I grew up in Rome with an Italian father and a mother of Italian and Irish descent. Her father, my grandfather, is the person I have to thank for giving me Irish citizenship, third among Americans and Italians. But despite being a citizen since the age of 12, I never felt particularly connected to this country, especially given that my family’s Irish heritage was largely silent.
All my family knew was that my grandfather was the son of a strong woman from West Cork who traveled across the Atlantic to the United States in the early 20th century. There were no stories or photos. Everyone before her was a ghost, as if the waves had swallowed our history during the long journey across the Atlantic.
A year ago, driven by a sudden and inexplicable desire to understand the basis of Irish nationality, I began digging into my family history. I spent hours combing through Ancestry.com and many of Ireland’s public online databases looking for information. After weeks hunched over my laptop, I traced my family tree back to the mid-19th century, with names, births, marriages, deaths, occupations, and addresses all tied to one place: County Cork. It has become clear that It was natural to visit them.
Sheep along the rocky coast of Dingle, Ireland.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
Shortly after, my boyfriend and I booked a week-long trip to Ireland from our home in Boston. I planned a five-county road trip spanning more than 800 miles, hiking along sheep-lined cliffs, staying in quiet fishing villages, and visiting the ruins of once-great clans. I have visited Ireland twice before, once during high school and once after graduating, but both times were limited to Dublin. I wanted to see more of this country and have some kind of connection with this land where unknown families had lived for generations.
We arrived in Dublin early on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. The rain was pouring down and the crowd was guzzling down Guinness like it was water. We spent the day exploring the city in a jet-lag fog, then headed back to our airport hotel for an early night’s sleep. The next morning we picked up our rental car at the airport and headed an hour south to our first destination, the Abbey City of Glendalough, one of Ireland’s most important monasteries.
Located in a clearing in the forest, facing the lake on one end, this area was founded in the 6th century and contains surviving buildings from the 10th to the 12th century. From there we continued south into County Tipperary, making another stop at the imposing Rock of Cashel, a 1,000-year-old church complex perched atop a limestone outcrop. Before getting back on the road, we grabbed a bite to eat at Granny’s Kitchen, a family-run cafe where we dipped warm brown bread into freshly made vegetable soup and ate sausages wrapped in delicate puff pastry.
After many hours passing through small towns, we arrived in Cork City, the second largest city in the Republic of Ireland. Our home for the night was the historic Address Cork, a converted mid-19th century hospital. Housed in a red-brick Victorian building, this three-story, 70-room hotel is located in Military Hill’s landmark St. Luke’s Quarter and offers city views.
Asia Palomba stands in front of her godparents’ house in Cork, Ireland.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
Just a 30-minute walk from the hotel, in a narrow alley across the River Lea, I found the place where my great-grandfather Jeremiah, a basket weaver, lived for the first decade of the 20th century. Hidden in the shadow of the medieval red monastery tower, the building appeared to be in good condition and I could faintly hear the sound of someone playing a television inside.
A 10-minute walk away, on the winding, cobblestone Barrack Street, I found the two-story house where my widowed great-grandparents Michael and “Widow” Catherine had lived for several years. . Surrounded by pubs, hip coffee shops, and street art, the building seemed to be rotting from the inside out. Plants sprouted from cracks in the facade, exposed power lines ran along its edges, and the two-tone paint peeled off like bark. Right next to it was a construction site, a sad but inevitable reminder that my ancestral home would be the same way.
The house was dilapidated but still there. It was a visible monument, an ancient relic of the presence of my ancestors, and for the first time in my life, the tenuous connection I felt to this country fell into place.
Archive photos of Asia Palomba, a writer living in Kinsale, Ireland, and her grandparents’ home in Baltimore, Ireland.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
The next day, we continued south to Baltimore, a fishing village on the southern tip of Ireland. This is the town where my grandfather lived intermittently for several years, in a house where he wished to retire, until his sudden death in 2006, when I was 8 years old.
I didn’t get to see the house he loved so much, but I heard that it was surrounded by lush cherry and apple trees and had roaming cows. The site is overlooked in the distance by the crumbling remains of a 19th-century cliffside signal tower overlooking Baltimore Harbor and Roaringwater Bay, and is colloquially known as the Spanish Tower, where my grandparents picnicked on warm days. I was doing
Aerial view of the Spanish Tower in Baltimore, Ireland. A Napoleonic signal tower overlooking Baltimore Harbor and Roaring Water Bay.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
Once we arrived and checked into our family-run bed and breakfast, we headed a short distance out of town and hiked up a winding dirt road to the tower. Ireland’s notoriously relentless wind gusts and rain forced us to reconsider and head to the village to visit the Baltimore Beacon instead.
Built in 1848, the 50-foot-tall conical stone marker is one of County Cork’s most iconic sites. It rises from a series of steep cliffs that split like fingers from the land and reach the sea, where a gust of strong wind carries you out to sea—I have never been more thoroughly battered by the elements than I was then. I think it’s a cold afternoon. After a hot shower, a change of clothes, and a piping hot candlelit seafood chowder at local hangout Casey’s, we called it an early night.
A steep single-lane mountain pass in Priest Leap, County Kerry, Ireland.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
We continued further south over the next few days and began circling the country’s rugged western peninsula. We entered County Kerry through the dizzyingly narrow and dizzying Priest’s Leap. Priest’s Leap is a single-lane mountain road that winds through the land for 53 miles. Freckled by grazing sheep and wandering cows, the landscape is dominated by towering mountains bisected by rushing streams and babbling streams, painted in wide swaths of muted browns, yellows and greens.
While climbing by car, there were times when I would lean out the window and see nothing but a vertical drop to the bottom. We visited the 1,000ft-high Kerry Cliffs, slept in a cozy pub in the seaside village of Dingle, watched a three-month-old border collie puppy chase blackface sheep in the mountains of County Galway, and watched the waves I visited a beach where the sand was lapping against the waves. It was very delicate and felt like it was touching silk. We also hiked the rocky coastline, including the steep 1.6-mile loop trail to Dunmore Head, the filming location for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. From there, you can admire the vast and mind-boggling views and forget about the sweat running down your back. Pain in the legs.
Beautiful views of Dunmore Head in Dingle, Ireland. Located on the Dingle Peninsula, it is one of the westernmost points in Europe.
Asia Palomba/Travel + Leisure
We tasted lamb and steak, sea bass and fish chowder. There are times when the weather feels like the earth itself is punishing us for our existence, and we seek refuge in a warm pub, munching on roast beef slathered in gravy and crunchy red apples. I asked for a local cider which I can only describe as delicious. One autumn day. We were also lucky to experience days when the wind died down, the clouds disappeared, and only undiluted sunlight made the hills and sea shine like the finest jewels. That day, we soaked up the warm spring sunshine with the sheep lying on the grass.
My family’s history had been largely silent for a century, so tracing my heritage back nearly 200 years and visiting the homes where they once lived was nothing short of a metaphysical experience. I now know that part of me is from Cork City, descended from basket weavers, servants and laborers. I also know that three generations of my female ancestors tended to marry late, in their mid-twenties for the time, and were referred to in public records as spinsters. It was more information than I expected, and I can’t help but feel a new affinity for this country. I’m already planning a second, more extended road trip for spring 2025.
I’m not going to pretend to be Irish just because I have a nationality. We understand that claiming land rights requires more than a passport and a few old documents. However, I do admit that Ireland is my family connection and I am unexpectedly very proud of it. How I am bound to a land where sheep fall like snow, where shadows of green blankets sink over the land, where the sea swirls and thrashes against cliffs in a millennia-long tidal dance. You’ll be lucky.
