In 1954, as Palermo raced towards a self-destructive modernity, a man from another era sat at his desk in Via Butera crafting, in miniscule handwriting, his only significant contribution to the world of literature. The man in question favoured a thin moustache, emulating that of his ancestors. His habitual attire was a woollen suit, often worn with a waistcoat despite the island’s punishing heat. The final flourish would be either a patterned bow tie or a simple tie but rarely an open-necked shirt. This disciplined apparel reflected both his aristocratic origins and his resolutely old-fashioned outlook.
We are, of course, referring to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), author of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). Lampedusa was the last in a long family line of Sicilian nobles whose ancestry can with certainty be traced back to twelfth-century Tuscany and perhaps even further to the Imperial Guard of Tiberius. Like so many of his class, Lampedusa did not have to earn a living but was able to follow his passions in life. A man of few words, painfully shy and content in the company of selected close friends, he preferred to immerse himself in literature. In the hours of his everyday solitude, he would read avidly, eventually deciding to impart some of his knowledge to those in his intimate literary circle including Francesco Orlando, who would later become a critic and essayist and Gioacchino Lanza, the young cousin he would eventually adopt as his son.
It was a trip to San Pellegrino Terme in northern Italy during the spring of 1954 that finally kick-started Lampedusa’s latent desire to write for public consumption. His cousin, the poet Lucio Piccolo, had been invited to San Pellegrino for a literary conference and took Lampedusa along for moral support. Piccolo was presented as a protégé of the poet and writer Eugenio Montale despite the fact that he was of a similar age. Lampedusa, realising that his cousin could make an impact irrespective of his advancing years, decided to put pen to paper himself.
The process of completing The Leopard was rather laboured. David Gilmour, in his biography The Last Leopard, points out that Lampedusa was as used to writing in French as he was in Italian. When his Latvian wife, Licy, was on one of her frequent visits to the Baltic coast, he would always write to her in French, their shared language of choice. As Gilmour notes, the fact he had to focus intently when writing in Italian may account for the carefully crafted phraseology and imagery present in the book. The majority of the text was either written at home in Via Butera or at the Caffè Mazzara off Via Ruggiero Settimo, a rather odd choice, given the plain concrete exterior of the building. Sadly, the Mazzara has recently closed its doors forever.
Two years later, at the start of 1956, Lampedusa was still struggling with his novel. The fifty-nine-year-old aristocrat had sidelined the text by dabbling with an autobiography which he was never to finish but, realising the importance of his Leopard, he once again refocussed and completed the work in March of that year. It was Francesco Orlando who turned Giuseppe’s tightly-written lines into a typescript fit for submission to a publisher. Italy was then in the grip of neo-realism, a genre epitomised by Vittorio De Sica’s film Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves), in which an impoverished father is forced to steal in an attempt to feed his family. The gap between Lampedusa’s historical novel and the prevailing climate seemed unbridgeable.
After a rejection from the leading publishing house, Mondadori, Giuseppe added two more chapters but was still unable to persuade them to take on the text. Further rejections followed from Flaccovio and Einaudi before a revised typescript was accepted by Feltrinelli. Sadly, Lampedusa did not live to see the publication of his novel or, indeed, to hear of its acceptance. Feltrinelli’s editorial director Giorgio Bassani, himself famous for his Ferrara novels, was the book’s champion and wrote the preface to the original edition. By 1959 The Leopard had achieved the highest acclaim by being awarded the prestigious Strega Prize.
At the heart of the novel is the Prince of Salina, a proud but jaded and time-worn aristocrat. Often referred to as Don Fabrizio, the character is based on Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, although many acquainted with the author have seen Lampedusa’s own resemblance to the Prince. The book is set during the Risorgimento at a time when the island’s nobility have to choose between the Bourbon status quo and Garibaldi’s new horizons. Prince Salina represents the tradition and morality of a fast-receding era, whereas his nephew Tancredi is excited by the opportunity that change could bring. However, despite the fact that these two family members are pulling in opposite directions, they both recognise the need for continuity if not the means of achieving it. This is crystallised in Tancredi’s famous assertion that everything will have to change in order for it to stay the same.
Tancredi then falls for the charms of the beautiful Angelica, whose father is the proto-mafioso, Don Calogero. Forced to receive the arriviste interloper at his noble home, Donnafugata, Prince Salina is both horrified and amused when Calogero arrives for dinner dressed in a totally inappropriate frock coat. He may be ignorant of etiquette, but Calogero nevertheless has acquired much wealth through his money-lending enterprises, while his future son-in-law has the manners and lineage only dreamt of by a man who has dragged himself up from peasant stock. The joining of the two families through marriage is finally agreed upon.
Whilst at the summer residence of Donnafugata, Prince Salina meets Chevalley di Monterzuolo, a representative from the new government who has been sent to persuade the Prince to join its ranks. Their conversation represents Lampedusa’s most pessimistic view of his fellow Sicilians. As Chevalley flatters the aristocrat, Salina responds with a distinct lack of enthusiasm seemingly born from centuries of inertia. He claims that the Sicilian soul has seen great civilisations come and go whilst the island remains a colony, thus leading to a form of utter exhaustion — an exhaustion reflected in the Prince’s subsequent death in Palermo’s Hotel Trinacria.
The book does not end with its chief protagonist’s demise, but continues to tell its readers the fate of the remaining characters, namely Concetta, Carolina and Caterina, Prince Salina’s daughters. All three have inherited the religious gene so present in both the fictional Salina family and Lampedusa’s own ancestry. They meet with Angelica who recounts the forty years she spent living with Tancredi, whose noble ways had evidently left a mark on his wife’s behaviour and interests. The reminiscences of the aged women and their guest, Senator Tassoni, bring a melancholic close to the story as the dynasty fades into bitter-sweet memory.
One of those who voted for the book to receive the Strega Prize was the aristocrat and film director Luchino Visconti (1906–76). According to screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Visconti had voted for Lampedusa rather than for his friend Pasolini. In 1960, the director attended a preview of a television documentary entitled La Sicilia del Gattopardo, shot on location in Sicily, and the seed was sown to make a film version of the book. In May 1962 the actor Burt Lancaster (1913–94) arrived at The Palms days before he was due to start filming the part of Prince Salina. Lancaster had been chosen to play the leading role despite the fact that he did not speak Italian, however the American had been taking matters in earnest, travelling with a copy of the book and even beginning to learn the language.
