Chapter Six
Nothing of my childhood Easters has survived the passage across the Atlantic to my present state of agnosticism, into an age when hats are a matter of fashion rather than breeding, and a land where Easter egg dyes and jelly beans are not available. Thus unencumbered, I have fallen very easily into the pattern established my very first year here, when Tonino and I cut short a trip to Tràpani and Selinunte in order to return to Alcamo early Easter morning, to be with his family. And for twenty years our Easters have been that, first at Alcamo and then at Bosco: the heavy dinner at noon; chocolate Easter eggs with a cheap surprise inside until I desecrated even this small ritual, discovering that for the same amount of money I could get twice the weight in chocolate bars and a nice and welcome present as well; the marzipan lambs with tinfoil halos and red paper banners that my mother-in-law produces annually in the hopes, I think, that they might exercise some miraculous power of conversion over her heathen grandchildren. (The first time, when Francesco was just two, Tonino and Turi managed to hollow out the lamb completely before Francesco caught them picking at it from the back and realized that it was edible.)
That first year, however, leafing through the guidebook as we hurried back to Alcamo, I read about an Easter procession in Castelvetrano that I have yearned to see ever since. My chance has now come: a heavy cold has confined my mother-in-law to her Palermo nursing home, so two bars of Swiss chocolate and some drawing pens wrapped up in an egg-shaped package suffice to take care of family custom, and early on Easter morning we are off to see the Aurora.
This name is misleading, according to Claudia, a friend whose family comes from Castelvetrano, since dawn comes and goes long before the action begins, but Castelvetrano is on the southern coast, directly below Alcamo, and it will take us about three-quarters of an hour to cross the island.
Nature has orchestrated the feast day to perfection. The wind has gone elsewhere, taking the clouds with it, and as we drive down the hill toward the highway, the early-morning sun rises on a world of soft new green and lemon yellow, on pink peach blossoms and the clustering white of the late-blooming, green-leafed pear trees. We enter the autostrada at Alcamo and drive south, swooping above the valleys and skimming the hilltops on long, curving viaducts, twentieth-century colonnades that look out over vineyards that around Alcamo have just sparato, as the Sicilians say, just shot into leaf in the sudden, explosive Sicilian spring, and then on to the lusher green of the wheat fields in the interior. Here and there as we go farther south a field of sulla, a leguminous plant cultivated for fodder, is in bloom, a blanket of rich carmine blossoms spread out on the green wheat. We are driving down the Belice Valley, through the heart of the earthquake zone: morning mists, rising in the morning sun, reveal crumbled towns and shoddy barracks.
Soon the smell of salt indicates that we are nearing the sea again. The southern coast is low, sweeping, open to the sea that penetrates inland in an intermingling of dunes and fields and low bluffs quite different from what we are used to in the north, where the sea is a backdrop for the dramatic contours of the land, but remains quite distinct from it. There are no tides to speak of in the Mediterranean, and somehow on the northern coast one knows this at a glance, while to the south such an ebb and flow remains a possibility.
It is barely half past eight when we park the car in a small side street of Castelvetrano and continue by foot to the main square. The sun is not yet high enough to find its way into the streets and warm the air, and the bars are just opening. We are hungry after our drive, and when a young boy passes, balancing on his head a huge tray covered with a white cloth, we immediately swing round like the needle on a compass and follow him to the bar where, it turns out, he is delivering freshly fried arancine, the rice croquettes.
By the time we have wiped the last grains of rice from our chins, the square is beginning to fill up with people. It isn’t really a square at all, but a long, narrow rectangle, slightly bent at the halfway point, where Claudia has advised us to take up our stand. There are a fair number of tourists, brought here by guidebooks or guided tours, but the bulk of the crowd is local, all dressed up and very excited. Next to us a family of emigrants home for the holiday is particularly resplendent, the husband’s black and white brocade jacket and matching tie an unmistakable symptom of the way the somber good taste of the Sicilian peasant goes berserk in a foreign climate. The emigrant returns from abroad in loud checks and phosphorescent socks that are immediately labeled americanate no matter where they have been purchased.
The banditori, the town criers, arrive, the likes of which I have not seen for years. When I lived in Partinico there was still a town crier there, who would stroll through the streets announcing his arrival with a long roll on his drum and then shouting out his messages in thick, garbled dialect and long, drawn-out groans, of which I never understood a single word. These three limit themselves to their instruments, large drums slung from bands around their necks and balanced on their bellies; taking up a position a short distance from the others, as if in solitary command of the piazza, each one beats out in turn a passionate call for attention, vying with his rivals in the velocity of the rolls, the fury of the crescendos, the sharpness of the final rat-a-tats.
In white gloves and white pith helmets, the town police begin to carve a central path through the crowd for the length of the piazza. As soon as the way is clear, a group of majorettes step out, followed by the town banners and then the band, which strikes up a sprightly Sousa sort of tune. Gone are the funeral marches, the dirges, and the requiems; today is for resurrection and rejoicing. The crowd is excited, necks crane, peering to see what is happening at either end of the piazza, which is by now completely filled with people. Small children, piggyback, float above the sea of heads, while the privileged look down upon us from the surrounding balconies.
“Look, there she is! There she is! She’s coming!” Everyone is pointing to the northern end of the piazza, where the statue of the Madonna has suddenly appeared, wrapped up in a black cloak and carried on the shoulders of a dozen men. Immediately all heads swing southward to discover in the distance the risen Christ just entering the piazza at the other end. The two statues halt just out of sight of each other, separated by some three hundred feet of curving square and excited onlookers. The Madonna is accompanied by an angel, half the size and weight of the larger statues and mounted on a much smaller platform. The crowd tenses and swells forward; the policemen spread their arms to keep open the path. A shout, and the angel charges down the piazza on the shoulders of a dozen young boys, bobbing and swaying precariously in his agitation. He arrives at the feet of the risen Christ, pauses to catch his breath, and in a few minutes races back again with the glad tidings. Tidings that are not believed: three times this polychromed plaster ambassador is hurtled back and forth across the piazza, faster and faster as the delighted crowd urges the runners on to greater and greater effort.
A roll of drums, some new music, and the big statues begin to move. The crowd falls silent. Mary and Jesus draw toward each other, their slow, shuffling progress full of doubt and hesitation. Might it be? Could it be true? The pace quickens. When they have come halfway, they catch sight of each other, the bearers break into a run, the two statues sweep together and pull up sharply just in time to avoid collision, the momentum bringing their heads together in a brief embrace. Mary’s black cloak drops away to reveal a mantle of flowered brocade, and the falling folds release a flight of snow-white doves that wheel and circle over the scene of such rejoicing.
Tonino and I sheepishly discover tears in each other’s eyes. It was so real. The emotion that was released together with the doves was so intense, the longing for just such an encounter so palpable. Mary and Jesus, Demeter and Persephone, black-veiled mother and murdered child, release from mourning.
Selinunte is to me the least accessible of the Greek sites I have seen in Sicily. The bare bones of a city sacked by man and toppled by earthquake lie in careless heaps on low cliffs overlooking the sea, building blocks abandoned by some infant Titan who has centuries since outgrown them. They are illegible in their very size, with the tourists clambering over the enormous fluted drums of fallen columns like tiny, multicolored ants. Today it is very crowded; parking is difficult and the air rings with a many-tongued babble and with the nagging claxons of the tourist buses gathering their various broods. We mingle with the crowds, wander through the eastern temples, and stroll along the road that leads down into the river valley and up to the acropolis on the opposite cliff until the heat and the confusion persuade us to turn back.
