Sicilian Odyssey

by Francine Prose

  So we have decided to base ourselves in Acireale, a half dozen or so kilometers north along the coast—a friendlier city, though it too traces its origins back to a myth of violence. In love with the nymph Galatea, the Cyclops Polyphemus grew jealous when she became enamored of the shepherd Acis, so he crushed Acis with one of his lethal boulders. The shepherd’s body was divided into nine parts and scattered across the landscape, and from each part grew one of the nine towns whose names begin with Aci: Acireale, Aci Trezza, Aci Castello…

  Late on the afternoon of our arrival, we decide to go for a walk from our beachfront hotel (named, charmingly and improbably, Aloha d’Oro and built in accordance with someone’s equally charming and improbable Polynesian/North African/Mexican fantasy) and to head up into town toward the Piazza del Duomo. It’s misty, chilly, getting dark. But as we turn up Via Vittorio Emanuele, we begin to notice dabs of color—a baby dressed in a bright yellow bumblebee costume, a teenage boy sporting an oversize, striped-velvet, Cat-in-the-Hat stovepipe hat, a middle-aged woman in a jester’s cap ringing with tiny bells. And before we know it, someone has showered us with confetti.

  Shrove Tuesday is almost two weeks away, but the citizens of Acireale (home of “il più bel Carnevale di Sicilia—the most beautiful Carnival in Sicily”) are getting a head start on their pre-Lenten celebrations. Strings of glistening lights form an arching canopy above the main streets, dance music blares out of invisible loudspeakers. In the Piazza del Duomo, the soaring, extravagantly elaborate facade of the cathedral is brilliantly illuminated, as are the stalls selling masks, roasted pumpkin seeds and chestnuts, fried sausage, panini, noisemakers, plastic bags of confetti. Half the local population—and nearly everyone under twelve—is in costume, dressed as pirates and knights, skeletons and witches; lions and lambs, angels and devils stroll hand in hand.

  Some of the masks are familiar; in fact the plastic monster heads are the very same ones I saw in October, at Halloween, in New York City. And yet there’s something about the spirit of the event that’s entirely different from Halloween in Greenwich Village, or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or St. Patrick’s Day on Fifth Avenue. At home, public holidays have mostly become excuses for teenagers and young adults to dress up or paint their faces green and get as hammered as they’ll get the following weekend, as they got the weekend before. But this pre-Carnival celebration in Acireale feels like an entirely unique moment in the yearly calendar, a time for people (many of whom clearly know one another) to step out of character, to leave their normal selves behind, and to unleash something that—precisely because of familiarity, proximity, and the need to coexist harmoniously and amicably—stays in check for the rest of the year.

  To walk through Acireale in the days preceding Carnival is to understand what it means for the Lord of Misrule—that great equalizer, leveler, and liberator—to be in command. Children giddily bop their elders over the head with colorful plastic mallets that make a hollow sound somewhere between the noise of a baby rattle and the pop of a firecracker. It hurts just enough so I can feel (or think I feel) the fillings rattling lightly in my teeth, but after the first half-dozen bops, I’m no longer tempted to wheel around and show the little bopper how New Yorkers act when someone’s invaded their personal space. Groups of high school students spray each other—and total strangers—with shaving cream and strings of colored foam propelled by aerosol. Shy girls clutch bags of confetti, waiting to get the nerve to fling a handful at some cute boy—for much of the revelry is energized by the explosive charge of courtship, romance, and sex.

  But finally what makes the merriment seem so Sicilian is the ease with which it combines the mournful with the festive (the tunes played by the fresh-faced, earnest high school marching band are almost comically dirgelike and funereal) and the present with the past. The designs of the elaborate princess costumes (the outfit of choice for little girls) seem modeled on the gowns worn by Bourbon royalty and make their wearers look like the pretty, uncomfortable, and slightly stunned children in Velásquez’s “Las Meninas.” And smack in the middle of a group of kids, parading in formation and dressed like Harry Potter and his fellow students at the School for Wizards, is, incongruously, a sort of giant eyeball-on-legs meant to represent a Cyclops.

