws our attention to how transnational stereotypes about Sicily have been culturally constructed over centuries of representations.
As we suggested in our discussion of gender, both the 'regressive' attitudes to gender, which Sicily is used to symbolize, and the 'progressive' attitudes espoused by some of the North American guests, who suppose themselves to be enlightened, are the subject of ironic parody in The White Lotus.'Self-reflexivity and irony draw attention to the complexity of social phenomena': 75 there is nothing inherently apolitical about the ironic distance taken by The White Lotus, or its refusal to take a straightforward 'stance' on gender politics.On the contrary, The White Lotus uses irony to demonstrate the hypocrisy of Dominic's self-professed 'feminism', for example, and even the superficiality of his son Albie's attempts to break the patrilineal chain of patriarchal attitudes.
Nonetheless, as Hutcheon emphasizes, 'parody is doubly coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies'. 76This is especially true in the way White Lotus represents Sicily.The series is full of Sicilian 'stock characters', who will be known to viewers familiar with the history of Sicily's cultural representation by non-Sicilians.Lucia, the wily local sex worker; Giuseppe, the small-time local artist who tries to leverage his 'connections' for sexual favours; the stereotyped insular rural Sicilian woman, who chases away the Di Grasso men with a cooking knife.If 'postmodernism ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge', 77 then The White Lotus, for all its ironic distance, also reproduces two-dimensional negative stereotypes of Sicily and Sicilians, while implicitly purporting to critique them: '[p]ostmodern art cannot but be political, at least in the sense that its representationsits images and storiesare anything but neutral, however "aestheticised" they may appear to be in their parodic self-reflexivity'. 78f The White Lotus, as we have argued, is a knowing intertextual collage of past representations of Sicily, then it is also political in what it declines to show.The version of Sicily that is foregrounded, as much as it is also parodied, is the midtwentieth-century Sicily of L'Avventura, with its oppressive patriarchal gaze, and the honour-obsessed Sicily of The Godfather (and, centuries before it, of the culture that produced the teste di moro myth).The White Lotus had the option to engage with the complex Mediterranean racial politics of the teste di moro, and indeed with the recent cultural history of representations of migration to Sicily. 79Even an internationally successful film like A Bigger Splash (2015), 80 which engages only superficially with the politics of migration, at least acknowledges its importance in the contemporary Sicilian context.The Sicily of The White Lotus, on the other hand, appears frozen in the 1970s, with the minor exception of some recent 'local colour': music from a self-described 'queer pop' band from Palermo, La Rappresentante di Lista, for example, or a brief scene in the capital that captures something of the contemporary metropolis.As we argued above, the Sicily of The White Lotus epitomizes a 'fantasy of an Italy that does not fully take part' in the world of contemporary politics. 81here is an ironic distance between The White Lotus and the history of Northern European and North American representations of Sicily, but there is also 'continuum', to use Hutcheon's terminology.The White Lotus is not separate or separable from other representations of Sicily by non-Sicilians, which are heavily influenced by international tourism.On the contrary, it constitutes a continuation of this genre, recycling and perpetuating, as we have demonstrated, what Jane Schneider called a 'tenacious catalogue of stereotypes' about Southern Italy. 82he Sicily of The White Lotus is constructed as a locus of wish fulfilment for wealthy North American visitors, but this image is also co-constructed with the help of the Sicilian tourist industry.The fictional hotel, The White Lotus, does nothing to subvert or complicate the idealized image of Sicily that sells so well: why would it?Millicent Marcus observes how, in Caro diario (1993), Nanni Moretti portrays and parodies a town mayor fixated on 'regional improvement'.83 'In a Baudrillardian reversal of neorealist practice', Marcus writes, 'island life will be made to simulate cinematic representations of it, the real will be tailored to fit its media image'.84 Marcus' 1996 analysis of Moretti's mayor, over two decades on, now seems prophetic.'Destination Sicily', to borrow Hom's terminology, is already reciprocating and reinforcing the idea of Sicily put forward by The White Lotus.Taormina, the setting for most of the series, is reaping the benefits of the association, 85 and local entrepreneurs have been quick to capitalize on the series' success.Not only can visitors inspired by The White Lotus follow the characters' footsteps on The Godfather excursions, which have already been popular for some time, 86 they can now also participate in 'The White Lotus Tour', visiting sites popularized by the series itself.By purporting to parody historic representations of Destination Sicily, therefore, The White Lotus has secured its place within that self-same genre.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Teste di Moro outside a tourist ceramic shop in Sicily.Photo by Margaret Neil.
Valentina: 'Welcome to Sicily […] How was the trip?' Daphne: 'It was fine, but they did lose Cameron's bags in Rome'.Valentina: 'Never transfer through Rome.Fiumicino always loses bags.You should have flown through Munich'.