Sicilian Odyssey

by Francine Prose

  Carnival float, Acireale

  Carnival, Acireale

  It’s all so beautiful and so incredibly tasteless, so misguided and so heartfelt. It represents such a deep outpouring of sympathy and such a profound expression of the belief that life must go on (which is what the Sicilians have been saying to me as soon as they learn where we come from and that our house is only a short distance from the World Trade Center) and of the profound conviction that some humor and brightness, vitality and even joy must be found even in the most terrible tragedy. It reminds me of the comical skeleton figures with which Mexicans mark the Day of the Dead: There’s that same acknowledgment of the fact that death is so powerful, so unspeakably cruel that, at times, tears seem somehow beside the point, there’s nothing to do but laugh. The Sicilians know how to celebrate, and they know how to mourn, and they know how to do both at nearly the same time.

  Still, it’s clear that most of the Sicilians around me have no idea what to make of the float, not a clue as to how they should be reacting. And like them, I feel overwhelmed by the float’s grandeur, its scale, and above all by its (to say the least) problematic approach to its disturbing subject matter. Yet if the crowd seems a little uncertain about the correct response, I seem to be the only one who reacts without thinking, the only one with tears welling up in my eyes.

  It’s chilly in the piazza, night’s come—somehow I hadn’t noticed how dark and cold it was till now. And it strikes me: I want a drink. Howie and I duck into a nearby café and, surrounded by Sicilian families, we sit across from a little girl dressed as a pussycat and slowly working over her ice cream, eating every last drop with rapt, transfixed fascination. We order grappas and drink them, too fast, the moment they arrive.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I Mosaici

  In the Villa Romana del Casale, the fourth-century Roman mansion decorated with the most extensive mosaics to have survived the destruction of the empire, the Cyclops depicted on the floor of the Vestibule of Polyphemus has three eyes. Two regular eyes, normally set, and another, smack in the middle of his forehead, give a wistful, puzzled look to the traditionally one-eyed monster, who sits amid his flock of sheep, with a slaughtered, half-eviscerated ram across his lap, preparing to devour it raw. Beside him stand Odysseus and his men, offering the Cyclops the chalice of wine that will, they hope, get him drunk enough so that they can escape from his lair. Behind him is the mouth of his cave and, behind that, the cone of Mount Etna.

  Perhaps the master craftsmen—mosaicists believed to have been brought in from North Africa—got that part of the story wrong, the detail about the number of eyes. In which case, it’s daunting to imagine the wrath of their supervisor, who appeared at the end of the day to check on the progress of the work and noticed… Or perhaps it was intentional, perhaps one eye just didn’t seem enough amid all that decorative splendor, all that show of wealth and skill and state-of-the-art architectural design employed in the construction of the villa thought to have belonged to Emperor Maximian, who ruled the empire along with Diocletian, and who used the estate as his summer pleasure palace. Later, after Maximian was deposed from the imperial throne, his country house became the retreat where he plotted his return to power.

  Like the Teatro Greco in Syracuse, the Villa Romana del Casale near the city of Piazza Armerina is the product of a culture that was blissfully unable to see the writing on the wall. Unlike the Norman palaces scattered throughout most of the island—thickly walled structures that reflect the concerns of a society based on insecurity, on semiconstant warfare, and a continual awareness of the need for protection and fortification—the Roman villa gives no indication that its inhabitants believed they would be called upon to do much more than take hot and cold baths, rub themselves (or have themselves rubbed, by servants) with perfumed oils, exercise, play games, listen to music, have love affairs, hunt, and fish.

  And the floors on which they walked were meant to portray the lives they lived and wished to continue living, and which they believed would continue uninterrupted despite the fact that the empire was already showing fault lines, suffering from internal and external pressures—the strains and tensions that would soon pull it apart. Meanwhile, the Romans continued to exploit the country around them, to practice the system of latifundia (estates owned largely by absentee landlords who extracted every bit of wealth from their holdings without much caring about the fates of the people who lived and worked there) that would continue, in one form or another, throughout much of Sicily’s history and accelerate the economic decline that would affect the island for centuries afterward.