On the surface, Lancaster’s arrival would appear to be the spark that ignited the keenly anticipated project. In fact, the filming had already started with the shooting of battle sequences designed to portray Garibaldi’s Redshirts in the streets of Palermo. As is the case on so many film sets, the monumental moments on screen had their subtle undertow off screen. Alberto Anile and M. Gabriella Giannice detail the machinations behind the scenes in their book, Operazione Gattopardo. Visconti had in fact told Lancaster to remain in Rome until he was needed, thus allowing the director to concentrate on the street scenes.
Visconti was determined to use authentic locations in situ. For the battle, he set up his film crew in front of the Palazzo Sclafani by Piazza San Giovanni Decollato near to the archway over Via Biscottari. Bystanders were cordoned off from the action by the local police and the streets were strewn with the dust that would have covered nineteenth-century Palermo. The director went out of his way to inform journalists that the Palermitani had been very welcoming — something that could not be said of the local government in the town of Palma di Montechiaro on the south coast. Despite being a key Lampedusan location, the commune sent the producer and director a telegram distinctly lacking in hospitality. There were rumblings of mafia discontent.
Visconti’s decision to delay Lancaster’s arrival at The Palms may have had more than just logistics at its core. From the very beginning he had been searching in a very different direction for his leading man. He had initially looked towards Russian cinema, specifically the actor Nikolay Cherkasov, who had been one of Sergei Eisenstein’s favourites. However a recent photo sent from the Russian Embassy persuaded Visconti to drop the idea, given Cherkasov’s advancing years and slight appearance. Italian names such as Turi Ferro and Marcello Mastroianni were also considered as was Lawrence Olivier. Anile and Giannice even suggest that Olivier was actually offered the part but refused either due to health or family reasons.
The push for an American star came from the producer Goffredo Lombardo who was aware that the casting would bring in much-needed funding. Visconti’s reaction to the suggestion of Lancaster was one of horror, believing that the actor was merely a cowboy. Names such as Marlon Brandon or Anthony Quinn were hastily suggested as alternatives who acted outside the strict confines of genre cinema, but Lombardo was fixed on his original choice. It was the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg that finally persuaded Visconti of Lancaster’s quality as a serious actor, capable of lending subtlety to the role of Prince Salina. Even so, Visconti was unaware of the manoeuvres of those behind the funding who went on a mission to woo the American actor. Although Visconti accepted Lancaster, he never forgot the way in which he had been manipulated to make the choice.
Whilst Lancaster was kicking his heels in Rome, he was not immune to the attentions of the paparazzi. The influx of American and English actors in the city had led to even more opportunistic photographers haunting the hot spots, especially Via Veneto where the stars would relax, drink and party. One night in 1958 the English actor Anthony Steel emerged from a nightclub with his wife, Anita Ekberg. Shawn Levy in Dolce Vita Confidential tells us that the couple were being watched by one of the leading photographers of the day, Tazio Secchiaroli, who managed to fire off a couple of quick snaps before Steel’s explosive and drunken temper swung into action. Waving his arms wildly and intent on attacking Secchiaroli, Steel missed his step, staggered and gave up the pursuit — too worse for wear to cause any serious damage.
When Burt Lancaster was snapped by Umberto Spagna emerging from a restaurant in Piazza Navona with the young actress, Béatrice Altariba, the paparazzo was not as fortunate as Secchiaroli. The sturdily-built Lancaster kicked Spagna in the lower abdomen with such force that the photographer was hospitalised for a short while. Without today’s twenty-four-hour social media, the pair were able to reach a supposedly amicable agreement that hushed up the incident. It was a somewhat tetchy actor who arrived in Palermo, already suspecting that Visconti would gain the upper hand during filming and that the interpretation of Prince Salina would be the director’s and not his.
One of the most unlikely meetings during Lancaster’s stay in Sicily was between the actor and that permanent resident of The Palms, Baron Di Stefano. Philippe Fusaro in Palermo solo imagines the actor sharing Di Stefano’s choice of fish at the aristocrat’s habitual table whilst they are joined by a Frenchman whose name the Baron is unable to recall, presumably Alain Delon who played Tancredi. Fusaro visualises an impressed Di Stefano recalling the fine and intelligent words of Signor Lancaster.
This seemingly far-fetched evocation is based on fact. Giuseppe Di Stefano did eat with Burt Lancaster, although we have not been able to establish whether they were joined by Delon or, indeed, any other members of the cast. However, there is one element in the description of the meal as it appears in Palermo solo that teeters on the brink of impossibility, namely that Di Stefano was impressed with the refined and sage words of the American actor. This completely ignores the fact that the Baron had Sicilian as his first language and Italian as his second, which was frequently punctuated with Sicilianisms. There is no evidence that he spoke English. We already know that Lancaster was a beginner in Italian and, therefore, the conversation would not have been able to reach the heights of intellectual thought, let alone move beyond polite introduction, unless an interpreter had been present.
Much to the annoyance of Visconti, Lancaster had insisted that his scenes on set be directed and shot in English. The two final versions of the film have Lancaster’s voice in English rendition for the release that was otherwise dubbed from Italian for the American audience, and his voice dubbed into Italian by Corrado Gaipa for the rest of the world. The continuing tensions on set led to the establishment of opposing factions, with Delon and the majority of the Italian cast in Visconti’s camp and Lancaster with his small American contingent in the other; this included his personal make-up artist who was the only person he would allow to act as his stylist on set.
The scene that pushed everyone to the limit was the memorable ballroom sequence that took place in Palermo’s Palazzo Gangi, just to the east of Via Roma. Over thirty-six consecutive nights, the crew grappled with the complications of filming. The number of costumes required spiralled into the hundreds, furniture was loaned by Lampedusa’s adopted son Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, and extras milled about in all directions. Visconti had chosen the searing heat of August for this enterprise with unsurprising consequences, especially as the temperatures remained at a torrid thirty-five degrees even during the night-time filming. Anile and Giannice claim that a Red Cross van was permanently parked outside the Gangi for the duration, attending to cast members who had fainted as well as those suffering from other heat-related complaints.
