erikgauger

Mount Etna beyond Taormina, seen from the ancient Greek theatre where the chase for this story begins. In the 1990s, a man on vacation in Taormina took home a handful of lizards to his backyard in San Pedro, California. They survived. They spread. Today a

Marina Corta, the old fishing harbor at Lipari town, the largest settlement in the Aeolian Islands. The lemons in a Lipari backyard looked like no lemon in any Sicilian market-long, knobbled, and tipped with giant nipples. One of them traced back to a fru

Cefalù appears from around a bend on the coast road east of Palermo, its pastel walls creeping up the cliff sides of the La Rocca promontory. Every crate of lemons that left Palermo harbor was grown on a tree nobody was buying. For centuries the sour oran

A narrow alley in Palermo's old quarter. Behind the Baroque facades, the city's hidden courtyards still preserve the imprint of the Arab city built a thousand years ago. Sicily is branded around the world as pure, ancient, and unchanging. But Sicily is no

My original travel watercolor palettes after more than two decades of field sketching. For more than twenty-five years, my watercolor kit fit inside a waterproof travel palette. It worked beautifully for quick field sketches, but as my illustrations becam

Sicily Map - watercolor, first painted in 2014 and updated in 2026 for the Citrus Kingdom articles. Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, a rough triangle of limestone hills, citrus plains, and volcanic slopes anchored in the east by Mount Et

Aeolian Islands Map - watercolor and Copic marker, depicting the seven volcanic islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily. The Aeolian Islands rise from the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily as a scattered chain of seven volcanic islands: Lipari, Vulcano

Chili Peppers of the World - a hand-illustrated guide featuring 176 peppers from across the globe. For the past several years I've been working on what may be Notes from the Road's biggest illustration project yet: a visual guide to the chili peppers of t

A hand-painted map of the eight main Hawaiian Islands, created with watercolor, Copic marker, and Adobe Fresco. These two handmade mixed-media maps of Hawaiʻi show the islands at two scales: the familiar eight major Hawaiian Islands and the full 1,500-mil

The El Portal Motel sign in Beatty, Nevada - part of a later generation of roadside design, built to last rather than impress. This is an ongoing sketch journal of the American desert - a record of roadside signs, motels, and the architecture of movement