Selinunte was a revelation the first time I came, exactly twenty years ago yesterday. Apart from Tonino and me there were no more than a dozen people here, and even these disappeared, swallowed up by the vast sweep of sea and plain and the immoderate proportions of the ruins. We sat for hours on some stones and stared out across sea and centuries, the sea of flowers in the foreground no less brilliant than the Mediterranean that sparkled in the distance. The selinon, the wild celery that gave the ancient city its name, was submerged by the red of the sulla, the yellow of mayflowers and mustard, the blue of bugloss and borage, bobbing and trembling under the insistent and noisy prodding of thousands of bees. It was my first immersion in the Sicilian spring, in its colors and its perfumes and its heat, a baptism that caught and held me convert. Today the flowers are still as beautiful, the sun perhaps even hotter, but the crowd and the confusion drown out the bees, and the ruins are silent, unable despite their size to cope with this Lilliputian invasion.
We continue eastward and then turn north on the road for Caltabellotta, which winds up over the ridge of low mountains that separates the southern coastal plain east of Selinunte from the rolling hills of the interior. These mountains are quite barren, with patches of vineyard or wheat exploiting the rare flat spaces, an occasional olive or almond tree clinging to the steep and rocky slopes, and, as closer inspection reveals, a sparse carpeting of the crouching, grasping plants of arid soil and high altitudes: purple squill, delicate white clusters of star-of-Bethlehem, the single tiny yellow-and-brown orchids of the lutea family, and the many-flowered stalks of the orchis italica, bristling with minute pink tentacles.
The village of Caltabellotta lies at the summit of the highest mountain in this southern ridge, topped only by two great spurs of rock that thrust up behind it like giant tusks. The streets are narrow and zigzag steeply up the hillside; a policeman directing all five cars’ worth of traffic instructs us to park the car and continue on foot if we want to see the procession. Of course we do, so we quickly park and follow the main street up to a point where it splits, one fork leading farther up a very steep slope, the other curving down to the right into a tiny piazza. The “procession” is here—townspeople and bandsmen, their instruments tucked forgotten under their elbows, have gathered in a circle to cheer and applaud a dancing saint, a life-size plaster statue of the Archangel Michael, the town’s patron. Michael, dressed in the armor of a Roman legionary, is leaning against a column that has been completely wrapped in purple phlox, with a young laurel tree tied next to it so that the purple flowers glow against the dark leaves. As in Tràpani and Castelvetrano, the flower-decked platform that bears the statue is mounted on two poles—in this case very long, thick wooden beams that of themselves must weigh an enormous amount—and requires some thirty hefty young men to carry it. But “carry” is not the right word: they rock and jostle and bounce the statue in the most extraordinary manner, accompanied and encouraged by a crescendo of cheering and clapping from the crowd that presses in around them. Sweat pouring off their faces, the young men push and pull still harder on their poles, and the Archangel rocks and sways and reels in a frenzied dance, until his porters can bear it no longer, the movement subsides into a faint bobbing, and the statue itself seems to pant as the men fight to catch their breath, still holding all the weight on their shoulders.
Bottles of water and beer are passed around, the band recovers its role and starts to play again, and considerable maneuvering is necessary to effect the passage of the statue around the curve and into the main street, where it pauses at the foot of the rise, gathering strength. Meanwhile another statue arrives, a little winged cherub about two feet high, with platform, poles, and porters in proportion: a handful of boys about twelve years old bounce the baby statue about in great excitement, egged on by an amused crowd.
The music dies out, and, at a sign from one of the porters, the drummer sounds a roll. On the final snap of the drumsticks the men charge up the street, running and stumbling with their heavy burden up a slope so steep that the statue seems almost horizontal. The cheers of the onlookers assist them over the top and around the corner, quickly followed by the angel, who bobs gaily and effortlessly up the rise in the wake of his big brother.
We too turn and climb. We have lost the statues, but echoes of their progress parallel to ours reach us at the street corners. A final hike up a street so sheer that the sidewalk is a flight of stairs brings us out onto the Piano della Matrice, the open square of the mother church, unexpectedly spectacular. In front of us a wide checkerboard of cobble and grass slopes gently up to the steps of the Matrice, built by Count Roger after he took Caltabellotta from the Saracens in 1090. The weathered gray stone of the Norman church blends into the sharp-toothed rock that rises abruptly behind it. On the left-hand side of the square stands the chapel of San Michele, its Gothic portal garlanded in laurel branches, and next to it a gate and a stairway carved into the live rock lead off toward the second, bigger pinnacle, ringed by the trees of the town park where the ruins of the Norman castle lie.
Commotion rising from below tells us that Saint Michael is about to make his final assault on the mountain. The last steep rise is rendered more problematical by telephone wires and shop signs, and considerable measuring accompanied by animated discussion is necessary before a strategy can be agreed upon. At last somebody climbs out on a balcony and unties a laundry line, final directions are shouted out, and the group braces itself. Up they come, the initial momentum waning as they scramble up the cobbled street, their boots slipping and straining to find a grip on the polished stones. A final push and they burst into the square, where they bring up sharply, the statue swaying back and forth, evidently in some confusion as to where to go next.
One of the townsmen who has followed the progress of the statue explains to us that the municipal pro loco committee has decided that Caltabellotta should cash in on the “Easter in Sicily” tourist boom and has organized a new procession for the afternoon, a version of the Castelvetrano Aurora, but the details have not been thought out all that well, and no one knows whether Michael should spend his lunch hour in the Matrice or in the chapel of San Michele, where the garlands declare a readiness to receive him sooner or later.
After a few false starts and some rather languishing discussion, Michael is carried up the steps and into the dark interior of the Matrice. We start to follow it, but a priest, heretofore absent from the scene, closes the door firmly in our faces. Lunchtime. The Matrice is closed, the chapel is closed, the gate to the castle is closed. The best we can do is climb up some stone steps that lead around behind the Matrice, to discover that the rock is sheltering a miniature Alpine meadow, shaded by pine trees whose sun-warmed resin fills the air and dotted with tiny daisies, the kind whose white petals have had their tips dipped in red. I remember the flowers from a French children’s book I had when I was little, and it is surprising yet suitable to find their smiling faces here in the shadow of the Norman walls. The view from the meadow is spectacular: we can look north toward the mountains of Palermo across the whole of Sicily, the hills and valleys flattened from this height into a gentle pool of green, flecked with the white foam of the blossoming fruit trees.
The priest had something, however. Our stomachs call us to more prosaic questions. We discover that Caltabellotta offers a choice of two restaurants, one in the town itself and one just outside, around the back of the peak that rises above the castle ruins. Walking down toward the car we pass the first, which is occupied by a baptismal party and has no free tables. A winding road takes us out of town, past vegetable plots and tiny vineyards, to a huge baroque monastery, this too flanked by a cliff and by a charming restaurant with a trellised terrace. The proprietor is polite and extremely apologetic: a wedding reception is in progress, and there isn’t a free chair in the place. Tonino, undaunted or perhaps desperate, asks if they couldn’t fix us a little antipasto to go. After a brief wait the obliging host produces three foil-covered plates, a bottle of mineral water, and a round kilo loaf of fragrant, crusty bread. We drive back along the road a little way to a curve that offers space to park and some rocks to sit on. Our plates turn out to hold spicy olives, some slices of prosciutto crudo and of a peppery local salame, and two kinds of pecorino cheese, one fresh and mild, the other aged and sharper. With a bag of oranges from the car, the sun warm on our backs, the mountains rolling down at our feet to the southern coast and the sea beyond, where the heat haze clouds the horizon and hides Africa from view, we have as fine an Easter dinner as I have ever eaten.