  Catania’s Feast of St. Agatha also takes place at the beginning of February, at the same time as the start of Acireale’s Carnival, and less than ten miles away. But the atmosphere and the mood of the crowd are so remarkably different that the festival could be taking place in another country. The Feast of St. Agatha is celebratory but solemn in a way that seems appropriate for a religious holiday honoring the city’s patron saint, a martyr credited with having rescued the town from an especially threatening eruption of Mount Etna; in some versions of the legend, her outstretched arms diverted a stream of lava that would otherwise have inundated the city. On cloudless days, you can see Etna’s gently smoldering cone at the end of the long straight boulevard that bears its name. The last time we were in Sicily, Etna was erupting, and, from our hotel room in Taormina, we could watch the tongues of fiery orange lava snake down the mountainside.

  Just before noon on the final day of the feast, a crowd of Catanians—many of whom carry long yellow candles they will light in the course of their peregrination around the holy sites associated with the saint scattered throughout the old quarter—gathers in the square in front of the stately, gloomy cathedral. The charcoal-gray volcanic rock from which so many of its buildings are constructed gives Catania the air, among Sicilian cities, of the family member with the long face, the sad story, the bad news.

  At exactly twelve, a series of cannon blasts sends puffs of white smoke wafting across the blue sky; the church bells toll. And as a procession of priests, ecclesiastical dignitaries, local officials, and members of fraternal orders dressed in eighteenth century costume emerge from the church, displaying a silver reliquary containing the relics of the saint, a young mother standing in front of me tells her small son the story of St. Agatha.

  Smoothing back his hair, gently stroking his forehead, speaking in a melodious voice, she narrates a mercifully bowdlerized version—minus the gorier details—of how the blessed virgin refused to marry the suitor who had been chosen for her and, consequently, as punishment, had her breasts cut off. A visitation from St. Peter healed her wounds and restored her breasts, but Peter could not, or would not, save her from a horrible martyrdom—from the tortures that insured her beatitude and made her the patron saint of women suffering from diseases of the breast.

  This evening, at the height of the festival, young men, dressed in black berets and white suits (rather like karate uniforms) and assembled in groups representing the various trade organizations, will carry the candelore—heavy, gilded litters decorated with images of the saint and topped with tall candles—in a procession that’s part race, part endurance contest designed to see who can bear the weight longest. There will be fireworks, music, stalls selling candy, nougat, freshly made nut brittle. But beneath it all will run that Sicilian understanding that the underside of joy is grief, that the face of sacrifice and suffering is the dark mirror image of pleasure and enjoyment, that every moment of arrival is to be treasured and enjoyed in the full knowledge that it has brought us a moment closer to the moment of departure.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Syracuse

  Sitting in the top row of the Greek amphitheater in Syracuse’s Archaeological Park, I close my eyes and try to imagine the roar of the spectators during the city’s glory days, when Syracuse was among the most influential city-states in the world, when its leaders could afford to build the most magnificent theaters and attract the most brilliant playwrights, when fifteen thousand spectators crowded into these seats to watch the tragedies of Aeschylus, who lived and worked here in the royal court of Hiero I. What waves of excitement and anxiety must have rippled through the crowd as the masked actors performed Prometheus Bound, a play about the tensions between obedience and individual freedom, betwee
n following the will of the gods and finding the courage to break the divine law that would have doomed mankind to live without fire, in the cold and the darkness. How subversive—how dangerous—would Aeschylus’s words have sounded to theatergoers who lived under the rule of a greedy, violent dictator, one of the succession of tyrants who ruled Syracuse from the fifth to the second century B.C.

  Like us, they believed that their civilization would last forever. Whatever they thought as they heard Prometheus cry out from the rock to which he had been chained for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mortals, not one of them (we can only assume) could have imagined the day when, from the high rows of their theater, you could see trains in the rail yard, traffic speeding by on the highway, the tall flat roofs of the modern city built over the ruins of their own. (At the city’s archaeological museum, photographs and exhibits explain exactly where excavations under the busy streets and sidewalks have exposed the remnants of ancient burial grounds.) The early Syracusans could not have foreseen this any more than Aeschylus could have anticipated that he would be killed at Gela, not far from here, when, so the story goes, an eagle dropped a tortoise directly onto his bald head, which the eagle mistook—clearly, this is one of those stories that gets progressively more implausible as you pile on the details—for the sort of rock on which it was accustomed to drop turtles, in order to smash their shells so that their insides could be eaten.