  But the Villa Romana is not a place in which people seem to have thought much about the future; they were too busy celebrating the delights of the present moment and the glories of a mythological past. In one room, the charming so-called Bikini Girls—dressed appropriately for exercise, in their underwear—toss a ball around, work out with weights and a discus, and crown each other for their skill in gymnastics. In a nearby antechamber, the emperor’s wife and children are surrounded by servants bearing bolts of cloth and boxes of perfumed oils. There’s a scene of seafaring cherubs sporting with dolphins, another of two lovers embracing. In the Sala della Danza, a young woman dances while twirling a veil above her head, while in the Sala del Circo, riders compete in a chariot race held in honor of Demeter, probably much like the ones staged in the arena at Syracuse.

  But by far the most sophisticated and dynamic scenarios—the ones that most clearly engaged the energy and expertise of the artists and artisans—portray blood sports and struggles to the death, the hostile and combative relationships between the fiercest and most helpless members of the animal kingdom. Perhaps in honor of the fact that Maximian took the surname Herculius and adopted the Greek hero as the equivalent of a household god, the mosaics in the triclinium illustrate the labors of Hercules. In one area the mythic hero has shot his poisoned arrows into the prodigiously overdeveloped chests of the Titans, whose writhings are accentuated by the fact that their legs turn into the tails of serpents. Elsewhere he defeats a sea monster threatening a maiden and carries off the sacred oxen of Geryon.

  Part of the Great Hunt mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Piazza Armerina

  Still, all of Hercules’s most brutal and strenuous labors seem controlled and highly civilized compared to the scenes that illuminate the Room of the Small Hunt and the Corridor of the Great Hunt—the largest and most famous room in the villa. Everywhere you look, someone or something is killing or being killed. Leopards pounce and sink their teeth into the backs of harts. Hunters stick wild boars with spears and chase terrified deer into huge nets. No species is exempt from pain and suffering. One man beats another with a stick, another is being viciously attacked by an enraged lioness, while in one of the more disturbing and enigmatic scenes, a griffin carries in its claws a box with slats through which we can see the head of a boy.

  What’s on view in the monumental corridor is not an amusing hunting party, our gracious host and a few friends riding out for a day of sport in the neighborhood around the villa. It’s a big-game hunt, in Africa, and across the bottom of the mosaic is an unmistakable representation of the quarry that’s being stalked. Men are loading an elephant, and antelope, and an exotic bird (on ostrich, perhaps) into a boat that will bring them back to Europe to be exhibited in zoos and killed at the hunting games held for public entertainment in the arenas. Meanwhile, a merchant coolly discusses the transport and the price he will receive for the captured beasts. And what are we supposed to make of the fact that this portrayal of the plunder of Africa was most likely done by artists who had themselves been imported from Africa to decorate the mansion of Emperor Maximian?

  It keeps reminding me of another palace belonging to another aristocrat: Konopiste, the former home (in what is now the Czech Republic) of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, another near-maniacal hunting enthusiast, who filled his sporting lodge with thousands of trophies, from bear skins to fans made from the feathers
of small birds he’d blown to smithereens with cannon. Like Maximian, who was killed in 310 in his struggle to regain power, Francis Ferdinand would himself die violently, assassinated at Sarajevo. And like Maximian—whose son Maxentius died in a battle with Constantine, who then took over the Villa Romana—Francis Ferdinand would continue to cause more havoc and bloodshed, even after death.

  The other thing I can’t seem to get out of my mind is something I saw just this morning as we drove across the fertile and mostly unpopulated plain of Catania, which the Greeks called the land of the Laestrygonians after the race of cannibals that they believed inhabited the area. For the first twenty miles or so outside of Catania, at the juncture where each country lane and dirt road met the main highway, a young African woman, nicely dressed and wearing heavy makeup, sat, dispiritedly, on a chair or crate, awaiting customers. They were prostitutes, brought there largely to service the truck drivers plying the long-distance routes across the island.

