Our Family Odyssey had a stowaway named Homer

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The 2026 release of Christopher Nolan’s epic film The Odyssey brought back memories of that one time the Greek poet Homer crashed our family trip to Italy and Sicily.

We traveled in 2009 with a group of students, parents, and teachers from Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City. We went to Rome and Florence, headed south to Pompeii, Sorrento and Capri, and then ventured even further down the boot of Italy to Sicily, Taormina, and Palermo.

Near Villa San Giovanni, our bus boarded a large ferry to cross the Strait of Messina to Sicily. Standing on the ship’s bow deck, trip organizer Tim Soran—an expert on the Greek and Latin classics—leaned over to me and asked, “How do you like being on the same sea where Scylla and Charybdis live?”

I was surprised. I’ve always been diligent to do some research before a trip so I know at least a little bit about where I am going.

I had neglected before this adventure, however, to consider Homer. But he was there for the rest of our trip.

Homer’s hero Odysseus knew Sicily all too well. 

According to oral tradition and Homer’s poem, Odysseus left Troy (in modern Turkey) after the decade-long Trojan War ended and headed back to his island home of Ithaca on the western coast of Greece. Bad weather, however, pushed his ships south and west towards Sicily.

Legend says it was in southwest Sicily—not far from where we toured ancient Roman temples—that the one-eyed cyclops named Polyphemus trapped Odysseus and his men in a cave. The giant began devouring them.

On our 2009 trip, we enjoyed a delightful tour of Taormina, under the volcanic shadows of Mount Etna. In contrast, Odysseus had to blind Polyphemus with a sharp fiery spear and then run for his life. 

The enraged cyclops threw huge boulders at the escaping Greek ships. The shoreline near Taormina now is called the Coast of the Cyclops, and tourists flock to see large rock formations (the Faraglioni) said to be the same ones tossed by Polyphemus.

The log-in-the-eye tactic angered the sea god Poseidon, the cyclops’s father. Poseidon cursed Odysseus, ensuring prolonged suffering and adversity for the king of Ithaca and his men in and around Sicily.

In the sea north of Sicily, near where our plane flew when we left Palermo, a king named Aeolus—the keeper of the winds—gave Odysseus a bag trapping all but the gentle breeze he needed to get home. After many days of smooth sailing, and within sight of Ithaca, Odysseus fell asleep on his ship. 

His crew opened the mysterious bag, thinking it held hidden treasures. Fierce winds rushed out and blew them way off course again…back to Sicily. 

We got a sense of those powerful gales on our ferry ride to Messina. We stood on the ship’s front deck, leaned forward while the powerful onrushing air held us up.

After a detour on Circe’s Island, Odysseus had to face the deadly Sirens and their alluring singing voices. Local lore says that encounter happened somewhere near today’s Sorrento and Capri in the Bay of Naples. 

With no signs of sirens, we had a relaxing but busy visit to Capri. I snapped a photo of my ten year old son snoozing on the boat trip back to Sorrento and then teased him about it. 

When I looked at my photos a few days later, there was one of me napping in our hotel room. Odysseus got no such rest when he visited the same area. 

After surviving the Sirens, he had to face Scylla (SIL-ah) and Charybdis (kah-RIB-dis). According to Greek myth, they were terrible sea monsters who lived in the narrow Strait of Messina separating Italy from Sicily. 

Scylla, a former lover of Poseidon, had been transformed into a hideous beast by Poseidon’s angry wife. Charybdis was a massive underwater creature—a whirlpool—that drank in ocean water and spewed it out again. 

To navigate between such horrible hazards, Odysseus and his men had to either sail too close to one—which would snatch six people from the ship—or get too close to the other and risk losing the whole ship and everyone on board. I am glad we never had to choose between Scylla and Charybdis.

We had good appetites during our trip and—as you might expect while in Italy—ate well. Yet, we carefully avoided the nearby island of Thrinacia. 

Odysseus’s crew stopped there and made the fatal mistake of eating the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios. As punishment, an angry Zeus destroyed their ship with lightning bolts. Only Odysseus survived. 

We left Sicily and Italy reluctantly, but only because we had so much fun there. And we knew that quiet and comfort awaited us after a long flight home.

Homer had many trials (a son who did not know him, a wife besieged by dozens of aggressive suitors) still in store for Odysseus once he got back to Ithaca. I doubt that the epic hero ever wanted to go anywhere near Sicily again.

When we got home, I was curious about why our stowaway Homer could not allow poor Odysseus to enjoy even a little bit of Sicily, like we did. The clever muse-inspired poet had prepared a written response for me, in two sections of The Odyssey, long before I even pondered the question.

When Odysseus’s wife Penelope complains to her son about the sad tales told by the bards about her husband, Telemachus explains, “Poets are not to blame for how things are.”

And near the end of the epic poem, a disguised Odysseus once again meets his loyal swineherd, Eumaeus, and tells him, “These nights are endless, and a man can sleep through them, or he can enjoy listening to stories, and you have no need to go to bed before it is time. Too much sleep is only a bore. And of the others, any one whose heart and spirit urge him can go outside and sleep, and then, when the dawn shows, breakfast first, then go out to tend the swine of our master. But we two, sitting here in the shelter, eating and drinking, shall entertain each other remembering and retelling our sad sorrows. For afterwards a man who has suffered much and wandered much has pleasure out of his sorrows.”

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.