Visconti also found the lighting situation difficult, particularly due to the many candles, candelabras and chandeliers required for realism. It appears that eliminating studio lights from the field of view became a problem, adding to the issues of heat and the need for re-shooting. Things came to a head when Lancaster, suffering from a swollen knee, had to perform a dance scene with Claudia Cardinale who was playing the part of Tancredi’s fiancée. Cardinale recalls Visconti shouting at Lancaster to stop whining and suffer in silence, blaming the actor for insisting that he go for an early morning run each day to perpetuate the illusion that he was still young. In Operazione Gattopardo, the authors go further with Visconti’s insult and quote the production manager, Pietro Notarianni, as remembering the director, in front of all the cast, alluding to the fact that Lancaster was no Mittel-European prince but a mere cowboy.
Apparently, Lancaster drew himself up to his full height and slowly approached the director who told Notarianni to remain by his side, despite the fact that he wished to leave them to their argument. A torrent of English abuse came from the star’s lips whilst Visconti simply sat without saying a word. The final slur at the end of this litany was that Visconti lacked the appropriate manners. This accusation hit home and the director had to admit that he had overstepped the mark on this occasion. The irritability amongst the two camps brought on by heat and differences of opinion was bound to erupt into a full-blown argument of this nature. Tensions, having been released, created a rapprochement between Lancaster and Visconti culminating in a respectful concern for each other’s opinions and an enduring friendship.
With the arrival of his family, Lancaster decided to move away from The Palms and hire a residence known as the Villa Scalea ai Colli on the way to Mondello. His wife and five children moved in with him and they also hired a yacht for excursions between Mondello, Addaura and Palermo. In this sense he was emulating Visconti who had a dislike of hotels and had already installed himself in a converted castle along with a coterie of friends and his personal staff. In casting around for a model on which to base his interpretation of Prince Salina, Lancaster needed to look no further than the director himself.
Visconti represented many of the contradictions present in Italian society at the time. Formally, he was known as the Count of Lonate Pozzolo, a settlement in the province of Varese to the north of the region of Lombardy. He was born in Milan, one of seven children whose father bore the rather grandiose title of Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, Duke of Grazzano Visconti and Count of Lonate Pozzolo. The young Luchino’s privileged upbringing allowed him to study the cello and mix with the highest achievers in the worlds of art and theatre.
His film career started in 1935 when he worked as an assistant director on Jean Renoir’s Toni. It was the 1948 film La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) that launched him as an innovative director in his own right. The film, using only amateur actors from the vicinity of Aci Trezza on Sicily’s east coast, is loosely based on Giovanni Verga’s classic novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree). It tells of the exploitation of a working-class fishing family who mortgaged their house in order to try and circumvent the low prices of wholesalers who controlled the market. When the family boat is lost at sea, their fortunes go from bad to worse. We can see from the subject matter that despite his wealthy background Visconti had a social conscience.
During World War II Visconti joined the Italian Communist Party. Although he may not have been a full-blown Marxist by conviction, he was certainly a fellow traveller. It is in this context that critics were expecting his version of The Leopard to be a left-wing response to what was generally perceived as a novel written from a right-wing perspective. The Spanish commentator and writer Luis Antonio de Villena believes that the film has the virtue of reflecting both the contemporary situation and the past in which it was set, thereby capturing the timeless quality of high art.
For many in the 1960s, The Leopard was a film that represented the inescapable decay of history’s ruling classes, the morally bankrupt aristocracy of yesteryear; a message that could also be applied to the increasingly corrupt Christian Democrat politicians of the day who were ripe for a challenge from the proletariat and students with vivid new ideas — witness the events of 1968. Significantly, Visconti chose to remove the death of Prince Salina and the subsequent chapter detailing the fate of his three daughters. Although the ending of the text has a melancholic poignancy, particularly with regard to Concetta’s realisation that Tancredi had always loved her, it also prolongs the story beyond the life of the Prince and provides the glimpse of a possible alternative history.
The left-wing critic Antonello Trombadori felt that the removal of Prince Salina’s death and the subsequent chapter were significant in refocusing the film, thereby rendering it both faithful to the book yet enabling it to be a barbed comment on the state of political transformation. De Villena, in El Gatopardo: La transformación y el abismo (The Leopard: Transformation and the Abyss), is sure that Lampedusa thought the old ruling class would be a better prospect than the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie that was bound to replace it, even though it was significantly flawed.
The nature of change is at the heart of both the book and the film. Does Sicily want to be the kind of society where change is superficial, where aristocrats can duel in the foyer of The Palms and suffer few consequences? Or does it want change to come at the deepest level, where the rules apply to everyone, irrespective of notable position or underworld connection? If Lampedusa’s vision was worn down by Salina’s centuries of exhaustion, then Visconti’s supposed view of the Marxist march towards the end of history could be seen as equally challenging but also defective. Modern Sicily has had to adapt, not only to a rapidly changing geo-political world, but also to internal circumstances only partially understood, if not wholly predicted, by both author and director.
That is not to say that Lampedusa’s vision was one of simple despondent disillusion, disappointment solved only by death. In his words you can occasionally read a cri de coeur — a call to slough the dust of centuries which has become a second skin for some Sicilians of Prince Salina’s breed. The island’s inaction is reflected in the author’s own life. Apart from his service in World War I, much of Lampedusa’s time was spent as a reclusive dilettante, dabbling at the edges of both thought and life. It was only when he found his literary voice that all those years of close observation came tumbling forth in a mixture of cynicism and frustration.
Irrespective of political viewpoint, the novel and the film manage to convey an island rich in sensory experience. The language of the novel is brimming with beautifully crafted imagery that enables us to feel the heat of an intense summer or imagine the robust, concentrated flavours of Prince Salina’s table. Likewise, one of Visconti’s most memorable and evocative scenes concerns the family’s arrival at their country seat of Donnafugata after a long hot journey by carriage. The Salinas, along with Tancredi, repair to the Chiesa Madre to hear a Te Deum. The camera pans along the carved choir stalls where the family are seated, still wearing their travelling attire which is noticeably covered in a film of fine sand and dirt. The message is at once both subtle and blatant — they are consigned to the past, no longer useful or relevant but preserved in a tableau as a memento mori. The warning again focuses on change and the dangers of stasis, a paralysis that could lead the family to a form of mummification, reminiscent of the embalmed corpses in Palermo’s Capuchin Catacombs, caught forever in their dusty finery.