The drive north to Prizzi, a rapid descent switchbacking down the north side of the mountain to the green valleys we had seen from above, takes us along luxuriant riverbeds, over hills of green wheat, past isolated pear and apple trees in bloom. The hedgerows are overflowing with flowers, unable to contain such a riot of color, such an exuberance of form and texture. It is difficult to believe that in the space of a few months the velvet softness of the wheat fields, shifting from emerald to chartreuse with the wind, will give way to bristling, colorless stubble; these are the hills that the Lampedusa family cross in the Visconti film of The Leopard, in blinding light and smothering dust, their carriages creaking to the shrill song of the locusts.
But the extravagant hand of spring is less and less successful in concealing the poverty of the agriculture the farther north we go. Our destination, the village of Prizzi, is quite high, slapped down on a hill of rocky soil and stunted vegetation with none of the cozy shifting and filling with which most Sicilian towns have accommodated themselves to the bones of the island. The outskirts of the town are ringed with the usual half-finished houses, fruit of the emigrants’ remittances, but once past them the streets are small and close and we are hard put to find a parking space and then to fight our way through the crowds that are thronging toward the center of town, the ranks of the Prizzitani being very much swollen by both foreign and Sicilian tourists. Tonino greets several of his students from the university, then most unexpectedly a hand claps down on my shoulder. It is Nicolò, a man who served on the school board with me. He is a native of Prizzi, a linesman for the telephone company, and after a period of technical schooling in Milan now lives in Palermo, where, fortified by his northern experience, he has become very active in the local section of the Communist party, in the neighborhood council, the trade union, and the school board. He proved a most unusual and valuable addition to the school board, able and willing to work on two levels in a way that is rare among Sicilians, ready to debate the ideological or educational implications of a policy decision and at the same time to fix a light plug or repair a busted slide projector himself rather than trusting to the lengthy meanderings of the school bureaucracy. But today he is here in Prizzi to be with his family and to see the devils dance.
We are lucky to run into him. We have arrived too late for the distribution of the cannateddi, Prizzi’s special Easter cakes, but Nicolò carries us off to the Circolo della Caccia, the Hunters’ Club, which the Chamber of Commerce has been using as its headquarters for the occasion, and there he sets various cousins scurrying around to unearth some last undistributed cannateddi for us, oval cakes of biscuit dough braided about an egg.
Cannateddi in hand, we follow Nicolò out again and push our way along the main street, which dips sharply down, then rises again in the distance. Nicolò guides us to the lowest point in the street, where he tells us to stay put, this being a grandstand seat for watching the triumph of Good over Evil. The street is filled with people, strolling, talking, and shouting across from one crowded balcony to another. Here at the bottom we can look up in either direction at a sea of faces. A small and hornèd vortex is descending upon us from the eastern end: the devils are coming, accompanied by the clanking of their chains and the squealing and shouting of a swarm of little boys. There are three masked figures, two devils escorting Death. Death is dressed in yellow, a big, loose-fitting yellow jump suit and a yellow mask of soldered tin covering his whole head in the shape of a skull, in which have been cut eyeholes, a black dent for the nose, and a mouth grinning around a few long and crooked teeth. Under his arm is a crossbow with which he menaces the crowd. The devils have rust-colored jump suits, ample enough to accommodate a variety of figures over the years, and their masks are large, flat tin ovals, painted brown, with curved horns, long noses, and tongues sticking out from leering mouths. The backs of their heads and shoulders are covered by heavy, long-haired goat pelts, black for one, white for the other, a touch of the genuine that is somehow much more menacing than the masks themselves. The multicolored stripes of Adidas sneakers show underneath the baggy trouser legs.
Comfortable shoes are a must for the devils, whose loping, lolloping dance betrays considerable weariness. Well it may, says Nicolò: they have been dancing ever since the hour of the Crucifixion on Friday, chasing about the town making mischief and teasing all they encounter. Nicolò was a devil one year and assures us that the costumes are unbearably hot and heavy, especially on a sunny day like today—the only thing that keeps you going is the wine. Anyone whom Death manages to hit with his crossbow is obliged to stand the devils a round at the nearest tavern, and if Death is a good shot, they all have quite a bit under their jump suits by the end of the day.
There is movement up at either end of the street, and for the second time today we are shoved back against the buildings by white-gloved policemen. The street is long and I can barely make out the Madonna to the east, Christ to the west, and just hear the loudest notes of the band. Down the hill come the forces of Good, two angels in armor, with cardboard wings, red capes, ropes of beads and gilt chains across their breasts, swords in hand, and strange flat-topped helmets that Francesco is quick to notice have been cut out from Alemagna panettone boxes. The devils at first have the best of these bizarre apparitions; a brief skirmish leads to a hasty retreat, and then a counterattack. Back and forth they run and clash and feint as the statues continue their slow but steady descent. The battlefield shrinks as the statues draw nearer, the dance and the swordwork grow more and more frenzied as the devils find themselves hemmed in between the advancing figures, until a last and desperate leap marks the meeting between the risen Christ and the rejoicing Madonna, and Death and the devils fall to earth, vanquished and immobile.
This scene will be repeated four more times this evening, the last time in the dark in the big piazza in front of the Matrice, at the top of the hill. Nicolò urges us to stay, but it is a long way back to Bosco and it is already half past five, so we say good-bye. Drunk with all that we have seen, my cheeks burning from the sun and wind, and my eyes watering, I can hardly take in the landscape we drive through, nor do I notice where we are when Tonino turns his attention from the road to give me a reproachful glance.
“When I was a boy, I spent all my time avoiding processions!”
Until quite recently, Easter Monday morning found the country roads around Alcamo and Partinico full of cart-borne families heading out to the fields for their picnics. The horses were strapped into holiday harness, with bells jingling, brightly colored plumes and woolen pompoms nodding, and the sun flashing on tiny round mirrors. Behind them, balanced on two high wheels and beautifully carved and painted, with gay primary colors depicting the triumphs of Count Roger over the Saracens or of Garibaldi over the Bourbons, the carts themselves were bursting with people: the grandmother in black, sitting stiffly in a straight chair and holding a large black umbrella over her head to keep off the sun, a flock of grandchildren tucked in around her feet, the adults squeezed onto the driver’s seat; the family dog, tied to the axle of the cart, ran briskly along behind. (One of the great chestnuts of Sicilian humor is the touring Englishman who stops one of these carts and makes the peasant untie the dog, to the considerable bewilderment of both man and beast.)
This is a rare sight nowadays, since most families have a car to travel in, and many peasants even have a summer house, albeit tiny, by the sea that they prefer on holidays to the scene of their daily labors. But some still choose the countryside: I am out early in the morning, pruning the lavender bushes that border my herb garden, and as I work I can hear the landscape come alive with laughter, with shouting children and calling mothers, the voices traveling a long way in the quiet air. Some cheerful traditionalist has brought a record player that vibrates with the nasal twanging of the marranzanu, the iron mouth harp, over and over in a tireless tarantella. Before long I will see thin columns of smoke begin to rise here and there on the hillsides: you need a lot of embers for roasted artichokes, which are obligatory today and marvelous anytime. To achieve this apotheosis of the artichoke, you must grasp it firmly by the stem end and pound it vigorously on a stone until the leaves flatten and open out enough to allow you to poke in toward the heart a large pinch of garlic chopped up fine together with mint, salt, and pepper. Olive oil in generous quantity follows upon the garlic, and the artichoke is then placed on ash-covered coals to roast gently for about forty-five minutes until the tough outer leaves have charred and the tender heart has steamed in its own juice and absorbed the oil and the seasonings in one of the world’s happiest marriages.
