AFTERWORD

To the parade of enlightened travelers who ventured to Sicily from the classical age through the early twentieth century, the island represented “that miraculous centre upon which so many radii of world history converge.”1 These explorers, writers, and artists set out to discover this ancient “land of gods and heroes,” in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville.² Their journals provide detailed accounts of Sicily's history, topography, geology, climate, culture, agriculture, food, and wine. In the early seventeenth century the Frenchman Pierre d'Avity declared that Sicily “perhaps surpasses, in fertility, any island in the Mediterranean, yielding every kind of fruit” and “produces the most delicious wine in the world.”³ In 1787 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who pioneered ideas at the core of modern botany, described the grapevines on Mount Etna as giving “evidence of meticulous cultivation.”⁴ Traveling around Mount Etna in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville was struck by the prosperity in the towns around Etna compared with those in the rest of Sicily. He described an “enchanted country” where in almost every field “corn, vines, and fruit-trees” were “growing and thriving together.”⁵ These continental explorers also brought with them the rational and scientific principles that would help to illuminate the thinking of Sicily's most enlightened reformers.

The modern-day enologists who have come to Sicily from Piedmont, Tuscany, and other points north since the 1980s have been similarly drawn to the island's history and potential for quality. Along with their continental grape varieties, they brought the knowledge and experience that had earned them respect among international wine journalists and merchants. Sicilian winegrowers welcomed these outsiders to their soil. They knew they had much to learn. Having established themselves in the export market with star international varieties, alone and married with Nero d'Avola, the winegrowers of Sicily are now planting new roots. They are discovering the potential of their indigenous varieties and the diversity of their island's territories. They are rediscovering alberello and even amphorae. They are learning how to integrate the foreign with the native and the modern with the ancient. They are striving to unite for a common purpose and to honor their rich diversity. This is a search for identity.

In this quest there are no better models for the winegrowers of Sicily than the incisive Sicilian authors who have given Sicily its own identity on the global stage. So long denied that identity by the circumstances of history, Sicily has been honored nonetheless by the authentic voices of its brilliant poets, playwrights, and storytellers. Remarkably, the Sicilian language does not have a future tense. It would be easy to conclude that the absence of "I will” stems from a lack of free will. The story of Sicily is one of domination. But it is also one of survival. The story of the Sicilian language is as rich and complex as Sicily's history. Sicilian is considered one of the oldest Romance languages to derive from Latin. It is laced with Arabic, Old Provençal, and Spanish words, which evoke images of those now-distant conquerors and their diverse cultures. The Sicilian word taibbu, for example, derives from the Arabic tayyib (meaning “good") and was used to refer to a “perfect wine that has a fine taste.”6 The only surviving poem of the woman whom some scholars believe was the first female poet of Italy, La Nina Siciliana, was written in thirteenth-century Sicily in a proto-Italian influenced by the refined style of the Provençal troubadours. However, it was the Tuscan dialect of the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-century Florentine poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch that became the official language of Italy, with Sicilian (and all other regional languages) being relegated to the status of dialect. And while the Sicilian School that flowered in the court of Frederick II is credited with writing the first lyric poetry in Italianate vernacular, it would be several more centuries before literary works in Sicilian or by Sicilian authors were recognized beyond the island.

Antonio Veneziano was a sixteenth-century Sicilian poet who was a contemporary of Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote his love songs in Sicilian. He was strident about its use at a time when the Tuscan dialect was becoming widely accepted as the purest form of Italian. Veneziano also drew on popular Sicilian folktales and fables for his themes, making his poetry autochthonous in both form and substance. In his time he was recognized outside Sicily for his poetic greatness, and in the intervening centuries Sicilians have embraced him as a heroic literary figure. He argued that it was only right and natural that he should express himself in his mother tongue: “Perhaps the world expects different fruits from my wit, but in what language could I begin if not with the language that I learned first and suckled with my milk? . . . It would certainly be odd if Homer who was Greek and wrote in Greek, Horace who lived where Latin was spoken and wrote in Latin, Petrarch who was Tuscan and wrote in Tuscan, if I who am Sicilian did not find it more appropriate to write in Sicilian.”⁷

Like Veneziano, Giovanni Meli wrote his moral fables and other poems in Sicilian. Early in his career Meli trained as a physician, ministering to the peasants and the dispossessed in a rural town outside Palermo, and he later became a professor of chemistry. While honoring his authentic Sicilian voice, Meli was influenced by the Enlightenment's embrace of both culture and science. He became one of the most respected Italian poets of the late eighteenth century. The following stanza is from a drinking song that he wrote in the form of a dithyramb, an ancient Greek hymn to the wine god Dionysus.

If you want to live in joy

drink red wine throughout your life,

the red wine that's made in Mascali

which when sold out of a stein

will be looked on with disdain,

but when it's bottled,

well tarred

and sealed

by a clever foreigner

who comes barking in the square:

“Drink, my friends, this wine's from France!”

then it's bought as an elixir.8

While celebrating wines from various Sicilian towns, Meli's drinking song provides us with an ironic image of Sicilian wine being bottled and sold as a prized French wine by “a clever foreigner.”

In the line of Sicilian authors who championed the Sicilian language, Nino Martoglio has a place of prominence. Martoglio lived in Catania at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. He is credited with founding modern Sicilian theater and was an early mentor to Sicily's most renowned playwright and first Nobel laureate, Luigi Pirandello. Martoglio was also a poet who wrote solely in Sicilian. In the preface to a posthumous collection of poems by Martoglio, Pirandello honored his teacher's native Sicilian voice and authentic expression of the “flavor and color that cannot exist anywhere else.”⁹ In one of his poems, Martoglio celebrates his ability to capture these flavors and colors:

Because the way I talk, they like to swear,

brings smells of home: pistachio nuts, a hint

of shelled, dry almonds, rows of prickly pears,

of orange blossoms and of calamint.¹⁰

Like Veneziano, Meli, and Martoglio, the authentic winegrowers of Sicily who are finding expression in their native grape varieties and distinct growing areas are capturing the “flavor and color that cannot exist anywhere else.” In their heroic efforts to express the essence of this magnificent place to the world, they need look no further than their own poets. For a young Marsala winegrower named Marco De Bartoli, the Sicilian poet Salvatore Quasimodo was such a guiding star. Quasimodo won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. His lyrical poetry evokes both the ancient and the ephemeral sensations of his island home. Like his ideal of the modern poet, the modern Sicilian winegrower is called to express his own land and time.11

Look! on the trunk

buds break:

a newer green than the grass,

balm to the heart:

the trunk seemed already dead,

leaning over the gully.

And everything seems to me like a miracle;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

this green, bursting the bark,

that even last night was not there.¹²

As the bud “bursting the bark” of an ancient, gnarled vine, the culture of wine in Sicily is reborn.