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SWIMMING WITH THE GODS
“Stai attenta!” (Be careful!), Captain Tonino shouts as I dive from a boat (serendipitously named Passione) into the Tyrrhenian Sea off Sicily’s northeastern tip. I ignore his warning. The Aeolian islands, ancient playground of the gods, shimmer as irresistibly now as in times long past.
Above me Stromboli, the black-coned volcano locals call Iddu, or “Him,” puffs smoke into the sky like a man-mountain with an immense cigar. With each exhalation, pebbles skitter down its sides. Its island “wives” glimmer in the distance. Phallic “sea stacks” called faraglioni thrust upward from a turquoise sea. Aeolus, god of wind, ripples the water’s surface with the gentlest of breezes.
With no one in sight, I swim into a grotto carved in the volcano’s side and enter a deep pool with a bluish-green glow. Droplets of moisture splash gently from the craggy ceiling. Sailors call them le lacrime delle sirene, the tears of the mermaids who once tried to lure Ulysses’s men toward these perilous rocks. I follow their trail farther into the cavern.
Suddenly the first lash strikes, then a second burns across my thigh. A large medusa, the jellyfish named for the snake-haired goddess, tightens a tentacle around my waist. I struggle against its grip, but every kick intensifies the pain. Finally breaking free, I escape into the open sea. The stinging subsides within days, but the welts remain livid for weeks, a silent rebuke for incurring the wrath of the gods.
My husband the doctor, anointing my wounds with a soothing lotion, arches an eyebrow when I offer my fanciful explanation of what happened. I counter with a quote from the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “If they were great enough to create these myths, we should be great enough to believe them.”
IN SICILY IT’S EASY TO BELIEVE. Maybe that’s why Goethe loved the Mediterranean’s largest island. “To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all,” he contended, “for Sicily is the clue to everything.”
Scoured by thousands of years of wind, water, and volcanic fire, the island defies conventional descriptions. This is the topography of passion, a geographic aphrodisiac of colors, shapes, and textures. A poet called it “a sea petrified,” conceived in geologic delirium.
Some 620 miles of coastline—931 if you count its offshore islands—curve, bend, jut, rise, twist, and stretch into salt flats that change color in the setting sun. Tawny wheat fields spill into sweet-scented groves of almonds, oranges, and lemons. Sunbaked hills stretch toward craggy mountains. Towering above looms Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, molten lava frozen on its flanks, its peak as barren as a moonscape.
Everywhere on the island abandoned buildings slump, many farmhouses with empty windows, like carcasses of giant beasts with eyes gouged by vultures. When I ask what happened to the residents, Sicilians respond with a shrug. Centuries of invasion and conquest—by Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards, and French—have left their mark on the people as well as the land. I see it in their hooded eyes, arched profiles, and, above all, their passionate intensity. Time takes on new meaning here, as if three centuries of history crystallize in a single moment.
ON A RECENT TRIP to Sicily, after three flights and a voyage of twenty-eight hours, I arrive near midnight in Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, among the best preserved of ancient Greek monuments. In my room at the Villa Athena, I throw open the shutters to behold the Temple of Concordia glimmering in floodlights, all but outshining the full moon above it.
Here the settlers of Magna Grecia worshipped all-powerful Zeus, brave Apollo, and the demigod Eracle (Hercules) in temples even larger than those in their native Greece. At sunset the following day, I stroll among stately columns and mammoth altars with Lorenzo Capraro, a local guide who grew up playing among these ruins. The first citizens of the thriving town of Agrigento, he tells me, cherished one deity above all others: the earth mother Demeter, goddess of all that grows, who bequeathed on this favored land the riches of fertile fields.
Demeter doted on her daughter Persephone, whose loveliness captivated Hades, the god of the underworld. One day, as she gathered blossoms on the shore of Lake Pergusa near Enna, he lured the girl near with some blooms of rare beauty, then snatched her into his subterranean realm. Frantic with fear, Demeter searched everywhere for her child. When she learned of Persephone’s abduction, she furiously condemned Sicily to total sterility.
Without Demeter’s benevolent grace, the seasons halted, vines withered, and fields turned brown. To save the starving people, Zeus intervened and decreed that Persephone return to her mother. But since the girl had eaten some of the pomegranate seeds Hades had offered her, she would have to return to his lair for part of each year. During these bleak months, Sicily grieves with Demeter.
Every spring, the island welcomes Persephone’s return with floral fireworks. While snow still caps Mount Etna, almond trees—a mythological symbol of fertility—burst into white blossoms. Wildflowers riot along the roadways and poke vibrant petals through the ruins at Selinunte, a major port that flourished as a center of trade and art for centuries until its destruction by its Carthaginian foes in 409 BC.
