What the markets remind you of, and partly explain, is the earthiness at the heart of Sicilian cuisine. Nothing has been sanitized, there’s nothing squeamish or repressed about the Sicilian appetite, the Sicilian diet. In the sfogliatelle—the pastry coated with confectioners’ sugar and stuffed with fresh ricotta—we’re served for breakfast in Enna, the lightly sweetened filling still retains the tang of sheep’s milk. Fried fish arrives on your plate, bones, head, tail, and all. One of the most exquisite Sicilian dishes consists of tiny fish served, barely cooked, over pasta or else raw with lemon; it’s called neonata—which, of course, means newborn. You can’t help thinking that if anything on the American table is newborn or even underage, we don’t want to know about it, just as we make ample use of plastic wrap and packaging to spare ourselves the knowledge that what we are eating was ever alive.
In Sicily, by contrast, diners want to be assured—and rightly so—that what they are eating was recently alive. Whole lambs and goats and rabbits hang in the market place, not far from the stalls where you can buy and consume a plate of freshly opened sea urchins, or a chickpea or potato fritter, or a spleen sandwich, and savor it not far from a dog who happens to be enjoying a piece of raw chicken. There’s nothing forced or self-conscious about Sicilian cuisine; no one talks about comfort food because it is comfort food. There’s no nostalgia involved, because la cucina siciliana was never lost and rediscovered, never saved from the vile encroachments of the fast-food industry.
Nightly, on TV, you can watch advertisements for various disgusting products, including a sort of frozen patty made from a yellowish mozzarella and neon-pink prosciutto, covered with bread crumbs, equally suitable for the frying pan or the toaster oven. And the supermarket freezer sections offer such laborsaving items as zucchini flowers, breaded and prefried, needing only a brief immersion in hot oil or perhaps a few seconds in the microwave. But the energy and the vitality of the markets prove how much Sicilians are still cooking, as we say, from scratch. Anyone who wants to observe the reverence with which la cucina is still approached might want to drop by Palermo’s church of La Martorana early on a weekday morning, when the parishioners leave their grocery bags by the altar so that what they are taking home from the market can be blessed by the parish priest.
What arrives at your table in Sicily represents the culmination of a tradition. At Gangivecchio, the fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey that the Tornabene family has converted into an inn known all over the island and—thanks to the cookbooks authored by Wanda Tornabene and her daughter Giovanna—the wider world, that tradition functions like a special ingredient seasoning the meals that its lucky guests are served.
Part of Gangivecchio’s charm derives from the contrast between the patrician, aristocratic setting—the pergola covered with greenery, the fountain decorated with lions’ heads, the cobbled walkways, the courtyard of the abbey—and the rustic simplicity of the meals offered in its dining rooms: homemade pasta with a thick mushroom ragù, bean soup, crêpes stuffed with ricotta and covered with a delicate spinach sauce, homemade sausage, fried sweet and savory dumplings, and huge pork shanks that can’t help but increase the affection you feel for the gargantuan, bristled pig slumbering placidly in its pen near the inn.
The history of Gangivecchio is an archetypically Sicilian one: a story in which trouble and peril is, through determination, common sense, hard work, stubbornness, and a certain canniness, transformed into an occasion for triumph against all probable odds. The Tornabenes trace the history of their home back to a twelfth-century B.C. village, Engio, which antedated the Greeks, and which stood on the house’s current site. Successively decimated and revived (the town was forcibly evacuated after the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282), the town of Gangi recovered and the abbey thrived until 1653, when the population of the monastery was reduced to a single monk, left to guard the property and collect taxes. Rebuilt by a local squire in the eighteenth century, the estate passed from the church’s hands into private ownership, and in 1856 came into the possession of the Tornabene family.
The family cultivated the land, planting the orchards of cherries, apples, figs, pears, and nuts, tending the herb and vegetable gardens, raising cows and chickens for eggs and cheese. But in the late 1970s, the declining agricultural economy and steeply rising taxes made Gangivecchio’s future seem precarious until Wanda Tornabene (with the encouragement of a local priest) decided to turn her skill in the kitchen into a business and opened a small restaurant. Gradually, the restaurant was expanded into the simultaneously luxe and rustic agroturismo inn at which (in rooms converted from the former monks’ cells) it is possible to spend the night after you have eaten and drunk too much to even consider getting back on the road.
Surrounded by unspoiled countryside, Gangivecchio is about ten minutes by a winding lane from the town of Gangi, which is itself an hour and a half, or two hours—depending on the nationality and age of the driver—by mountain roads and then autostrada to Palermo. Over meals, you can observe the Italian guests—mostly prosperous Palermitans—in varying stages of annoyance at the fact that their cell phones will only work (and not especially well) from the dining room at the inn.
Wanda and Giovanna have written two cookbooks, one of which, La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio, was published in 1996 and won that year’s James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence. In the process they have transformed their home into the sort of earthly paradise which fuels Americans’ (and, for all I know, other Sicilians’) dreams of living amid the glories of Renaissance ecclesiastical architecture and Italian bucolic splendor. When we arrive and when we leave, other Americans are wandering dreamily through the gardens, as are groups of Italians, large parties who arrive for Sunday lunch and young couples who come for Saturday dinner and to stay the night. Judging from the mood of these young lovers—oddly jangled and tense, given the serenity of the surroundings—you can’t help thinking that Gangivecchio may have become a destination to which upper-middle-class kids head on the first date serious enough to involve sex, or the one on which marriage will be discussed or even proposed.