The whining of the chain saw drowns out the distant music: Tonino and Francesco have decided to tackle the palm and give it the definitive pruning. They cut and saw and chop all morning, carving out with surgical delicacy at least ten large clumps of fronds and almost twice as many little shoots. The final effect is very peculiar: the trunk goes up for about ten feet and ends in a large tuft, just like any proper palm, but halfway up four big branches curve up and out, their scratchy plumes waving to the four points of the compass like a badly smoking candelabrum. I cannot come out and say that I don’t like the fruit of so much hard and prickly labor and can only hope that this is a good omen, that having reduced this heraldic device from chaos to mere eccentricity, we will now proceed to operate in like fashion upon ourselves.
I must start early for Palermo, leaving Tonino and Francesco to finish putting the severed palm shoots to root and to close the house, because I have to go via the airport to meet Natalia, who is arriving from Milan. The trip from the airport to Palermo, usually only twenty minutes, is very slow tonight: all Palermo is returning from its Pasquetta picnic in a triple line of slow-moving cars whose red taillights flicker like last embers from the picnic fires. Natalia tells me about her Milanese Easter, rainy and urban, full of movies and nonstop confiding with her cousin. I describe to her our parade of processions and tell her how much I missed having her to share my delight in the wildflowers. After a while we fall silent, tired from our different experiences and mesmerized by the red lights that stop and start in a tedious crawl in front of us. I remember earlier evenings when I came upon the carts creaking back to town, grandmother’s umbrella folded, a woolen rug over her shoulders against the night air and sleepy heads propped up against her knees, the oil lantern that swung from the axle throwing a swaying circle of dim light on the asphalt below.
The darkness outside the car windows conceals an endless row of little villas, summer houses that have checkered with red tile and white stucco the empty beaches, stony fields, and olive groves that lay along this piece of coastline when I first came to Sicily. So much has changed, so much is being lost, so much altered in the attempt to conserve it. The quintessential message of the Tràpani and the Castelvetrano processions has allowed them to survive intact their inclusion in the tourist itinerary, but the pagan exuberance of Caltabellotta is surely doomed to succumb to self-consciousness. Prizzi seems neither here nor there; we had the impression that repeating the ritual now serves more to accommodate tardy tourists than to satisfy different neighborhoods, but perhaps we were suffering from a surfeit of pageantry by the time we got to Prizzi, and watched the devils dance with jaded eyes.
My doubts about the survival of the authentic spirit of the Easter processions are in part quelled the next day when I read the following article in the morning newspaper:
There is Passion and passion!
The traditional Good Friday procession that, even at Leonforte, represents the high point of the Easter ceremonies, was transformed this year into a gigantic free-for-all, which the police and the carabinieri were hard put to control. The coffin of the crucified Christ and the Madonna Addolorata were surrounded by a sea of punches, slaps, and shoves, of shouts and swear words, which paralyzed the long cortege of the faithful. The cause of it all was the dispute that for several years now has divided the senior priest of Leonforte, Father Ragusa, from the confraternities of the “Christo morto” and of the “Addolorata.”
The bone of contention is the organization of the Easter week celebrations and in particular of the Friday night procession, which is a very old tradition at Leonforte and attracts a big crowd of tourists and people from the neighboring towns. A further source of tension comes from the new statue of the Madonna Addolorata, made in Malta and shipped to Leonforte, a novelty that has divided the town.
It was clear right from the beginning of the rite that feelings in the church were running high. The priests began to detach the statue of the dead Christ from the cross in order to lay it in the coffin, and this ceremony, which should be carried out in devout silence, was instead accompanied by noisy bickering. The discussion revolved around the statue of the Madonna: which one was to go out of the church, the new one from Malta or the old one? The senior priest tried to cut short the argument and harshly scolded the representatives of the confraternities, but these gave tit for tat, and the shouts could be heard over the singing of the congregation. Finally the procession got under way, but not for long. Some say it was the fault of the priests, who were urging the faithful to step lively and get the procession over wíth. Some say that the confraternities were responsible because they didn’t like how the procession was organized and wouldn’t lump it. In any case it ended in a free-for-all: the air around the statues rang with “words that shouldn’t be repeated” and the two factions lit into each other.
Conclusions: the police and the carabinieri are preparing their reports, and the opposing factions are organizing a town meeting to determine how the people of Leonforte want their Easter week celebrations. Meanwhile, the traditional Sunday procession, the “Encounter,” has been canceled.
Article by Melo Pontorno in Il Giornale di Sicilia, April 4, 1983
Sicily continues to make the headlines in the national newspapers as well as the local ones: right after Easter the Christian Democratic party announces the nomination of a woman as mayor of Palermo. If she is elected, Elda Pucci, the head of the newborn division of the Children’s Hospital and preferred pediatrician to the upper-middle-class children of Palermo, will be the first woman to be mayor of a major Italian city.
The news is greeted with equal doses of interest and skepticism. Everyone is startled to see the dam of male supremacy crumbling at what was supposed to be one of its strongest points, but few people believe that Dr. Pucci, whose political experience is limited to three years as a city councilor, can ever be much more than a puppet of the Demochristian bosses who are trying to create for their party a new image, free from the suspicion of collusion with the Mafia. Dr. Pucci has a record of rigorous and courageous behavior at the hospital but is profuse in her expressions of admiration and respect for some of her more dubious, if not infamous, predecessors and fellow party members: either she is much more naïve than she seems or she is a great deal less sincere. Time will tell—to a delighted audience: nothing constitutes a more pleasing pastime for the Palermitani than cortiggbiu, “court gossip,” be it the chattering of the women in a crumbling courtyard of the old city or the sycophantic back scratching that goes on in the courts of power. One of Palermo’s least attractive characteristics is the pleasure it derives from destructive criticism of anyone who takes an initiative, and in the coming months the city will be watching avidly for the hair in the egg—the Italian version of the fly in the ointment—and waiting with ill-concealed amusement for the defeat of its new mayor, who has already been described by one Palermo intellectual as “a butterfly immobilized upon a pin.”
But the attention for Mayor Pucci is short-lived, brushed aside by a spray of bullets. “Massacre in Sicily” reads the headline of a national paper today. Twelve dead and five wounded in twenty-four hours. The body count is evenly divided: six here in Palermo and six in the east between Catania and Gela. Special correspondents arrive from all over Italy to paint a lurid picture of a city rotting in its structures and its morals, permeated by the stench of uncollected garbage and by the arrogance and violence of an economy and a power structure based on heroin and bullets. The authorities and the journalists discover that a woman and her eight children have been sleeping in a car parked outside the one-room house of a married daughter ever since her husband was murdered more than a year ago. Local politicians are arrested on charges of graft and corruption and then released in time to be included in the list of candidates for the coming national elections.
The newspaper articles and the debates on the radio are full of quotes and telephone calls from Palermitani bewailing the horrors of life in this city, as if all its inhabitants felt flattened by the steamroller of Mafia power. Yet in most cases it is hard not to entertain the suspicion that these protests are part of a recital of anguished impotence that requires far less effort than would be necessary to search for an alternative, viable, and constructive way of living in Palermo. Closing an eye here, turning a deaf ear there, most Palermitani have learned to navigate quite comfortably in these foul marshes, or to convince themselves at least that they live on an island within an island. “As long as they are shooting it out between themselves, the more dead the better!”