One aspect of modern Sicily’s obsession with The Leopard that would have surprised Visconti and Lampedusa is the commercialisation which surrounds the film and book. To the twenty-first-century reader, this is perhaps less surprising, as any successful entity inevitably develops a commercial persona. There are tours in the footsteps of Lampedusa’s Prince Salina and a Parco Letterario del Gattopardo (a literary foundation) is located in the reconstructed ruins of the real Donnafugata at Santa Margherita di Belìce. There is also the Parco Culturale del Gattopardo — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, run by Sicilia Letteraria in Palermo, where tourists can relive scenes from the film and discover all the locations associated with the author of the book. We realise, of course, that with this text and our previous work on literary Sicily, we are but one more contributor to a story passing into legend.
The barman of The Palms, Toti Librizzi, is the man who recalled Burt Lancaster’s meeting with Baron Di Stefano and he is also the person responsible for creating the now-famous Gattopardo cocktail which could once be ordered in the hotel’s bar of the same name. Sadly, it will no longer be mixed by Toti who has retired to his country house. The eponymous drink, a heady brew, consists of one part Hennessy cognac, two parts Grand Marnier, four parts fresh orange juice and three parts strawberry juice. The mixture is tipped into an ice-filled glass, topped with an orange segment and completed with a squeeze of lemon juice. Clearly, Lampedusa would never have tried the cocktail as it was invented after his death, but we suspect it may not have been to his taste. Librizzi though recalls staff mentioning that Lampedusa would occasionally stop by for a drink at the bar which, unbeknownst to him, would in future bear the name of his most famous character.
It is thanks to Toti Librizzi that the wider public know of the celebrated imbibers who took a drink or two at the hotel’s bar. In Mirto, near Capo d’Orlando on Sicily’s north coast, Toti has created the Casa museo della memoria, a small museum containing his collection of memorabilia from his time at The Palms. The museum is managed by the cultural association La Casa di Colapesce — named after the mythical Sicilian boy diver who prevents the island from sinking by holding it up from under the sea. Librizzi kept a book that he would ask his illustrious customers to illustrate and sign, and these autographs and doodles form a significant part of his display, together with photographs and other keepsakes from his years as a barman, including objects that once belonged to the famous clientele of the hotel.
The respected Sicilian writer Vincenzo Consolo was present at the association’s inauguration and his warm words are immortalised on its website. Consolo, in admiration of Librizzi’s wisdom and intelligence, calls his autograph collection a ‘golden book’ composed of marks made by a diverse range of characters who have set foot in the hotel and whose paths may or may not have crossed on the way to order a drink at the bar. He refers to the hotel as a ‘Calvinian castle’ — a direct reference to Italo Calvino’s work The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati), a novel that tells its story of fateful coincidence and predestination through the reading of tarot cards.
By listing some of the hotel’s most famous guests, Consolo conjures the establishment’s historic quality and laments the inability of the walls to speak. From painters, musicians, writers and poets to actors, singers, dancers, directors, scientists and politicians, all have left their designs in Librizzi’s golden book. Leafing through the entries, Consolo feels that any reader would want to ‘ask questions, form hypotheses and speculate: what motivated these characters to come to Palermo; which of them had the occasion to meet and what events arose from those meetings?’ He goes on to suggest that ‘a novel could then be written; the fascinating story of Palermo’s Palms Hotel’. Consolo, who died in 2012, was sadly never to write such a book, but the journalist Melinda Zacco has attempted just such a project with her novel Il mondo in un cassetto al Grand Hotel delle Palme (The Grand Hotel delle Palme: The World in a Drawer). Whatever the merits of the text, Zacco is without Consolo’s considerable reputation and therefore the work has gone largely unnoticed.
No speculation is required in order to understand why the opera diva Maria Callas (1923–77) visited Palermo and stayed at The Palms. The Teatro Massimo was, by the 1950s, firmly fixed on the itinerary of touring performers. In 1951, Callas was about to perform Bellini’s opera, Norma, at the Massimo in Palermo on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s birth. Before having the chance to unpack, she received an urgent call from Antonio Ghiringhelli, the manager of La Scala. He wanted her to drop everything and rush back to Milan so she could take over the role of Aida in the opera of the same name in place of the indisposed Renata Tebaldi. The insulted Callas had already deputised in the previous year and refused point blank in the hope that Ghiringhelli would eventually turn to her as the first choice for a lead role. Staying in Palermo to honour her contract was a wise decision as those who saw her performance remember it to this day.
Doubtless, it was her acclaim that prompted Baron Di Stefano to invite Callas to dine with him. It was far from the last time that the diva would sing at the Teatro Massimo or visit The Palms. Festivities shared with Di Stefano did not help the singer’s battle with her portly figure. During the 1950s, Callas realised that the increasing pounds were affecting her voice and health in general. She is reported as saying that movement on stage was becoming difficult, causing tiredness and excessive perspiration. By the mid-1950s she had managed to lose an astonishing amount of weight, an achievement that led reporters and the paparazzi to hound the now svelte Greek diva. Scurrilous reports attributed her dramatic change in figure to anything from a particular type of pasta to a tapeworm. The real secret was nothing more than a sensible diet of healthy food.
It is true to say, however, that scandal often dogged Callas’ career. After filing a lawsuit against the pasta company that had taken the credit for her weight loss, she was on the receiving end of another lawsuit filed in 1955 by a certain Eddy Bagarozy who claimed to be her agent. The same year, Time magazine ran a controversial cover story which portrayed the singer’s relationship with her mother as problematic, hinting that this was behind her temperamental behaviour. Maria never really forgave her mother for condemning her looks and forcing her to give up a normal childhood in order to sing and make money for the family.
