Another year has passed and autumn has come round again. Once again I am back in Sicily.
The first chestnuts of the season, their shiny, charred coats splitting to reveal the creamy coloured meat within. Prosecco in crystal, fluted glasses, a vase of perfect pink roses… It looks like a still life painting. We are in Umberto Martorana’s apartment at the end of the Corso. He has invited me for a drink and to talk about the Taormina of once upon a time.
The building is unremarkable from the outside; it does not prepare you for the gem within. Every aspect is carefully chosen and exquisite, from the Sicilian enamels in his bedroom to the alabaster busts against the walls, the pictures in his elegant living room. Beautiful carpets lie on the polished wood floors – a proper setting for such a cultivated man. He paints. His pictures are deceptively simple: two countrywomen against a frieze of olive trees, a shrine to the Madonna crowded with simple offerings, water reflecting the multicolours of a fishing boat – quintessentially Sicilian. He travels. From the books precisely placed around this room I gather he is also an extensive reader.
He has promised to show me his photograph albums, the images of lords and ladies, actors and writers, socialites – memories of another, more elegant Taormina, a time of fancy dress parties and dinners, cocktails at expat villas and visiting yachts.
Those were the disappearing years of a belle epoque that reigned at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth centuries: an idyllic time.
It was at the Hotel Vittorio in 1891 Oscar Wilde took a room. Thirty-seven years old, he had left his wife to embrace his true sexuality, which would lead to imprisonment and forced labour. The literary genius would be ostracised and live out his last miserable years in Paris.
In those early years of the twentieth century, the best touring companies in Sicily played spectacles and operettas at the Greek theatre. The cabarets had a fatal influence on the nobility from Catania who, falling for a pair of lovely legs, gambled their marriages and inheritances. Some were reduced by their impossible and violent passion to commit suicide in a hotel room and often, to save Taormina’s face, they were hurriedly dispatched.
Closing the albums, I sign Umberto’s famous visitors book. I sip my Prosecco and nibble those first chestnuts of autumn. They seem somehow significant: mature fruit but containing spring and summer. I feel I have made a long journey and now come ‘home’ as I sit in Umberto’s peaceful apartment, the sounds of the Corso far away. It is as if, this evening, all the long negotiations with Sicily have ended and we have reached a kind of truce, even though it can never be more than an uneasy one. A balance has been restored and, once again, I can see not only the shadows but the sunshine as well.
In the morning I go down to Isola Bella and gaze at that view as if I cannot take it in enough. I gaze and gaze. Light permeates everything, piercing the heat haze that shrouds the bay, the spume that fans out behind a boat. It illuminates another pagan world, tranquil and joyful. It is what one yearns for during those grey days in Northern Europe, to be made alive again by the light. I can understand how it is that Emilio paints and paints this scene yet again. There is another quality about Sicily, which he once described to me. He related how he took an Englishman – a man who was not accustomed to expressing his feelings – to stand at the top of Isola Bella.
‘He was enchanted and turned to me and said, “You can touch the air.”’
As I wander over the isthmus and back, I think of all those times when leaving the place, this small island in the Mediterranean, I would pause and gaze down Isola Bella, committing it to my memory. Isola Bella has been a recurring theme in my life in Sicily as it has Elke’s.
That September day, she was in reminiscent mood: ‘My first footsteps into Sicily were in the town of Messina. My future husband, Marquis Emilio Bosurgi, took me from Rome to Messina in a wagon lit sleeping car – a long trip from Rome to Sicily at that time. When we arrived at the train station of Messina I was extremely disappointed. I had imagined the island of Sicily similar to the Caribbean with sandy beaches, palm trees and hot weather. Nothing like that: Messina was ugly, the weather grey and cold (February) and no Hula-Hula girls, no white sand beaches with palm trees.
‘But Emilio said: “Wait and see when we get to Taormina, everything will be different.” We took his Alfa-Romeo sports car to Taormina, parked on the road in front of a little island called Isola Bella. To get to it we had to climb down a steep staircase to a stony beach, walk along it until we reached the narrowest distance between land and island. Emilio told me to put on long rubber boots and to follow him slowly, walking through rather high water and waves. But I did not put my feet firmly enough on the ground and the next big wave just knocked me over. Here I was in the icy-cold water, Emilio grabbed me by my hair and I got back on my feet. Thank God I had a suitcase with dry clothes, which was carried by a servant on his head, so it would not get wet!
‘Here we were on this mysterious little island. I was soaking wet and Emilio was having the largest laugh about my first meeting with the Sicilian sea. There was a nice chimney in the house on top of the island and I changed my clothes and dried the wet stuff at the nice cosy fire. We had good Sicilian wine and Emilio cooked a huge steak.
‘Next morning: what a surprise, no more strong wind, no more heavy sea, but the most beautiful sunshine instead, and the flat sea had a violet-blue colour. What a change from yesterday! It was a breathtakingly beautiful atmosphere. Unfortunately I had to go back to work in Germany, but on my next vacation in summer I was back in Taormina and after a year I gave up my job and moved to Sicily. From then on most of the time I spent on Isola Bella, taking care of Emilio’s customers and friends, showing them the island and inviting them for lunch.
‘Slowly, Emilio constructed many rooms on the island, one for each member of the family. Every room had a bathroom, a chimney and a little corner to boil tea or coffee. Many times I was angry because he spent all his free time with his workers constructing new places and studying a method so as not to ruin the original look of the island. Everything was made to look like little caves, with the walls carefully covered with the natural rocks of the island. The result was to create a unique work of art from nature.
‘It was the happiest time of my life,’ she continued. ‘We lived a wonderful twenty years, and really loved it, doing a big favour to the town of Taormina. Then it was requisitioned and we had to leave this corner of paradise. It fell into dilapidation.’
Maybe one day Isola Bella will return to its original beauty. Nevertheless, it will never forget those splendid years when all those important personages walked on her in admiration.
Coming from different backgrounds, though both lovers of this beautiful island, somehow Elke and I were brought together by our love of cats and our desire to give them happier lives. But our affection for Sicily is tempered by the fight to rescue its felines; there is still a long way to go.
I think of those words of D.H. Lawrence as he and Frieda prepared to leave Taormina in 1923. They sat with their luggage packed up, ready to leave Villa Fontana Vecchia.
‘My heart is trembling with pain – the going away from home and the people and Sicily. Perhaps Frieda is right and we shall return to our Fontana. I don’t say no. I don’t say anything for certain. Today I go – tomorrow I return. So things go.’
So things go. I will return.