At the bottom of the front page, day after day, in a basso continuo of rumbling and belching, the news of Etna’s eruption continues, keeping pace with the slow but steady descent of the three branches of lava. The ski lift and the observatory have long since been swallowed up, the people who worked there and elsewhere in the tourist industry are jobless, and it is the lower slopes, the scattered villas and summer camps, the vineyards and the fruit orchards, that now constitute the daily sacrifice to the great three-headed red dragon slithering down the mountainside. Three towns lie in the projected path—Nicolosi, Belpasso, and Regalne—and although at its present speed it will be a long time before the lava could reach the first houses, the inhabitants are justifiably uneasy and demand to know what the government intends to do. The government has no idea; among other things, it is against the law to deviate the lava flow in any way, and no one wants the responsibility of deciding where it is to end up. We have the ultimate waste disposal problem.
The debate over Etna offers a peculiar counterpoint to the discussions in the west. If some prefer to see the Mafia as a force of nature, the inevitable expression of human aggressiveness aggravated by historical circumstance, there can be no doubt about Etna. The amoral and impartial violence of the volcano is somehow fascinating and almost refreshing after the morass of moral responsibilities in Palermo. The conservationists are looking on with glee as Etna takes her revenge on the villas and tourist establishments that have violated both nature and the zoning laws. The authorities wring their hands, caught between the lava’s descent and the rising anger and impatience of the local population. Meanwhile the latter has decided to put the question into more competent hands. Repeating a ritual that has successfully stopped the flow of past eruptions, they will this afternoon carry the veil of Saint Agatha, virgin, martyr, and protectress of Catania, in procession before the advancing tide of destruction.
This is another procession I am loath to miss, but my presence is required at Bosco. The heat has come, right after Easter, an early and unwelcome accomplice to the drought, and I can no longer put off in anticipation of rain the planting of the corn seed that has arrived from the United States.
Very little corn is grown in Sicily, but strangely enough pedlars hawk corn on the cob on the beach at Mondello, Palermo’s fashionable watering spot. It is, however, horrid stuff, cold and clammy cobs of tough boiled orange beads that an American would be ashamed to offer to a pig, so I have hybrid seed flown over from the States—Butter and Cream, Silver Queen, Golden Bantam—paying twice as much for the airmail postage as I do for the seeds themselves. Every year I struggle to explain to Turiddu how to plant it, since he has no experience with corn, but the fact that I am a woman, an American, and a padrona far outweighs his lack of experience. So last year I told him to do exactly the opposite of what I wanted and had somewhat more success than in previous years. But wages have gone up and we can no longer afford to pay Turiddu for our caprices; this year I intend to do the planting myself.
If winter works miracles along the upper road to Bosco, spring is the season to take the lower track, tunneling between high green banks that close out the view on either side. In summer this is an avenue of bleached, dust-covered brambles and canes, shady except at noon, the dirt smooth as talcum powder under bare feet, the air humming with insects and heavy with the resinous perfumes of the Mediterranean underbrush. Startled turtle doves and lizards flit in front of the car in the daylight, toads and wild rabbits leap from the headlights at night. But now, in April, we drive between walls of color. Each leg of the road has its own vegetation, and each turn produces a new variation on spring’s basic scheme of purple and yellow.
The first stretch cuts in straight from the highway, closed in on either side by a steep hedgerow of blackberries that are just preparing to flower, the first of the pale lavender blossoms overpowered by the white-flecked purple brilliance of the vetch. A bigger, more colorful cousin of the tares that were sown with the wheat in the Biblical parable, the vetch clings to the other plants in the hedgerow, hoisting itself up until the time comes to unfurl its buds, so many tiny purple flowers so perfectly arranged to catch the sun and the passing insects’ attention that they glow like royal banners let down for some triumphant passage.
At the end of this first stretch the road runs into the reggio trazzera, a royal cart track originally financed and built by Sabaudian good intentions after the unification of Italy, now a muddy morass in winter and a succession of stony ruts and sandy skids in summer. Theoretically, all the farmers who use this road could unite in a consortium and obtain a government contribution to improve and surface it, but in order to make the road wide enough to qualify for state help it would be necessary to persuade the landowners whose fields border on the track to relinquish and donate a strip of land about two feet wide, a task so hopeless that I fear Tonino will never even try, although an improved road is essential if we are ever to live here all year round.
The royal track marks the edge of the plain; through the years a river of traffic and rainwater has dug a bed whose high banks hide from view the flat fields to the north and the gentle slopes leading to the southern hills. Here the germander is in bloom, low bushes of gray-green leaves and gray-blue flowers, and purple star anemones, and rockroses, their crumpled white petals and yellow centers easily confused with those of the true white roses that grow here too. Farther on the wild garlic is bursting into bloom. A cluster of delicate white bells strung from a single stem, wild garlic is a terrible temptation: so lovely to look at, so long-lived once cut, but so overwhelmingly garlic-scented as to make the best-aired room uninhabitable. The street vendors in Palermo pass them off on the unwary; I once heard them being sold as lilies of the valley to an elderly lady, much to the disgust of her chauffeur, who was holding them at arm’s length while his mistress paid the bill.
At the foot of the hill we leave the royal track and climb south between low banks and vineyards, where full sunlight brings out vivid colors again: crimson sulla that has escaped from some past planting to sow itself each year along the roadside, more rockroses, fuchsia-colored here, and the strange crook of the honeywort with its dangling yellow-and-purple bells, the intense blue of the bugloss, erba viperina, used by the Greeks to cure viper bite, and the purple-blue of the pitch trefoil.
At the top of the rise, beyond the two small houses of our nearest neighbors, our own house comes into view. This is the back door, the working side of Bosco: it is big and bare and graceless from this angle, the windowless walls and big iron door of the cantina where the wine is kept seem unwelcoming and uninteresting, and the flower beds are hidden behind a big ramp of earth and stones that serves for loading the tractor onto the truck. We drive past the kitchen door and beyond the house, park the car under the budding mulberry trees, and walk back toward Bosco’s frivolous side.
The last of the narcissus, withered and papery, are lost to sight in the brilliance of the freesia, the ranunculi, and the big yellow calendulas. For the first time dark purple spears thrust up from the iris I planted two years ago around three sides of the stone seat that was originally the base of the old wine press. This giant brick of gray travertine is one more instance of my fortuitous landscaping; one might think that its site, on the edge of the road, in the shade of the palm, was the result of careful if rather uninspired planning. It isn’t. That’s as far as the bulldozer managed to haul it from the about-to-be-rebuilt cantina before the steel cable broke. I feel a great affinity for that stone: surrounded by flowers, we both strive to convey the impression that we are not mere flotsam and jetsam, but that intention brought us to such unexpected shores.
The afternoon is long and warm; I putter about the garden well into the sunset, snipping off the dead heads of the grape hyacinths, discovering the first blossoms on the strawberry plants and on the white musk rose, and smelling the meager flowering of my poor stunted lilac bushes, inappropriate and ill at ease in the Mediterranean setting to which I have constrained them in tribute to the New England garden of my childhood vacations. As the light fades to lavender and dusk I realize that, unheralded and unobserved, there has been a changing of the guard. The swallows are back, chittering and swooping above the eaves in search of their evening meal, while the robins that winter in the almond trees and add their spot of red to the rosebush outside the kitchen window have gone without my noticing, having checked out only with the magpies, elegant scolds who are, together with the crows and the sparrows, our only permanent residents.
A distant mewing call comes from the olives in the valley, announcing the return of the little Athenian owls who used to live in the eaves of the Blundas’ roof, which sticks out at a right angle, eye-level to our upstairs corridor windows. We would watch them from the windows, and they would stare back, shifting from foot to foot in a worried dance and clucking angrily at this invasion of their privacy. One flew in the bathroom window one evening; I walked in to find him sitting on the radiator glaring at me, as outraged as if I had caught him with his pants down.