  I keep recalling their sad, haunted faces as I see the mosaic depiction of an obviously venerable tradition: the importation and exploitation of Africa for the enjoyment and entertainment of Europe.

  Travel through Sicily is filled with such moments, instances when the curtain of the present parts to reveal a connection, a parallel to something that occurred thousands of years before. Mostly, such moments are pleasant. In Cefalù’s Museo Mandralisca is a Greek vase from the fourth century B.C. depicting a tuna vendor slicing off a chunk of a prodigious fish to sell to a skeptical customer—an eerily accurate depiction of a scene I saw just a week before, in the fish market at Catania. From the ruins of Halaesa, the site of a community of Sicels, Sicily’s original inhabitants, you can watch workers tunneling under the mountains to build the new autostrada between Palermo and Messina—the modern equivalent of the engineering feat required to build, on a mountaintop, a once-great city like Halaesa.

  Founded around 40 B.C., Halaesa reached the height of its glory during the first century A.D., when its wealth attracted the unwanted attentions of the rapacious tax collector, Verres, whose crimes Cicero was sent to investigate; subsequently a series of unfair and destructive levies caused the city to decline. (In Enna, a plaque marks the spot where Cicero stayed on his mission to protect Sicily from its would-be exploiter.) And the parallels go deeper; though the building of the new autostrada facing Halaesa may be completely accountable and honest, it’s well known that, for decades, the Mafia has managed to collect a considerable share of the funding for highway construction and similar “improvements” on the island’s infrastructure.

  But surely such disturbing parallels—the link between the African prostitutes on the plains of Catania and the majestic creatures whose kidnapping from their African homes is documented by the mosaics of Piazza Armerina—are warnings against being too thoroughly beguiled by the island’s scenic wonders, too easily charmed and deceived by its romantic allure. Later on the same day that we spend at the Villa Romana, we visit the ruins of Morgantina, a town first inhabited during the Bronze Age, thirteen hundred years before Christ, then later settled by the Sicels and destroyed most probably by Ducetius, the only Sicel who tried to persuade his people to rebel against the Greeks.

  The ruined city occupies a ridge overlooking a vast rolling green valley; across it you can see Mount Etna, covered in snow. The overgrown meadows that separate the theater, the agora, the altars, and the residential district are covered with white clover; the almond trees are in blossom. The site is deserted, peaceful, absolutely silent but for the sound of bells and the faint bleating of a flock of sheep grazing on a nearby hillside. It’s paradise on Earth.

  Some time later I read, in Alexander Stille’s fascinating book, The Future of the Past, that Morgantina is among the most heavily ravaged of Sicily’s Greek ruins, plundered by thieves and bandits in order to supply the illegal, lucrative, and thriving market in stolen antiquities, a trade with suspected ties to the Mafia and with rich and powerful clients throughout the world. And, by coincidence, after we leave Sicily for Rome, I meet, at the American Academy in Rome, an archaeologist who has spent his career digging in Sicily. When I mention our visit to Morgantina, and ask if it’s true that it has suffered some of the most severe theft of any of the archaeological sites in Sicily, he says, “It would be awfully hard to say which have been most plundered. Because the fact is, if you’re talking about the looting of Sicilian sites…well, let’s just say there’s been a lot of competition.”

  In eighth-grade art class we were given rectangles of Masonite, tiles, a tile cutter, and some cement and launched into the brave new world of mosaics. Our teacher encouraged us to choose any subject we liked, provided that it was more or less figurative. I decided to make a clown. I suppose I was less concerned with originality than with being able to use all the different colors of tiles. The result was—I need hardly say—dismal; jagged bits of bathroom tile protruded from the Masonite board on which you could barely make out a big red nose, rosy cheeks, blue eyes. But our teacher said that hardly mattered. The important thing was that when we grew up and went to places like Ravenna and Venice (our future as upwardly mobile middle-class tourists was taken for granted) we would understand how difficult it had been to make those glittering ceilings and vaults, how much skill and cost and effort had been required.