I scramble with Pina, another local guide, around broken pillars and huge blocks of stone to a perch above the slate-blue sea. Pina counts herself lucky to have been among the last generation that worked the nearby fields. As a young girl, she would run across her grandparents’ farm “totally free.” Her grandfather plowed with a donkey. Her grandmother bartered her garden crops for household necessities. “We didn’t need money. We didn’t need anyone else. We had the earth.”
Even today this passion for the soil, this profound appreciation for Demeter and her gifts, endures. “I am proud to be a child of the people who came here and conquered and survived,” Pina tells me. “This sea was their sea, and it is mine. This land was their land, and it is mine. I feel their passion in my veins.”
Could she imagine ever living anywhere else?
Her dark eyes well up, and she shakes her head. We sit in silence, amid the fallen gods and their temples, listening to the wind and the waves.
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MYTH, this one born of an earthy passion of a different type.
In a cosmic coup, Cronus, son of the mythic god of the sky, castrated his despotic father. Uranus’s testicles fell into the sea, which gave birth to a fully formed woman who floated upon a wave that swept a magic mountain to the northwest tip of Sicily. In a temple atop this cliff, perched between sky and sea, the earliest tribes worshipped the Mediterranean Mother; the Greeks, Aphrodite; the Romans, Venus.
Here in the village of Erice, named for a son of the goddess of love, beautiful maidens served as her priestesses. Night and day, winter and summer, they lit torches in a high tower visible to ships from every direction. Landing in the port of Trapani, sailors clambered almost 2,500 feet up the steep mountainside to worship at the shrine—although more for passion than piety.
In a ritual delicately referred to as “embracing the goddess,” the men lay with Venus’s lissome handmaidens, who granted their lovers protection from the perils of the sea. The sailors left as their parting gifts the children who would populate the land.
On the day that I visit, Venus’s temple, wreathed in mist, seems suspended in a cloud. Although many structures have toppled, the “cleansing pool” where the priestesses bathed still stands, as does a dovecote. Every August, according to legend, the maidens would morph into doves and fly to a sister shrine in Africa for a nine-day festival, returning with red-winged Venus in the lead.
Long after the temple’s destruction, the tradition of “sacred prostitutes” providing comfort to sailors from afar continued. In time, Venus gave way to the Madonna, and a Christian church rose above the pagan temple. Devout young women still trekked to Erice, but to serve in a totally different capacity, dedicating their lives to the worship of God as cloistered nuns.
To support themselves and the orphans they sheltered, the nuns created heavenly sweets with cheese, nuts, and other local crops. A large horizontal wheel carried these mouthwatering treats from the convent’s darkness to customers, who deposited money and carried off the delicacies without ever glimpsing the nuns’ faces.
On Erice’s main street, I step into a former orphanage that now houses the bakery of Maria Grammatico, who learned how to make pasta di mandorle (an almond paste similar to marzipan) as a girl. In a Dickensian workhouse, she rose before dawn to fire the ovens, scour pots, and shell and crush almonds. With no dolls or toys, the girls worked every day except Christmas and Easter (when they attended church), their only treats an ice cream on Ferragosto (August 15) and an occasional piece of fruit. Yet out of this bleakness emerged sublime confections.
After leaving the orphanage in 1963, Maria opened a confetteria that produces sweets eagerly devoured by tourists. I buy an assortment—sospiri e desideri (sighs and desires), genovesi (known elsewhere as minni di virgini or virgins’ breasts), panzerotti (little bellies)—and sit on a bench overlooking the bay where Trapani stretches its long breakwaters into the surging sea. Surrounded by all the female spirits who lived amid the mists of Erice, I savor the timeless blend of the decadent and the divine, passion transfigured into the taste of bliss.
“ERICE MAKES MY DARKNESS TREMBLE,” said D. H. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the most erotic novel of its day, in Sicily. I can understand his reaction. However, he found his true soul mates in the Etruscans, an ancient people who settled in central Italy in the eighth century BC.
“The first time I consciously saw Etruscan things,” Lawrence wrote, “I was instinctively attracted to them. And it seems to be that way. Either there is instant sympathy or instant contempt or indifference.” I too felt an immediate affinity with the Etruscans, whom I got to know over several decades of annual stays in Etruria, the heartland of Etruscan territory that now encompasses Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio.