Just as Callas was establishing her opera career, a more self-effacing personality was also reaching the heights in her chosen field, ballet. Carla Fracci (b. 1936) was another celebrity to dine at the table of the hotel’s now permanently resident aristocrat. Fracci was born in Milan and studied dance at La Scala’s school of ballet. From 1958 onwards, she performed as a prima ballerina and danced in various companies worldwide, partnering the likes of Rudolf Nureyev, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Erik Bruhn with whom she filmed a version of Adolphe Adam’s Giselle in 1969. The poet Eugenio Montale dedicated a poem to Fracci called ‘La danzatrice stanca’ (‘The Tired Dancer’), which he wrote during her pregnancy in 1969, lamenting her absence from the stage and comparing a ballet without her to a ‘deathly pageant’.
Another frequenter of The Palms was an actor who made a career from the dark demands of death, namely Christopher Lee (1922–2015), the quintessential portrayer of the aristocratic vampire, Dracula. Lee made an entry in Librizzi’s volume and would have had much to chat about with the genial barman. The subjects covered must have veered away from the fictitious realms of the undead to the far more serious topic of war, given Lee’s military connection with the island. Behind the actor’s urbane mask lay a fascinating backstory that included a significant Sicilian element. Lee, whose full name was Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, was born to an English father and a mother with a noteworthy Italian lineage. Countess Estelle Marie Carandini di Sarzano could trace her ancestors all the way back to Charlemagne via Italian political refugees and opera singers.
Before he could be conscripted without a choice of service, Lee made the decision in 1941 to join the British Royal Air Force. However, whilst training in Southern Africa he experienced headaches which were a result of a failed optic nerve, putting an end to his flying career before it had even started. Extremely disappointed, he searched for an alternative meaningful role and applied to join RAF Intelligence. By May 1943 he was in the city of Zuwarah, Libya, awaiting the invasion of Sicily. Lee was to see action on the beaches of Pachino, in the island’s south-east corner, where the majority of British troops landed. As the forces made their way along Sicily’s Ionian coast, the future actor and his squadron made a permanent base at Agnone Bagni.
A recurring bout of malaria took Lee away from his unit and he was flown back to Carthage for treatment in a field hospital. On his return to the squadron, he found his men on the brink of mutiny, frustrated by a lack of mail and alcohol but, most importantly, information. Like any intelligence officer worth his salt, Lee had kept up to speed with the conflict’s most significant developments, especially those on the eastern front. In later interviews, he recalled the moment when he bombarded those under his command with a relentless stream of facts and figures to the extent that he was sure they must have regretted asking him in the first place.
In another interview with the Irish television presenter Terry Wogan, Lee was asked directly if he had been a spy during the war. Drawing himself up to his full height of over six foot five inches, he threw the question back at Wogan by suggesting that he would not have exactly blended into the background, although his knowledge of French and Italian would undoubtedly have been an asset. Lee was happy to talk about the generalities of his war experience but, like so many veterans, he rarely discussed the minutiae of the horrors he had witnessed. The invasion of Italy was, at times, a brutal campaign and Lee witnessed much suffering that stayed with him forever.
A small glimpse into the experiences he had compartmentalised, out of necessity, can be seen from an incident on the set of the Lord of the Rings. Lee was playing the role of the wizard, Saruman, who was to be stabbed in the back by Grima Wormtongue. The director, Peter Jackson, asked Lee to let out a scream as the knife plunged between his shoulder blades. Calmly, the aging actor turned to Jackson and informed him that he had witnessed men being stabbed in such a manner and that none of them had ever screamed; they had merely issued a biological sigh as the air left their lungs. The scene never appeared in the version released for the cinema but can be found in the extended trilogy on DVD.
Lee might never have become an actor if it had not been for a post-war encounter with one of his Italian relatives. Nicolò Carandini, his cousin and a former minister in Bonomi’s anti-Fascist government, had been appointed as Italian Ambassador to Britain. During a lunchtime chat, Lee was weighing up his future career options and describing his wartime experiences when Carandini made the suggestion that his cousin take up acting. Lee was enthused by the idea and was put in touch with Nicolò’s friend, the film producer, Filippo Del Giudice. It would be another ten years, however, before stardom arrived.
Despite a breadth of acting experience, the charming Lee is inevitably best-known for his Hammer Horror movies that spanned the period from 1957 to 1976. It is little remembered that the actor also appeared in Italian films such as the 1961 movie Ercole al centro della terra, known in English as Hercules in the Haunted World and Il castello dei morti vivi (The Castle of the Living Dead) in 1964. By the 1970s, the sugar-coated façade of Italy’s dolce vita had soured but its love affair with cinema and the arts had survived intact. The years of post-war introspection and rapid boom had produced much more than starlets, grandiose parties, truculent actors, throw-away films and chancers with a camera.
In 1975 Toti Librizzi was made head barman at The Palms and the artist Renato Guttuso (1912–87) asked him for his by now celebrated book so that he could add a congratulatory carnation in vivid colours. Guttuso was a man of the left but was, nevertheless, happy to share a drink with Baron Di Stefano. He had shown his political leanings as early as the Spanish Civil War, during which time he contributed to the magazine Corrente di Vita. Guttuso painted Fucilazione in Campagna (A Shooting in the Countryside), a work he dedicated to Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet who had been executed by Francoist troops.
Some of Guttuso’s work concerned Sicily’s struggle for land reform, an ongoing battle almost as eternal as the Sicilian landscape. He also painted the zolfatari, the workers who suffered intolerable conditions in the island’s sulphur mines (see chapter 1), conditions described previously by Luigi Pirandello and Guy de Maupassant amongst others. Guttuso was a native of Bagheria, the former playground for Palermo’s aristocrats and, as we know, now a warren of ill-constructed streets that seemingly lead nowhere, but which will occasionally launch the unsuspecting visitor towards the gates of a noble villa. Like many before him, he was drawn to the Villa Palagonia and its monstrous guardians. He produced more than one painting of the edifice with the most famous of these portraying a barrier of prickly pears in the foreground, masking the surrounding garden wall from which the contorted gargoyles leer mockingly.