  It was a superfluous lesson. Mosaics speak for themselves. It’s possible to assume that a great fresco might have been done by one overworked, underpaid painter, perhaps with a few assistants, but to see the cathedral of San Marco or the basilicas at Ravenna is to grasp instantly that whole teams of master craftsmen were responsible, that someone ordered and paid for all that work, for the gold that, centuries later, still catches the light and bounces it off the figures of the emperors and the saints, the patriarchs and the apostles. To decorate a church or a chapel or cathedral with mosaics is to honor and represent the divine and at the same time leave no doubt about the amount of wealth and power necessary to conceive of, and complete, an artistic project of that magnitude, that ambition.

  Six hundred years after the Vandals chased the Romans into the caves once inhabited by their Bronze Age forebears and then lost control of the island to Theodoric’s Ostrogoths, five hundred years after Emperor Justinian’s General Belisarius annexed Sicily to the Byzantine Empire, two centuries after the Saracen conquerors built the three hundred mosques that established Palermo as the capital of Islamic civilization on Sicily and a center of art and science, the increasingly tense dissension among rival groups of Muslims—Shiites and Sunnis, Yemenis, Persians, and Berbers—made the island vulnerable to invasion by the small army of Normans, the Hells Angels of the medieval world. Former mercenaries who had hired themselves out to fight for the pope, for the Byzantines, and for local aristocrats in Normandy, the Normans had already conquered, piece by piece, much of southern Italy. By 1091, Roger I, having defeated the last pocket of Saracen resistance at Enna, declared himself Count of Sicily.

  For all their toughness and ferocity, the Normans proved remarkably tolerant and capable of coexisting with—and extracting the best from—the diverse groups that preexisted their arrival. Under Roger’s son and successor, Roger II, Palermo became a model of multiculturalism that combined the intellectual advances and sensual pleasures (including, it’s said, the love for sweets and sherbets) of Arabic society with the vigor and crude energies of a warrior culture. And, in his aspirations to rival and surpass Byzantium, Roger II experimented with the ways in which art could advance his reputation and transform the son of a mercenary soldier into the lawful—and divinely ordained—ruler of a mighty kingdom.

  What better way to demonstrate this transformation than by outdoing the Byzantines at their own game—by ordering the creation of showier and more extensive mosaics than those in the grandest Byzantine basilicas? And what better way to emphasize the connection between earthly power and divine right than to let it be known that each new building project was not merely the result of a persona
l whim, an expensive project requiring the levying of new taxes, but rather a sacred obligation, the fulfillment of a heavenly vow, the natural consequence of a prayer granted because God wanted the rule of the Norman kings to thrive and prosper? So Roger II’s grandson William II made it clear that he was building Monreale with the treasure (hidden by his father) that the Virgin had shown him in a dream and that he had promised to spend on a new cathedral.

  This precedent—claiming that the divine was involved in an architectural project and had even (in William’s case) provided heavenly financing—was established by Roger II sometime around 1130. According to the legend that he himself seems to have generated and spread, the Norman king was on his way back from the mainland when suddenly a violent storm came up and threatened to sink his ship. But the quick-thinking Roger vowed that if God rescued him from the tempest, he would order the construction of a cathedral wherever he happened to come ashore. How convenient that God not only answered Roger’s prayers, but arranged for him to land at Cefalù, just down the coast from his capital at Palermo—the perfect spot at which to locate the new bishopric that he had promised the antipope Anacletus II, whom Roger supported in his struggle against Pope Innocent II in Rome.

  Work on the church was begun in 1131 and, although Roger announced that Cefalù was where he wished to be buried, it’s believed that he never finished the cathedral—possibly because his rapprochement with Innocent II in 1139 diminished the urgency of his need to support his personal bishopric. Likewise, art historians have suggested that the extant mosaics represent only a fraction of a plan for something more elaborate, more on the order of what Roger would build at the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and what his grandson William would create in the cathedral at Monreale.