At their height, according to the Roman historian Livy, the loose confederacy of Etruscan city-states, with a shared language, religion, and customs, “filled the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian strait with the fame of her name.” Rather than villages of mud and straw, the Etruscans built walled towns with geometrically laid-out streets and massive gates—one with designated “in” and “out” lanes is still in use in Cortona. Among pre-Roman civilizations, only the Greeks compared in wealth, power, and influence.
Etruria’s sailors (and pirates) established dominion over the Mediterranean. Its engineers, renowned for road and bridge building, constructed ramparts so colossal that they seemed “piled by the hands of giants for god-like kings.” Praised by the Greeks as “very good-looking because they live luxuriously,” the “plump Etruscans” inspired fashions other countries envied and emulated.
Jewelers hammered gold and gems into finely wrought pendants, earrings, and bracelets. Shoemakers cobbled lace-up boots with pointed toes and sandals with buckles that clicked like castanets, which the Greeks imported by the thousands. Dentists molded ox and calf teeth into soft gold to form bridges for human mouths that set a standard unmatched until the late nineteenth century.
Yet the Etruscans’ most enduring gift was an ebullient delight in worldly pleasures. Basking amid fertile fields and vineyards, with streams that never ran dry and mountains rich in precious ores, the original bons vivants dedicated themselves to enjoying a bountiful existence in the here and now. Both sexes, lavishly dressed, reclined in pairs on elegant couches, served by slaves and entertained by musicians.
“People of dainty and expensive tastes,” as the Greek historian Dionysius recorded, they “carried about with them, besides the necessities, costly and artistic articles of all kinds designed for pleasure and luxury.”
Although they paid homage to a full pantheon of gods, the Etruscans essentially worshipped life itself. To them, Lawrence wrote, “all was alive: the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all…to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world.” In the Etruscan belief system, everyone and everything pulsed with a “great furnace-like passion that makes the worlds roll and the sun rise up and makes a man surge with procreative force.”
Rome’s “naughty neighbors to the north,” as Lawrence described them, scandalized their contemporaries. In the fourth century BC, the Greek historian Theopompus described the uninhibited Etruscans stripping off their clothes to exercise in the open air and showing “no shame to be seen committing a sexual act in public.” As he breathlessly reported to his countrymen, “they all engage in making love, some watching one another, some isolating themselves with rattan screens set up round the couches, each couple wrapped in one another—courtesans, young boys, even wives.”
WAS HE EXAGGERATING? Perhaps, although most of what we know of the Etruscans comes from paintings that portray their passion for life. In vividly colored scenes on the walls of elaborate tombs, muscular men hunt, battle, fight bulls, wrestle, throw javelins, and race four-horse chariots. Naked boys dive from high cliffs into the sea. Dancers, some also nude, with long-limbed Matisse bodies, spin in sensual abandon to the sound of lyres, zithers, and double flutes. Etruscan women, considered the most beautiful and liberated of their age, appear at their husbands’ sides at banquet tables (unthinkable for Greeks). And everywhere—at intersections, in front of houses, in temples—stand phalluses, some huge inscribed pillars, some smaller carved stones.
My favorite Etruscans, a man and a woman, recline in the form of a terra-cotta sarcophagus from the sixth century BC in the Villa Giulia, the National Etruscan Museum in Rome. With almond eyes, a narrow face, neatly trimmed beard, long braided locks, and powerful shoulders, he lies casually, naked to the waist, his arm around her shoulder. She, dressed in a flowing gown, with tiny feet tucked into soft slippers with pointed toes, pours perfume—a ritual act—into his hands. I recognize the languorous look on their faces: utter postcoital contentment.
The future the Etruscans envisioned after death was neither an ecstatic heaven nor a fearsome hell, but a continuation of their sensual life on earth, as if the party simply resumed on the other side. To prepare, they stocked their tombs with jewelry, cosmetics, and elegant robes. This benevolent vision of eternity inspired them to accept all that life offered with unabashed exuberance.
Over time the Etruscans lost this zest. Tombs from the second and third centuries BC depict somber faces and stiff bodies lacking the natural grace of earlier eras. D. H. Lawrence blamed the Romans, who cannibalized Etruscan culture and claimed their engineering and artistic feats as their own.
“Italy today is far more Etruscan in its pulse, than Roman: and will always be so,” he wrote in Sketches of Etruscan Places. “The Etruscan element is like the grass of the field and the sprouting of corn, in Italy: it will always be so.”
As their society merged with that of the Romans, Etruscans would drain the marshes along the Tiber, lay out the first Forum, erect the first temples, create the first racecourse, teach everything from engineering to augury, and transform Rome from an assemblage of huts to a city of wood and brick. Above all else, the Etruscan spirit, hardened in battle, soothed by beauty, and energized by celebration, would endure.