A collection of Guttoso’s works are now housed in Bagheria’s Villa Cattolica where his ashes are also kept in a tomb that can be seen in the grounds of the villa. However, to view his most celebrated work, La Vucciria, the visitor will need to seek out the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri in Piazza Marina, the former Inquisition prison, where the painting is now displayed in a room to the right of the antiquated cells that still bear the heartbreaking graffiti of the Holy Office’s desperate prisoners.
The vibrant canvas conveys all the energy once found during the heyday of Palermo’s Vucciria market. The eye is drawn to the central figure of a retreating woman in a body-skimming white dress sashaying her way between the stalls; some believe her to be Guttuso’s mistress. She faces a representation of the painter in a yellow jumper, who is perhaps accompanied by his wife. On the left, a decapitated swordfish, mouth gaping and eyes angry, sits amid its sliced body, surrounded by a less impressive catch. A bank of fresh fruit and vegetables in primary colours twists the perspective of the image to the right, leading the eye to a table of cheeses that gives way to the sudden intrusion of a suspended, bisected carcass. The sensual, earthy composition has an undertow of threat represented by the butcher who, knife in hand, carves steaks from the carcass.
Guttuso’s style initially developed in response to Fascism and was dubbed ‘social art’, moving away from abstraction and also naturalism. His palette reflected the strong colours of his native island with vivid blues, sulphurous yellows and reptilian greens. In 1971 Guttuso was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Palermo, the same year in which a major retrospective of his work was held in the Palazzo dei Normanni. The exhibition catalogue was introduced by his friend, Leonardo Sciascia, who was writing his text on the death of Raymond Roussel during the same period. Sciascia would occasionally join Guttuso in the Gattopardo bar and no doubt they discussed their shared world view.
Another artist who made some sketches for Toti Librizzi was Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978), born to a Genoese-Greek mother and a Sicilian father in the Greek town of Volos. In his autobiography, Memorie della mia vita (Memories of My Life), he recalls being tutored by a drawing instructor called Barbieri who had come to Greece to look for work but had found the economic situation just as problematic as in Italy. It was only de Chirico’s passion for art that enabled him to bear the stench of stale retsina and garlic emanating from his expatriate teacher.
De Chirico, in his early years, developed a style that would become known as metaphysical art — a term used to describe the dreamlike qualities of his canvases which often carried a sinister undercurrent. The painter’s surrealist work The Song of Love precedes André Breton’s movement, formed in 1924, by ten years. The composition is made up of a Greek bust set against a plastered façade, to which is pinned a huge red surgeon’s glove. On the floor in the foreground sits a green ball and a steam train is disappearing on the horizon. These disparate and seemingly unconnected objects reflect the subconscious dream state with the glove lending an ominous presence.
By the 1960s, de Chirico was influencing filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, while the 1976 film Il deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) by the director Valerio Zurlini has undeniable stylistic links to the imagery of the artist. The film, based on a story by Dino Buzzati — also the author of La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily) — follows a young officer, Giovanni Drogo, as he guards the Bastiani fortress from an imminent attack by the Tartars. The role of Colonel Giovanbattista Filimore is played by Vittorio Gassman (1922–2000), another star in Librizzi’s collection.
Gassman, as his name suggests, had a German father, but he is inextricably linked with the rise of Italian cinema. The actor is remembered fondly for his talent and professionalism which made him one of Italy’s leading performers. He starred in everything from twentieth-century classics like A Streetcar Named Desire to Shakespeare and the plays of Aeschylus. Luchino Visconti was a big influence in developing his career, which inevitably came to the notice of Hollywood. Gassman’s second wife was the American actress, Shelley Winters, and their subsequent split due to the actor’s affair with his young co-star, Anna Maria Ferrero, provided many tabloid column inches, especially when Gassman and Winters were contractually obliged to appear together on the set of Mambo in Rome.
Such was Winters’ fury over the affair, she tried to attack her younger rival in a fit of anger and it was left to Gassman to step between the pair of warring women before any damage could be done. We have read an account which says this incident took place at the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa and another that places the attack on the Mambo film set. The episode was immortalised by Walter Molino who designed the illustrations for the magazine La Domenica del Corriere. The comic-strip style print, tinged with a degree of photorealism, shows a stumbling Ferrero backing away from an irate Shelly Winters whose raised hand is being restrained by a dismayed Gassman; her other hand is clenched in a threatening fist. In the background, concerned onlookers throw disapproving glances over their shoulders.
This public display must have been intensely embarrassing for Gassman who was otherwise a cultured individual. He turned to theatre and books for solace, citing Herman Melville’s acclaimed Moby Dick as a favourite. In an interview with the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Gassman described Melville as a giant and stated that his magnum opus had been a companion throughout his career. He called it a ‘symbolic book, a secular Bible’. He admitted to the interviewer that he knew large segments of the text almost by heart. It was a recital of Moby Dick that brought Gassman to The Palms where he doodled a ship caught in a storm for Toti the barman. It was not his only visit.
Gassman could play in Hollywood movies with ease owing to his fluency in English. Anglophone actors keen to play roles in Italian cinema, with the notable exception of Christopher Lee, had to face the perils of dubbing. It is a credit to Burt Lancaster that his performance overrides the obvious voice substitution found on the soundtrack of the Italian release. Lancaster also paved the way for Richard Burton (1925–84) who accepted the part of Cesare Braggi in Vittorio de Sica’s final film, Il Viaggio (The Voyage, sometimes known as The Journey). He played opposite fellow Briton Ian Bannen and the Italian siren, Sophia Loren.
Certain scenes from the movie were shot on location in Sicily, specifically in Syracuse, the Baroque town of Noto and Palermo, hence Burton and Loren’s stay at The Palms. De Sica already had an illustrious career behind him and two years prior to the release of Il Viaggio in 1970 he had received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), based on Giorgio Bassani’s masterpiece of the same name. For the Burton and Loren project he had decided to adapt a story written by the Sicilian Nobel Laureate, Luigi Pirandello. He took the text from the author’s collection of short stories, Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year).