  At least initially, the history of Syracuse resembled, in a general way, the history of the United States—that is, it began as a colony which became as powerful as, and then more powerful than, its mother country. The Greeks arrived in Sicily during the eighth century B.C., around the same time that Homer was dispatching Odysseus to have his adventures and misfortunes on the Island of the Sun, his travel delays and unscheduled layovers on the long journey home from Troy to Ithaca.

  Establishing their first colony on the coast at Naxos, the Greek invaders quickly conquered the indigenous tribes and founded a series of outposts. Then, in the fifth century B.C., Gelon of Gela—a chariot-racing champion known for his ferocity—consolidated his power by marrying the daughter of the tyrant of Acragas (now Agrigento) and by defeating the Carthaginians at the battle of Himera. With the help of an immense Carthaginian slave-labor force captured in the war, he moved his capital from Gela to Syracuse.

  There, Gelon (perhaps out of gratitude for his good fortune) began building the Temple of Athena on the island of Ortigia, which was already connected by a causeway to the mainland at Syracuse. With palm-lined boulevards bordering its shore and pink and ochre palaces giving its harbor an almost Venetian appearance, Ortigia is one of the most appealing places in all of Sicily.

  In fact, when I think about being reborn as a Sicilian, it’s most often in Ortigia that I imagine my new life beginning. The winding alleys are lined with abandoned baroque palazzi, many of which are in the process of being restored. Since our arrival, we have been looking longingly at the ubiquitous signs that announce A vendersi—FOR SALE. We fantasize about buying a derelict palace, fixing it up, persuading our friends to move into their own palazzi nearby. The light, the high ceilings, the studio space, the ocean views! As we pass one of the palaces under reconstruction, a German tourist grabs Howie’s arm and pulls us over to see what he’s just seen: A building site where a group of workmen digging in a basement have just discovered—and are gently unearthing—an ancient burial urn containing the bones of a child.

  Gelon’s temple survives on Ortigia, intact but greatly changed, its outlines and columns still visible in the walls of the Duomo. Partly what’s so pleasing about the cathedral is the evidence it offers that each invader who arrived in Ortigia, each champion of each new faith, seems to have been inspired by an admirable desire to preserve and protect, rather than raze and obliterate, the remnants of the previous structure, the evidence of the old religion. In the seventh century A.D., the Doric columns of the Greek temple were incorporated by the Byzantines into the walls of a Christian church, which was in turn converted into a mosque by the Saracens, then reconsecrated by the Normans. When the facade collapsed during the earthquakes at the end of the seventeenth century, it was rebuilt according to the principles of the high baroque. This amalgamation of styles represents a heartening aspect of Sicilian history and culture—the instances in which a ruler or a people extracted what was most valuable from an older tradition; among the happy consequences are the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù, which combine the aesthetics of the Normans, the Byzantines, and the Arabs.

  Gelon was succeeded by his brother Hiero I, the patron of Aeschylus, who was followed by another brother, Thrasybulus, one of the cruelest of the tyrants—though possibly not as vicious as the early ruler of Acragas who had his enemies roasted alive inside a specially fashioned bronze bull, the idea being that the howls of the dying would sound like the bellowing of a bull. During the rule of Hermocrates, the quarries surrounding the amphitheater at Syracuse were first used as prisons to hold—under inhuman conditions—thousands of captives brought back from the war against Athens. (Cicero, in The Verrine Orations, claims the caves were employed for that purpose, though this has been disputed by some modern scholars.) In 405 B.C., the throne was assumed by Dionysius the Elder, a soi-disant poet and playwright so loutish that he had Plato imprisoned when he came to Syracuse as a guest of his brother-in-law. It was during his reign that Syracuse became one of the most powerful cities in Europe.