“The Etruscans planted the seeds for all the passions we think of as Italian: music, food, wine, design, beautiful clothes, jewelry,” says the archaeologist Lisa Pieraccini, director of the M. Del Chiaro Center for Ancient Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “The Romans were able to achieve all that they did because they were standing on the shoulders of the Etruscans.”
The ancient Romans would never have agreed. They believed with absolute certainty that the gods themselves had destined them for greatness.
DEEP IN MYTHOLOGICAL TIME, Venus (Aphrodite in the Greek pantheon), goddess of love and beauty, spied a handsome prince in the vicinity of Troy. Dressed as an earthly princess, she seduced him and then slipped away. Nine months later Venus presented the Trojan prince with the son they had conceived.
Revealing her true identity, Venus made her lover pledge to keep their secret. (He didn’t, and as punishment, her father hobbled him with the strike of a lightning bolt.) She also predicted that their love child, whom she named Aeneas, would sire a race that would someday rule the world.
In the twelfth century BC, after a ten-year siege, Troy fell to the Greeks, who had deployed their infamous “Trojan horse,” a mammoth hollow structure with soldiers hidden inside. As the city burned, Aeneas escaped with his lame father on his back and his young son at his side. Despite detours and dalliances (including a torrid but doomed affair with Carthage’s queen Dido), Aeneas made his way to central Italy.
The tribal king of the Latins welcomed Aeneas, who asked to marry his daughter, already betrothed to a local general. Aeneas and his rival squared off, and Venus’s son won the princess’s hand. In time, Aeneas ascended to the throne of the kingdom of Alba Longa on the Tiber. The crown passed through eight generations until a jealous younger brother overthrew his reigning sibling. To block any rivals, he killed his nephews and confined his niece Rhea Silvia in a temple to the goddess Vesta, where a vow of chastity would prevent her from conceiving an heir.
Mars, the lusty god of war, blithely upended this plan. On a sunny day, he caught a glimpse of the beguiling virgin, who, resting on the banks of a stream, had “opened her bosom to catch of the breeze.” Overcome with desire, Mars swooped from the heavens and “left her rich with twins.”
When Rhea Silvia gave birth to two boys of uncommon beauty and size, the angry monarch ordered them drowned. But a slave, taking pity on the infants, placed them in a basket in the Tiber that washed ashore at the foot of what is now the Palatine Hill. There they were rescued by a lupa—probably not the she-wolf of legend but a woman known by a nickname given prostitutes because, like wolves, their lovemaking “knew no law.” She brought them to the cave of a kindly shepherd, where they grew to manhood. Once they learned their true origins, Romulus and Remus overthrew the wicked usurper who had stolen their grandfather’s throne.
The twins decided to build a new kingdom of their own on the Tiber, but quarreled over its location. They called for augurs, an Etruscan tradition, to settle their dispute. When six birds appeared above Remus on the Aventine, the hill he preferred, he seemed to be the winner. But then a dozen birds circled over Romulus on the Palatine, clearly favoring him and his chosen site.
Romulus began marking the perimeter of his città quadrata (squared city). Taunting his brother, Remus jumped across the boundary. His outraged twin killed him.
“This,” Romulus swore, “will be the fate of any who dare to violate this land.” And so, on a date fixed in history as April 21, 753 BC, Rome—conceived in rape and baptized in blood—was born.
ALTHOUGH MUCH OF ROME’S “foundation story,” as historians categorize it, may be myth, we know that its first inhabitants honored their divine forefathers. And we know, too, that its ancient site existed—thanks in large part to more than thirty years of research by the archaeologist Clementina Panella at Sapienza University of Rome (La Sapienza to Italians). Inch by painstakingly excavated inch, her team burrowed deep below ground level to uncover what she calls “the first page in this amazing history of humanity.”
Above all else, Panella explains when I visit her laboratory, Rome began as a place for the gods, created by Romulus or “the figure or figures he represents” as a temple. The land of his squared city was considered too sacred ever to be violated by battle. Warriors had to lay down their weapons before entering this hallowed zone.
In one corner of the original city, Panella’s team uncovered a monumental sanctuary, the Curiae Veteres. Here representatives of every district of Rome, regardless of class or status, gathered to worship, witness ritual sacrifices, and share meals together, as testified by huge mounds of discarded animal bones. This sacred space remained in use for 1,300 years—perhaps, Panella speculates, longer than any other on the planet.
Today thousands of fragments from these distant days fill floor-to-ceiling shelves in the archaeology department at La Sapienza: Bits of black-glazed Etruscan pottery. A carefully reconstructed pitcher. The head of an emperor, sliced from a statue and used as filler for the foundation of his successor’s palace. (The torsos were recycled, with a bust of the new leader cemented on top.)
