37.72°N — 12.88°E  ·  Partanna, Sicily

For Those Who Feel the Pull

Maybe your nonna kept a garden the neighbors didn't understand. Maybe your house smelled like Sunday sauce every week. Maybe you grew up knowing, somewhere in your bones, that you belonged somewhere you'd never actually been. I know that feeling. I grew up with it too.

I'm Josephine Ingoglia-Sparacia. I was born in Queens to a household where Sicily lived in every meal, every argument, every gesture of my nonni's hands. I spent every summer of my childhood here. I married Nino — a fifth-generation olive farmer from Partanna, the same corner of Sicily my own family came from. We kept coming back. In 2023, we stopped leaving.

Isola Marea grew from that. It's not a tour company. It's a sharing — of land that belongs to my family, of relationships I've built over decades, of access that can't be manufactured because it was never designed for visitors in the first place. The connections in the villages of western Sicily were built over a lifetime. That's the kind of knowledge you can only carry if you belong somewhere — not just visit it.

If you feel the pull — the draw back to the island your nonni or great-grandparents left, or simply the recognition that there's a version of Sicily no guidebook can give you — I want you to know: I felt it too, for most of my life. And I know exactly where it leads.

That's why you can trust me with this. Not because I have a certificate or a portfolio. Because I am you, further along. I know what you're carrying when you say you want to go back. I know what you're hoping to find. And I know this island — not as a destination I discovered, but as the place I belong.