  Dionysius was not only an effective leader but also a world-class paranoid so obsessive that he had a moat dug around his bed, complete with a drawbridge he could pull up when he went to sleep. Good fences may, as Robert Frost wrote, make good neighbors—but great paranoids make great walls. In an attempt to surround and fortify the entire settlement of Syracuse as a deterrent to foreign invasion, Dionysius built the prodigious walls of Epipolae, fragments of which can still be seen on the drive up to the ruins of the Castello Eurialo—a defensive fort constructed by Hiero II, most likely with the help of Archimedes, and one of the largest extant examples of Greek military architecture.

  The scale and ambition of the fort gives it an air of near-insanity, and indeed it’s the product of a plan to encircle and protect the entire known world—the classical equivalent of the “Star Wars” missile defense shield. When you consider the amount of labor involved, the human suffering all that labor represented, and, as it turned out, the fort’s utter uselessness in repelling the Roman invasion, the castello seems more aptly described as a folly than those harmless pagodas and pleasure palaces eccentric English lords built in their gardens.

  And yet, for all the pointless grandiosity and wastefulness that the Castello Eurialo represents, its builder, Hiero II, was one of the more progressive and rational of the despots who ruled Syracuse. It was he who enlarged and rebuilt the amphitheater, and who built the nearby altar (also in the Archaeological Park) on which, according to Diodorus, 450 bulls were sacrificed to Zeus in a single day.

  Like certain ruins—especially those in which something horrific has taken place—the Castello Eurialo retains some vestige of the spirit (in this case, of delusional mania) that inspired its construction. Bracing myself against the wind that rakes the bluff, climbing over the stone walls, exploring the grassy courtyards and the dank cells reeking of what I can only hope is mildew, I lose sight of Howie for just a few minutes and fall instantly into a sort of irrational, childish panic that feels like a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, a terror of never being able to get out of, or down from, this empty, desolate, open place.

  Despite the massive fortification of the Castello Eurialo and the best efforts of Archimedes, who invented a series of imaginative military gadgets (including hooks that seized and hoisted the attacking soldiers up into the air) to repel the invasion of his native city, the Romans—under the consul Marcus Claudius Marcellus—entered and destroyed much of Syracuse in 212 B.C. Preferring blood sport to classical tragedy, the Romans modified the amphithe
ater, enlarging the proscenium to accommodate gladiatorial and aquatic displays and covering the front rows with marble so that the nobility could enjoy yet another advantage unavailable to the masses of ordinary theatergoers.

  Not content with these relatively modest renovations, the Romans also built a huge elliptical arena for chariot races and circus games. In the center is a pool about which historians and guidebook writers disagree. Some claim it was used in the cleaning of the arena, while others speculate, more luridly, that it was intended as a receptacle for the remains of the more unfortunate participants in the Roman games, and that after the spectacles ended, the anemic and infirm would rush in to devour the internal organs of the unsuccessful athletes in the hope of benefiting from their supposed health-giving properties.

  As we stand on the edge of the Roman arena, we notice, perhaps a hundred feet away and quite near the tunnel-like entrance through which the chariots used to come hurtling onto the track, an animal about which there’s something so strange and uncanny that it’s hard to figure out what kind of creature it is. It looks like a wolf or coyote, but in fact it’s a very large and apparently feral dog, standing in a peculiar posture, leaning slightly to one side. After a moment we realize that it’s nursing two puppies so big that they seem almost full-grown themselves.

  I’ve never seen a dog stand to nurse before, let alone one suckling two such enormous pups, yet its posture seems so familiar, so…archetypal. We both say at the same moment: Romulus and Remus. And it feels almost like a vision, a private and privileged communication from the spirit of the civilization that built this proto-speedway and then lost it first to the barbarians and then the Byzantines. The mysterious appearance of the dog and her pups seems like a gift from this city from which the Romans fled in terror, abandoning their arenas and villas and seeking refuge near Pantalica in the caves where their Bronze Age predecessors lived, two thousand years before.