One artifact in particular intrigues me: an urn about a foot high from the fifth century BC that held the remains of an infant who had died at or shortly after birth. Although Romans routinely exposed newborns who were feeble, defective, or simply unwanted to the elements, this baby was gently wrapped in a cover of sorts and buried under the protective eave of a home.
The researcher who unwraps it for me sighs. “Povero bambino!” (Poor baby!) We pause for a moment in silence, touched by the timeless anguish of a child’s loss, still fresh after 2,500 years.
This sense of connection explains why the stories of ancient Rome remain more compelling than any we might invent. Although they loom as larger-than-life historical figures, the Romans whose names echo through the ages—Caesar, Mark Antony, Augustus—survive in Italians’ imaginations as flesh-and-blood members of their family tree.
THE GODS’ FIRST GIFT TO ROME was survival against overwhelming odds. Surrounded by hostile tribes, the new city had no natural resources, no fertile fields, no trained military, no institutions for government or commerce. Its swampy location on the Tiber posed a constant risk of floods and malaria. To populate his city, Romulus welcomed local shepherds and offered sanctuary to exiles, runaway slaves, debtors, thieves, traitors, bandits, even murderers—“the dregs,” as a classics professor succinctly described them to me. And yet they would thrive.
Gathering around a deep pit, each of Romulus’s renegades threw in a handful of soil or coins from his homeland, a mingling of their different pasts with their shared future. As the Greek biographer Plutarch recounts, they also tossed in tokens “of all things deemed good according to custom and necessary for human life according to nature.” Like seeds, these symbols flowered into the passions that would prove as eternal as the city they founded.
To ensure its future, Rome’s first citizens—poor, ragged, hardened by prison, slavery, or years on the run—needed children, and the mothers to bear them. But when Romulus tried to arrange marriages, the leaders of nearby towns scoffed at the notion of marrying their daughters to such riffraff. Some suggested that Rome offer asylum to female fugitives, the only fitting mates for its unsuitable suitors.
Romulus devised an alternative strategy: He invited the local tribes to his new city for a festival. Fathers and brothers, most from the nearby town of Sabina, turned over their weapons and relaxed with their families to enjoy the feast. Then Romulus’s men swooped in and carried off the young female guests. Some accounts say thirty teenage virgins were taken; other estimates run as high as six hundred.
Rome’s leader justified the kidnapping as motivated by l’ardore della passione (the ardor of passion) and assured the terrified girls that they would be treated with respect. As Roman wives, they would do no domestic labor other than spinning; slaves and servants would handle all other chores. No one could speak indecent words in their presence. No man could appear naked before them—or he would risk being punished as severely as a murderer. Their children would wear distinctive jewels and robes and share in a great destiny.
“We do not ask only for your bodies,” Romulus emphasized. “We want your hearts as well.”
The hearts of the girls’ outraged relatives burned for vengeance. Their opportunity came when Tarpeia, the daughter of the commander of the Roman garrison, ventured outside the city walls to fetch fresh water for a sacred ritual. Some flirtatious Sabines convinced her to help them enter Rome in return for the wrist-to-elbow gold bracelets they wore on their shield arms.
As soon as they burst through the gates, the Sabines crushed Tarpeia with their shields—fitting punishment for a traitor, they declared. (The cliff where she died became known as the Tarpeian Rock. Traitors were hurled to their deaths from its height for centuries after.)
Although the Sabines had the initial advantage of surprise, the Romans quickly armed themselves. As the fighting intensified, the Sabine women—sobbing and shrieking—rushed from their homes, not to escape, but to throw themselves into the fray. Pushing between combatants, they implored their fathers not to kill their husbands and their husbands not to kill their fathers.
“We would rather die ourselves,” they cried, “than live without either of you, as widows or as orphans.”
“Silence fell,” reported the historian Livy. “Not a man moved. A moment later Romulus and the Sabine commander stepped forward to make peace.”
The two men shared power until the Sabine king died in a riot in a nearby town several years later. Romulus reigned as Rome’s king for more than three decades. His successors would rule a city, then a peninsula, then an empire. Its citizens would shape the building blocks of Western civilization. Its government would survive longer than any in history.
Almost three millennia after Rome’s founding, its legacy lives on—in laws rooted in its statutes, cities based on its blueprints, churches and capitols crowned by its cupolas, the “Romance” languages spoken by millions around the world. Although Rome may have been built to honor its gods, la passione italiana would transform its citizens and create a city all of humanity can claim as our home.