To our great distress the cat ate two of the owls, and now the survivors come no closer than the olive grove, but we can still hear them calling throughout the night. I wait in vain, however, for the return of the falcons who used to nest in the pits and hollows of the stable walls before we rebuilt the house. Sometimes a falcon will still circle lazily overhead on a hot summer’s day, but none has found a place to rest in the new house. This is a grave disappointment, for the house’s full name, from the contrada in which it stands, is Bosco Falconeria, the “Falconry Woods.” I fancy that Frederick II, master falconer and author of history’s first scientific treatise on hawking, hunted in these hills while he was laying siege to the last rebels who had taken refuge on the mountain behind Alcamo. But the woods have long since been cut down, and the falcons will surely never return to nest in a place as frequently, if intermittently, inhabited as Bosco is now.
The next morning Tonino and Francesco plow the vegetable garden with the big rotary tiller so that Natalia and I can plant the corn, Natalia staking the rows and sprinkling the seed in the furrows that I dig with the hoe. A Sicilian hoe, with its wide forged-iron blade and thick, stubby wooden handle, weighs at least eight pounds and must be brought up over one’s head and then down hard with a shove from the lower back muscles, if it is to make any impression at all on the heavy clay soil. In the early days roars of laughter would ring out across the fields as Turiddu Vivona watched me struggling to master the beast, but nowadays I can wield the hoe with what at least looks like ease and effectiveness.
We plant some squash too, more American imports, butternut, acorn, and pattypan, whose delicate white scalloping fascinates the Sicilians. But the soil is already very dry, and if Demeter doesn’t pull a few strings with the rain god there will be neither corn nor squash at Bosco this summer.
The spreading tide of modern construction on the outskirts of the city has engulfed what remains of these villas; high-rise condominiums dwarf those lying nearer the center, while smaller houses, commercial enterprises, junkyards, and repair shops have encroached upon the more remote, flooding the surrounding parks and invading the stables and the outbuildings. Spare parts and rusting chassis prop up toppling Grecian urns, and laundry flaps on the scraggy remains of exotic shrubbery.
The later villas, the more famous and splendid examples of this fashion, are to be found in Bagheria to the east: Villa Valguarnera, Villa Trabia, Villa Palagonia, this last produced by the warped creativity of a humpbacked prince, who ringed his garden walls with grotesque stone monsters and lined his ballroom with distorting mirrors, so that all his guests appeared crooked too and wherever he looked he could keep a jealous eye on his beautiful young wife.
The villas to the west in the Piano dei Colli are smaller and somewhat simpler, although almost all of them bear the hallmark of the Sicilian baroque, the double staircase that curves up the facade to the piano nobile. The inventiveness of the Sicilian architects lay in the variation with which they were able to treat this theme: each family wanted its staircase to be similar but unique. At the Villa de Cordova the curve of the staircase is repeated in the wisteria vine below it, and Maria Vica and I have a long-standing date to see it at the height of its flowering.
It is already hot at ten o’clock when Maria Vica comes by to pick me up, and a slight haze tempers hue and texture, the perfect light for the lichened walls and lavender flowers that we are to look at. The winding country road that once led past quiet villas to the little fishing village of Sferracavallo is now a major artery for traffic heading to the autostrada for western Sicily. The stream of cars whisks us past the big Villa Boscogrande, a fashionable nightclub lodged in the Lampedusa family villa that was the setting for the opening chapter in The Leopard, and drivers honk impatiently as we brake to turn left through the Villa de Cordova gateway, the shape of the urn-topped pillars barely discernible under a swathing of tattered ivy.
The charm of the villa lies in its scale, its perfect, intimate, livable proportions. The courtyard where we find ourselves is less than a hundred feet long and half again as wide. A low row of stables encloses it on either side, their flat roofs topped by an openwork stone balustrade that flows around the courtyard from the gate, borders the terrace that runs across the second story of the villa, then sweeps down and around the curving arms of the double staircase. The simple facade above the terrace is broken by shallow pilasters whose rich golden brown stands out against the pale gold of the walls and the mossy gray of the stonework.
The courtyard itself is a tangle of unkempt and faded green: four palm trees droop gray and withered fronds over weedy gravel and leggy thistles. In the central bed a hibiscus bush, unpruned and shapeless, is surrounded by spikes of deep-purple iris and the pale violet flowers of a rambling scented geranium, thus stating in the foreground the range of hue to be admitted within the curve of the staircase, where the thick gray trunk of the wisteria vine echoes exactly the arc of the broad stone banister, swirling up like a spiral of smoke to lose itself in the cloud of lavender flowers suspended in the stairs’ embrace, a watery cascade of purples and violets laced with the first tiny leaves of green.
Below the wisteria an arch leads underneath the house to some rear courtyard: a peasant woman with a washtub balanced on her hip peers out at us from the shadows. A pop song from a transistor radio accompanies the hammering noises that come from one of the stables, but the villa itself is closed; the upper windows are boarded up behind their broken panes, and slatted shutters losing their paint bar the lower ones. The structure itself looks sound: surely this villa is not in any danger of falling. Having withstood revolutions and earthquakes it will merely flake away, a sliver of lichened stone here, a sprinkle of plaster dust there, neglect nibbling at the marble and sanding down the stucco.
The sun that filters through the overcast floods the courtyard with the same warm, nostalgic glow that lights Lampedusa’s memoirs of his childhood in the villa of Santa Margherita Belice, Places of My Infancy. To see these villas in this light is to be exempted from mental acrobatics; it blocks out the gray winter of their present decay, the contempt with which Sicily treats her past; it tempers the harsh glare of a Sicilian summer sun baking the vast feudal holdings, three-quarters of the island, that were milked dry to build such mansions, each penny that could be squeezed from starving peasant labor invested in pomp and luxury rather than in roads, new crops, irrigation. I am grateful for such an exemption: it is too much of an effort to juggle all at once these other seasons together with the exquisite taste and loveliness of the flower-lit facade before me now and to keep all three aloft in some coherent construct.
Maria Vica has something else to show me, a recent discovery she is eager to share. We leave the Villa de Cordova and make our way to Acquasanta, a little fishing village hidden in the westernmost corner of the Bay of Palermo in the shadow of Villa Igea, Palermo’s most glamorous hotel. The narrow strip of land between sea and steep mountain has offered little foothold for the city’s advance, and despite considerable new construction, Acquasanta retains the character of a village.
We park the car in the piazza, a square swaying with tall, sparse palms that look out over a little port cluttered with pleasure boats, a few magnificent yachts, and dozens of brightly striped fishing dinghies. Maria Vica leads me into an alleyway, around and behind a turn-of-the-century house with two doors leading, according to the words carved over their lintels, to hot baths and cold baths. We follow the alley down into a courtyard half filled by a voluminous tangle of vines, wisteria, and bougainvillea knotted together by white rambler roses, which have escaped the pruning shears of the Villa Igea gardeners and tumbled over the hotel wall. A little two-storied house occupies one side of the courtyard, its facade proclaiming in faded letters “Establishment for Mineral Baths: Sacerdoti Pandolfo Bros.”
The upper windows of this house are shuttered, but some sort of life goes on downstairs: an old man in an undershirt is repairing a motorbike inside the front door, a young woman in slippers flaps out of the house and up the alley, then comes back shortly with a can of Coke in hand, giving only a quick, uninterested glance at my attempts to focus my camera in this narrow space. What interests me lies to the right of the house, where six feet of railing and a gate mark a passageway that tunnels under the second story of the house and opens on a little ravine, where natural rock and sunlight are visible, thick foliage and a faint tinkle testifying to a vestige of the thermal waters.