Set just before the outbreak of World War I, Count Cesare Braggi has to forgo his love for the seamstress Adriana De Mauro (Sophia Loren) who, according to the dying wish of Cesare’s father, is destined to marry his brother, Antonio, played by Bannen. The unfortunate Antonio dies in a car accident leaving Adriana to bring up their son whilst descending into a long period of mourning. It is Cesare who manages to revive the widow’s lust for life only to discover that she is dying from an incurable disease. The diagnosis of a Palermo cardiologist is confirmed by a similar specialist in Naples. With little time left, the hitherto repressed love between Cesare and Adriana flourishes, leading to the final scenes in Venice where Loren’s character dies.
Richard Burton had his own demons to fight whilst portraying Braggi’s tragic destiny. According to Sophia Loren’s memoir, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, the Welsh star was battling with his alcohol addiction and struggling to hold together his fated romance with Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011). Prior to shooting, Burton contacted Loren with the unusual request that he might be allowed to stay with her and her husband in Rome in order to avoid the attentions of the paparazzi. He needed a quiet, domestic environment in which to ‘get back in shape’, by which he meant to temper the self-destructive boozing that had been such a feature of his life in preceding years.
On one disastrous evening in 1968, Burton had been drinking heavily with his brother, Ifor, who had come to visit him in Switzerland. Ifor lost his balance and fell so awkwardly that he broke his neck and was severely paralysed. According to their younger brother Graham, this may have been a significant contributory factor in Burton’s almost suicidal levels of alcohol abuse, particularly after Ifor’s death in 1972. Despite the fact that Loren claimed the Welshman was an exemplary house guest, de Sica, whilst observing the actor on set, felt that Burton was on a path to an early grave. His concerned observations also saw the effect that the tempestuous ‘Elizabetta’ was having on his demeanour.
Elizabetta is, of course, Elizabeth Taylor who, prior to the first camera roll, had phoned Burton and demanded he be by her side in Los Angeles where she was to have an operation. The resigned but dutiful actor made the thirty-hour round trip which allowed him just a short time to be at her bedside before making it back in time for the first scenes. At this point in their relationship, the couple were heading inexorably for divorce, notwithstanding a short period of reconciliation that saw them spend the Christmas of 1973 together in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.
Both were prone to affairs, particularly during rocky times in their marriage and long periods of separation. During the filming of Il Viaggio, Taylor started an affair with a businessman, Henry Wynberg, who had the unlikely profession of used-car salesman. Melvyn Bragg in his biography Rich: The Life of Richard Burton, says that Elizabeth was convinced that her husband was having an affair with Sophia Loren. The most Loren ever admitted to, in an interview with The Telegraph, was her admiration for his looks, voice and acting skills. The photographer Gianni Bozzacchi, who worked closely with Taylor, has claimed in his memoir that everyone on set and in the press was convinced of an affair between the two co-stars. He does admit, however, that he had no way of knowing the exact truth. The rumours cannot be substantiated.
Sicily was close to the hearts of both Burton and Taylor. It was to the island that the couple escaped in 1963 when they first became an item during the filming of Cleopatra in Rome. The A-list magnet resort of Taormina on the Ionian coast was their destination, where the San Domenico Palace Hotel, once a monastery, has even preserved the wrought-iron bed that witnessed their passionate encounters. Taormina was also the scene of their petty and not-so-petty jealousies with reports of Taylor becoming so possessed by the green-eyed monster that she felt compelled to smash a guitar over Burton’s head.
The reception of Il Viaggio was nowhere near as dramatic as its filming. The New York Times felt that de Sica had succumbed to a bout of sentimentality which was out of sync with the world around him. Its view on the casting of Burton and Bannen mentions the oddity of their dubbing in Italian, although their original voices are used in the English version. It is not this, however, that incurs the newspaper’s strongest criticism, which concerns the miscasting of all the major roles due to a mismatch in age and the inability of the Britons to feel at home in the Sicilian landscape. The film is sumptuous in its period detail and locational cinematography, but we have to agree that the final product is something of a damp squib, even though Sophia Loren received the prestigious Italian David di Donatello award for best actress.
The music for the film was composed by Manuel de Sica, Vittorio’s son with the actress María Mercader, who, bizarrely, was the half-sister of Leon Trotsky’s assassin. Manuel de Sica spent time on the set and with the actors in The Palms, gaining inspiration for the soundtrack. The piece accompanying the film title is a gently lilting, melancholic tune led by the simple notes of a piano, backed by strings that faintly echo Pietro Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.
The gentle music of the film score was a world away from the trova guitar of Máximo Francisco Repilado Muñoz Telles (1907–2003), otherwise known as Compay Segundo. The Cuban guitarist arrived in Palermo a year after de Sica and his crew had left, having been asked by the Palermo City Council to perform a concert at the Villa Trabia in Via Antonino Salinas, a twenty-minute walk from The Palms. In the romantic surroundings of this eighteenth-century classical villa, set in a park with a bridge and ornate fountain, Compay and his musicians performed from his repertoire of sones, danzones and mambo beats — blending African and Spanish rhythms. The troupe was staying at The Palms and Toti Librizzi recalls Compay heading for the restaurant after their set at the villa. He paused in front of the Gattopardo bar and doffed his Panama hat as if recognising the gentility of a bygone era.
Librizzi was much taken with the gesture and invited the guitarist to have a drink with him after he had finished his meal. The pair struck up an unlikely friendship and Compay headed for the bar as his first port of call when he came back to Palermo during the heady years of the famous Buena Vista Social Club, the 1996 album promoted and directed by the North-American musician Ry Cooder and subsequently filmed by Wim Wenders. With his illustrious compatriots, Compay played some of his famous tunes at the Teatro di Verdura, compositions which included ‘Chan Chan’, the track with which he will forever be associated. The guitarist’s hat, which Compay had given to Toti, is now on display in the barman’s Casa museo della memoria.
The robust Compay had boasted to Librizzi that he would live to be a magnificent one hundred and sixteen, seemingly plenty of time for the Sicilian to visit him in Cuba, however he died in 2003, at the age of ninety-five, before the barman had the chance to visit the musician’s home. Librizzi was then instrumental in setting up a cultural exhibit at Havana’s Museo Maqueta called ‘Dai Caraibi al Mediterraneo — Cuba Sicilia’. During the inauguration of the photographic display, Toti slipped away from the celebrations and headed for Santiago de Cuba where Compay is buried in the Santa Ifigenia cemetery. Wearing the stylish Panama hat, he laid flowers at his friend’s grave.