Maria Vica has brought me here to look at the tiles that cover the walls of this passageway, hand-painted majolica squares each bearing a grape leaf and a generous bunch of purple grapes, whose tendrils twist and link from tile to tile, encasing the walls in a network of curving branches and purple clusters, a naïve echo of the wisteria we have seen so much of this morning. On the wall opposite the gate a large marble plaque reads:
THIS MINERAL WATER
CONSIDERED SALUTARY BY THE ANCIENTS
WAS EMPLOYED FOR THE REBELLIOUS OBSTRUCTIONS OF THE BOWELS
AGAINST CHRONIC RHEUMATISM GOUT GALLSTONES PROSTATE ETC.
SCIENCE, HAVING THEN STUDIED ITS CHEMICAL QUALITIES,
SAID TO IT: SULPHATE, MAGNESIAC, FERRUGINOUS!
THUS CONFIRMING ITS THERAPEUTIC ACTION
IN THE AFORESAID MALADIES.
CLINICAL EXPERIENCE SANCTIONED ITS EMPLOYMENT
WITH REPEATED PROVEN SUCCESS.
PATIENTS PRAISED ITS EFFICACY
FOR THE BENEFITS THEY DERIVED.
ITS DIVULGATION FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY WAS PROMOTED
BY IMPORTANT AND ILLUSTRIOUS CITIZENS
BY MERITORIOUS AND INDUSTRIOUS DOCTORS.
IN HOMAGE
THE JURY OF THE NATIONAL EXPOSITION OF PALERMO
GAVE IT A MOST DESERVED AWARD.
JUNE 7, 1892
From one courtyard to another we have jumped almost two centuries. The innocent faith in science, industry, and progress carved into this piece of marble has nothing to do with the weary sophistication of the Villa de Cordova. We are fully into the last splendid blossoming of the city, the Belle Epoque, when the huge industrial fortunes of the Florios, of the Whitakers and the Inghams, English merchants of Marsala wine, joined with the dwindling fortunes of the aristocracy to finance Palermo’s last great moment of architectural glory, the villas and the town houses designed by the Art Nouveau architect Ernesto Basile. It is the period of the Teatro Massimo, whose stage is second in size in Europe only to that of the Paris Opéra, and of the, Villa Igea next door, whose halls, frescoed with maidens wading through water lilies and carved into sinuous floral designs, welcomed the royalty of all Europe, kings and kaisers, who considered Palermo to be a watering spot of the greatest gaiety and opulence.
The First World War, which was soon to extinguish this last brief blaze, seems to have smothered taste as well. After the pretentious monumentality of the Fascist epoch, pure unadulterated ugliness has taken over, “modern” cement and stucco blocks that rapidly age and discolor into uniform dreariness, whimsical villas afflicted with wrought iron and tile on which even the most luxuriant landscaping cannot confer charm. Not that the means are lacking: if Palermo ranks seventieth among Italian cities in per capita income, it holds seventh place for per capita consumption, a mysterious discrepancy that can be explained only by heroin, graft, and tax evasion. But licit or illicit, it all flows into the status symbols of mass consumption: BMW cars, Gucci luggage, Les Must de Cartier.
Maria Vica and I still have some time to spare before we return to our respective duties, and we decide to continue our drive out past Villa Igea and along the narrow road that runs between the cliffs of Monte Pellegrino and the sea. We are leaving Palermo behind us: the city gives way to summer beach houses, the sun burns through the haze and lights up the sparkling sea, the glistening white of the stucco, the bright crimson and fuchsia of the bougainvillea, the tropic green of palms and banana plants in exotic backyards. Two-thirds of the way around the mountain we arrive at the beach of Mondello. The broad, tree-lined streets are peaceful now in the spring noon, the little houses with their gingerbread turrets and neo-Pompeian swags, Belle Epoque scaled down to a bourgeois pocketbook, mostly shuttered still; the beach itself, a wide cove between two mountains, is still free of cabins and crowds, with only a student or two skipping school to lie in the sun and a few hardy German tourists actually swimming. We drive on past the Bathing Establishment, a vast, ivory-colored wedding cake standing on piles in the water, and the little fishing port, crowded with seafood restaurants and stalls selling boiled octopus, raw mussels, or dark purple sea urchins that taste of iodine.
The sight of the sea and the smell of the clean air tell me that I am ready to turn my back on Palermo, on its opulent history and present decay. I want landscapes bleached clean by the sea and the sun, the illusion of classical simplicity, the pungent smells and sounds of the Sicilian summer.
I have convinced everyone, however, that the proper reward for all this hard work is a trip to Erice. Or at least almost everyone: Francesco, just turned fifteen, has lost interest in family outings, so it is Natalia, Tonino, and I who set off on Monday morning.
The mountains that form an almost unbroken chain from the Straits of Messina west along the northern coast of Sicily run past Palermo, swing round the gulfs of Carini and Castellammare, and then reach out to Capo San Vito, the western tip of the island, whose abrupt outline and winking lighthouse we can see from Bosco. The southern shore is much flatter, however, a long coastal plain that ranges from the Arab near Tràpani, Marsala, and Mazzara to the Greek of Selinunte, Agrigento, and Gela. This plain, which is very broad in its western tract, is broken only at the beginning, where Mount Erice rises to guard the port of Tràpani. Erice is a smallish mountain, really, only 2,454 feet high, but the improbability of its position, all alone at the edge of the sea, gives an impression of greater height. And of great mystery: this is one of the most sacred spots of the Mediterranean, sacred long before man had discovered the means of recording and transmitting the reasons for this reverence.
Actually, Erice was never Greek: it belonged to the Elymians, who together with the Sicels and the Sicans inhabited Sicily when the Greeks began to colonize the island in the eighth century B.C. Very little is known about these peoples, neither when nor from where they came to Sicily, but the Elymians are the most mysterious of all; the one distinct trait that can be ascribed to them is a remarkable capacity to absorb more complex cultures, whether it be the Greek, as in the Elymian city of Segesta, or the Carthaginian, as in Erice.
The lack of factual information about the origins of Erice is compensated for by a great abundance of myth, which traces its founding back to the very beginning of creation, when the Titans revolted against their father, Uranus. Cronus castrated his father with a sickle and threw both sickle (hence the name Sicily) and genitals into the sea off Cape Drepanum (Tràpani). To mark the spot where her ancestor’s genitals fell, Aphrodite rose from the waves in a cockleshell chariot and created the mountain of Erice, claiming it as her own. It was here that the goddess brought Butes, the Argonaut, when he succumbed to the sirens’ song and threw himself into the sea, and here that she bore him a son, Eryx, who gave the mountain its name.
The Carthaginians worshiped Aphrodite here in the guise of Astarte: each spring a flock of white doves was released toward North Africa and the sister shrine of Sicca Veneria. After nine days the flock would return with a red dove in the lead, Astarte, symbol of fertility, whose return signaled the reawakening of nature. The Greeks arriving in Sicily also took up the worship of Aphrodite at Erice. When Daedalus, unlike his unfortunate son, Icarus, managed to escape successfully from Crete by means of the wax-and-feather wings and fly safely to Sicily, he entered the service of Kokalos, king of the Sicans, and is said to have forged a magnificent golden honeycomb as an offering to her shrine there.
The Romans maintained the cult and the shrine, especially after the Sibyl advised seeking the help of Venus Erycina during the Second Punic War, but the Elymian town appears to have been abandoned until the advent of the Saracens, who built a fortress on an outcropping connected to the bulk of the mountain by a narrow bridge of rock. This practically invincible citadel was besieged by Count Roger in 1077 and only fell thanks to the intervention of Saint Julian, who loosed a pack of hounds on the unfortunate infidels. (From then on the mountain was known as Monte San Giuliano until Mussolini restored its classical name.) After this Erice became a medieval town, and nothing of its classical heritage remains today, except for a length of Punic wall and perhaps something in the faces of its women, to whom Ibn Jubayr, true to character even in the very last entry in his diary before he set sail from Tràpani to Spain, attributes “the fame of being the most beautiful on the island—may Allah soon deliver them as slaves to the Muslims.”