Another musician of note to stay at The Palms was Ray Charles (1930–2004), the American soul singer who had been blind from the age of seven. Librizzi was faced with a dilemma when presenting Charles with his golden book, aware that the prospect of contributing something meaningful might make the performer feel uncomfortable. He need not have worried. Charles happily took the pen from the barman, placed his right hand on the page and proceeded to draw around it with his left.
Charles had been used to performing at some of Italy’s most renowned historic venues. The Arena di Verona, the Roman amphitheatre usually reserved for opera, had already witnessed the American’s performance alongside Italy’s foremost blues man, Adelmo Fornaciari, otherwise known as Zucchero. Things were to prove more problematic in Sicily when Charles was scheduled to perform with Renzo Arbore at the historic site of Selinunte, situated on the coast and over an hour’s drive to the south of Palermo. The technicians had begun to set up the equipment amongst the Greek temple ruins when they were summarily stopped by the Regional Council for Cultural Heritage.
It was claimed that the archaeological site was not the appropriate cultural location for a concert of this kind. The functionary at the head of the Council felt he could only overturn the ban by using a special dispensation which he was unwilling to do because of the precedent it would set and the problems it would cause. He was backed in this by the President of the Region, head of the regional government. Both feared accusations of an abuse of power, given the opinions expressed by the bodies they represented and those of the local superintendency.
In fact, authorisation for the concert at Selinunte had never been given. The local Municipality of Castelvetrano had buried its head in the sand, hoping for a last-minute change of heart from the superintendency and the aforementioned heritage organisation who had always been in opposition. Desperate attempts by the local mayor fell on deaf ears leading to the final clash between the authorities and Charles’ frantic and exasperated technical staff. This incident is indicative of Sicily’s dilemma when faced with the need to modernise and attract the tourist dollar but at the same time adhere to a cultural responsibility for the protection of its wealth of antiquities.
Ray Charles and his team were relocated to the far more prosaic Paolo Marino stadium in nearby Castelvetrano where concrete football terraces replaced the ancient ruins set against the inviting Mediterranean. Eight thousand ticket holders squeezed into the confines of the town’s football ground, probably many more than would attend a match for a side that now languishes in the distant reaches of Sicily’s Regional League, Group A. Twenty-first-century representatives of the local heritage bodies seem to have now come to terms with the use of ancient sites for popular music. Recent concerts at Selinunte have featured the Jamaican hip hop and ragga artist, Sean Paul, in addition to the Dutch house DJ, Martin Garrix. The columns must be vibrating to their millennial foundations.
Charles’ soul and Compay Segundo’s Cuban rhythms brought the music of the world to Sicilian shores. The sound of Astor Piazzolla (1921–92), the Argentinian bandoneon player, would instantly have felt more familiar, although his music undoubtedly shares common roots with both of the above. It is easy to picture Piazzolla in his room at The Palms, taking his precious bandoneon from its case and running through a handful of the pieces he would be playing later. He was a proponent of nuevo tango which incorporated elements of jazz and classical music. Tango itself was born from a mixture of African beats, Spanish tunes and other influences derived from European migration to Argentina and Uruguay, with much of that migration coming from Italy and Sicily.
As his name suggests, Piazzolla was of direct Italian descent. It was Jorge Luis Borges, the respected Argentinian writer, who said in his biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego that the ‘criollos viejos’ who gave birth to tango were called ‘Bevilacqua, Greco or de Bassi’ — all Italian family names. If these were some of the originators, Italians also had much to do with the gentrification of tango, bringing it out of the dark shadows and into the refined salons and middle-class ballrooms. European polkas, tarantellas and mazurkas were added to the mix to produce the music we know today, although the lyrics still maintain an element of immigrant lament. In many ways, they are tunes that Spanish speakers would refer to as ida y vuelta songs — composed by those that have gone to the New World and returned home.
Sometime after Piazzolla’s death, his wife, the singer Laura Escalada, was in Palermo carrying out her role as manager on tour with the Italian singer, Milva. In conversation with Toti Librizzi at the Gattopardo, the circumstances of her husband’s death arose. She recounted his final hours in a clinic following a stroke, suffering from pneumonia and sunk in a coma for days. He died, as he predicted in song, in the early hours of a Buenos Aires morning. The account of Piazzolla’s illness reminded Librizzi of the actress Susan Strasberg and her unfortunate demise from breast cancer. Strasberg had been another of Richard Burton’s conquests and they even took an apartment together in New York for a short period. The actress is best known for her role between 1955 and 1957 as Anne Frank in the Broadway production of the famous diary, and for the 1960 Oscar-nominated Italo-Yugoslav film, Kapò. A former long-term resident in Italy, she was often referred to as ‘La Strasberg’.
It transpired that Escalada had been Susan’s friend and made the assertion that the American had actually committed suicide because of her illness. Although the claim cannot be substantiated, the statement hit the barman particularly hard. During his last conversation with Strasberg, she had asked him whether he believed in reincarnation. Not taking the question too seriously, he replied that he thought it likely. When she pursued his reasoning, he quickly and without thinking felt obliged to provide the star with an appropriate answer, specifically he thought it must be the case because he could remember previous lives.
This spurious confession drew Strasberg closer to the barman and from that moment she wanted his attention and time. A photograph exists of Librizzi and Strasberg together standing next to The Palms’ Christmas tree, the last Christmas that the actress would see. Five months later, she would be dead. Escalada’s revelation and Librizzi’s rash championing of reincarnation pricked his sensitive conscience, a regret that stayed with him for many months.
These interconnecting threads that work their way through the fabric of la dolce vita, from its glorious inception to its tattered demise, reflect Calvino’s crossed destinies, the storied imaginings of the novel that Consolo was never to write. As we have seen, The Palms’ role in hosting actors, painters and musicians continued well beyond the intoxicating years of the 1960s, but Hollywood’s affair with Italy and Sicily, in particular, had already begun to take a more sinister turn, a twisted fork that would taint the world’s view of the island for the foreseeable future.