The feast of Aphrodite Erycina was celebrated on the twenty-third of April: I have come as close as I can, and she is showing us her appreciation by giving us an absolutely perfect day. We speed across western Sicily under a cloudless sky, and the red carpet of sulla flowers is out to welcome us as we drive along an avenue of golden fireworks, the bright flowering of the acacia trees that line the autostrada. As we take the turnoff west, the temple of Segesta floats briefly above us before we are sucked into the dark of a long tunnel and spewed forth onto the plain of Tràpani, gently rolling hills of green wheat and red sulla, the chartreuse of the burgeoning vineyards and the warm rust of bare fields waiting to break out in a rash of bright yellow melons.
Erice beckons us all the way with its dark green slopes and its ragged crest of castle towers. Just before Tràpani we circle round to take the road up the northern flank, around switchbacks and hairpin turns that swing us back and forth, like a slide projector gone haywire, now a dazzling view straight down to the bay of Bonagìa, sparkling azure and turquoise before the distant purple mountains of the Cape, and then back to the slope we are climbing, cool shady pine forests carpeted with swatches of color, with borage and calendula, with thick pink clusters of Fedia cornucopiae, and solitary scarlet dots of asparagus pea. Here and there the dark green of the pines is interrupted by the brilliant fuchsia blush of the flowering Judas tree. There is no room to park the car, fortunately, or I should forsake Aphrodite and be off like a truffle hound, snuffling through the underbrush in pursuit of Flora.
At the end of its climb, the road circles round to the south of the summit and finishes in a broad piazza filled with cars and tourist buses, which with the town at its back looks out over an almost vertical drop to the plain twenty-four hundred feet below. If it were an absolutely clear day we could see Africa, but as usual the horizon is veiled over by haze and we have to be content with the nearer checkerboard of brown and green fields edged by the uneven line of the Sicilian coast skirting the Stagnone, the lagoon of Marsala where the small island of Mothya, once a thriving Phoenician port, is just visible. Land fades gradually and geometrically to water across the grid of the saline, the ancient salt flats with their windmills, tiny from this distance. To the west the Egadi Islands float in the haze, the dark, humpbacked turtles of Levanzo, Marittimo, and Favignana, and at our feet the city of Tràpani stretches the long arms of its breakwaters into the blue.
Beneath the low stone parapet that borders the piazza, the mountain has hung out all its banners to welcome back Astarte, to celebrate Aphrodite: yellow, orange, celeste, and midnight blue; mayflowers, calendulas, borage, and purple vetch; great bolts of silk unrolling as they fall.
It is almost noon when we head into the warren of narrow streets, but we have no fixed itinerary to respect other than a visit to the fourteenth-century Matrice with its carved portal and intricate rose window, the purchase of Erice’s special almond cakes in a pastry shop just off the main square, and then, after lunch, the castle. Erice is a town to wander in; its charm is one of scale and contrast. Tiny streets patterned with gray cobbles wind among low houses, stark peasant dwellings, or little palaces with baby baroque facades that testify to former wealth, and innumerable abandoned churches, boarded up and crumbling. The streets themselves are silent and empty; low voices and the ring of a child’s laughter come through the gates that allow a glimpse of sheltered courtyards, short flights of stairs, fruit trees, and carefully tended flowerpots. The life of the town is hidden from the public eye, played out behind the walls of these green and flowering courtyards, seemingly isolated yet linked one to another by a sense of community that shows itself in the absolute cleanliness of the streets, the neatly clipped box hedges and well-pruned trees in the public gardens, the well-kept appearance of the houses, even those a much-diminished population has left empty.
The cool gray stones, half hidden by thick mantles of dark and polished ivy, are the outward armor of reserve and civic pride, shadowy and impenetrable, unlike the yellow limestone and the whitewashed plaster of the plains below that seethe and overflow, spilling out people and garbage and laundry and passions and noise into hot and dusty streets.
We walk along the western edge, where the flowers have crept up from the pine forests to attack the old Punic walls, huge blocks of stone that are all that remains of Erice’s Carthaginian era. They drip with green, the colored tide advances, tunneling between the stones and dancing triumphantly along the top of the wall. We squeeze sideways through a narrow arched passage that likes to think itself the narrowest street in Europe and peer into the courtyards, each of us picking the house we would most like to live in, the play-house scale of so much of the town an invitation to such games. And finally, prompted by the growlings of our stomachs, we chart a zigzag course back to the southern side and the Taverna Re Aceste.
Each time I come back to this restaurant I’m afraid it won’t be as good as I remember, and each time I am relieved to find it unchanged, neither the famous luxury restaurant that in any case would lie beyond our means and interest nor the rustic Sicilian cooking, excellent ingredients in simple combinations, that I would seek elsewhere. This is food for Erice, subtle, mysterious seasoning, intimations of flavoring prepared with pride and restraint.
Replete with risotto alla marinara, rigatoni all’Ericina, and grilled shrimp, we roll gently down the path that leads to the castle, not the Castello Pepoli, which is nineteenth-century neo-Gothic, but the real Castello di Venere, the Saracen and then Norman fortress, built at the very edge of the rock. Its walls supposedly enclose the site of Aphrodite’s temple, but there is nothing left of that to see. In fact the castle itself has rather little to offer, and its appeal lies in leaning over the walls and parapets to enjoy the spectacular view.
I prefer to focus closer, however, to stick my nose right up to the castle walls and discover the world of tiny plants that cling to the stones and fill the crevices, a dwarf vegetation growing in a thimbleful of earth: camomile, grape hyacinths, feathery tufts of fennel, and an infinite variety of stonecrop, the succulent plants that appear to live on nothing, their fat-leaved branches bursting into miniature stars of pink, lavender, and white. And then, most appropriate here, a slightly bigger succulent whose smooth circular leaves dented in the middle have earned it the name Venus’s-navelwort—ombelico di Venere in Italian. A square foot of these walls in spring equals an entire field in the richness and the variety of color and texture, and I am perfectly happy to peer close, forgetting the larger setting.
On our way home we stop at the farm. Bosco too is doing its best: the iris are magnificent, the clematis in the courtyard has its first flowers, and the air around the gate is heavy with the scent of the zàgara, the waxy white flowers of the lemon tree. Natalia picks an armful of wild gladiola, the elongated and intensely pink blossoms smaller and much more elegant than their cultivated cousins, while I pick artichokes and spinach.
Despite the beauty of the day and the abundance of blossom, I feel discouraged. Bosco looks neglected; the grass that was so green and lovely a few weeks ago is out of control, while the nasturtiums under the rosebush are stunted and spindly for want of watering. A truck clanks and clatters up the hill, and Mr. Amato climbs down to say hello. He has a load of oil drums filled with water: he and his cousin are setting out melon seedlings, and the soil is so dry they have to truck in water and ladle it out around each plant. He has had luck with the melons planted from seed here, almost all of which have germinated, but none of his tomatoes has come up.
A curled leaf, a withered flower, a yellowed spear of grass—these are the first intimations that we are already, prematurely, past the peak, that the sun so pleasant on our bare arms today has set to its long slow task of leaching out all color and coolness from the earth, that Sicily is exhausting its riches in the exuberance of a spendthrift spring, a brave front of color that will soon give way to the bare-bones economy of summer, the husbanding of moisture and the tilling of dust.