And yet, as Sicily keeps reminding you, no paradise is without its price. On Saturday night, Giovanna Tornabene—an attractive woman who speaks nearly flawless English, who attended university in Palermo, studied in London, and then returned home to help run Gangivecchio—rushes into the dining room, welcomes us warmly (we’ve exchanged e-mail messages), apologizes for being distracted tonight because her mother isn’t feeling well, and invites us for lunch tomorrow at the abbey. After consulting briefly with her brother, who owns the inn and presides genially over the proceedings from a table in the corner, she hurries out again.
At noon, we arrive, as instructed, at the abbey, where Giovanna greets us and apologizes again: Fortunately, Mama is feeling better today, but now twenty or thirty people have called to make reservations for lunch, she’s short on help…She’s an immensely appealing person and the obvious strain under which she’s operating (feeding thirty strangers a five-course lunch is not the same as throwing together a little meal for the family!) makes her all the more sympathetic.
She shows us to a table in the dining room overlooking the mountains, lights a cigarette, opens a bottle of white wine, fills our glasses, and begins to talk about the inventiveness and freedom of Sicilian cuisine (“There are no great chefs to imitate and follow, no strict rules, no recipes, it’s all about making something up with whatever you have in the kitchen. Today, for example, I had no parsley for the pasta sauce, so fine, I used celery…”). But all that freedom, in this case, does not include the liberty to finish a thought or a sentence. (In that way, running Gangivecchio seems a little like raising quadruplets who have all reached the crawling stage at once.)
Suddenly afraid that the bread might be burning, Giovanna races back to the kitchen, then reappears after a while to talk about the new cookbook she’s begun, one which will be based on—and take its recipes from—the relationship betwee
n cuisine and history, family history in particular and Sicilian history in general: the festive dinner that was served at her grandparents’ wedding, what people ate during World War II when food shortages challenged the most resourceful cooks. Then Giovanna remembers something else that needs to be done, which she fears no one is attending to, and jumps up from the table. Apologizing yet again—though really, we’re the ones who should be apologizing for distracting her at a moment that so plainly demands her unbroken concentration—she invites us to look around the abbey.
We wander down a long, wide corridor, past an informal display of handmade farming implements and pause to gaze out the window at the courtyard beneath—at its archway, its grand and graceful proportions, at the morning sunlight striking its rosy, blistered walls, at its romantic aura of noble age and picturesque disrepair. Sections are under construction, new building projects are in progress all over the farm. Across from our window, a large section of roof is covered with metal.
Giovanna comes up us behind us.
“It’s so beautiful,” we say.
“Yes,” she agrees, sighing. “But the roof…several winters ago, it collapsed under the weight of the snow. And I have been trying to fix it, but because the abbey is, how do you say, protected by the government?…”
“A historical landmark?”
In Gangivecchio
“Yes, a historical landmark. Because the abbey is a historical landmark, I am not allowed to just put up roof tiles, I have to find tiles that are at least a hundred and fifty years old, that match completely the imperfections, the discolorations of the ones that are already there. It’s very difficult to find such tiles, and extremely costly, so it can’t be fixed.”
“But certainly it’s all worth it,” I say. “The place is so extraordinary.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s worth it. But it’s so expensive.” She looks past us out the window at the abbey, the gardens, the land that she so clearly loves, and she sighs again, more deeply this time. It occurs to me that, notwithstanding the armies of strangers arriving to be fed and housed, life at Gangivecchio must, at times, get lonely.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she repeats, then smiles ruefully. “And it’s so much work.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Leopards
A friend in Palermo has another story about the history of the Tornabene family, one that does not involve cuisine.
“I remember, I was a girl,” she says. “Maybe fifteen. And I went somewhere, to see friends, maybe, and there was a girl there, a young woman from the Tornabene family. She was very beautiful, and she had fallen in love with a boy, a very handsome boy. She wanted to marry him, maybe she had already tried to run away with him, but her family would not allow it, because the boy was not from an aristocratic family, his father was some sort of craftsman. And she was obeying her family, she was going home to her mother, giving up everything, youth, love, sex, because the family insisted. On the night I saw her, she was brushing her hair, she had very beautiful long hair, she was brushing her hair and weeping, tears were running down her cheeks. I’ll never forget that image of her, brushing her long hair and weeping, brushing and weeping….”
Intensely romantic, theatrical and melancholy, this image of the Sicilian Rapunzel, of the Palermitan Juliet forbidden to marry her working-class Romeo is powerful and memorable partly because it so precisely mirrors the popular image of the Sicilian aristocracy. The enduring fascination of the Sicilian nobility extends far beyond the island itself. It draws travelers and tourists to photograph the decaying baroque palazzi in the historical centers or (as in Bagheria, a suburb of Palermo) the grand mansions that, like their inhabitants, are doggedly holding onto the vestiges of their pride amid the humbling reality of the grisly modern housing blocks surrounding them. Dreams of long-gone princes and baronesses inspire motorists to pull off the road and contemplate the rambling mansions and walled farms being remodeled or left to rot at the edge of vineyards and grazing lands.
More than any other surviving aristocracy except perhaps for the British royal family and until recently the rulers of Monaco, the faded Sicilian nobility inspires the romantic fantasies not only of those who live here or who long to visit, but also of many who have no intention of ever setting foot on the island. The substance of this dreamy fascination has been generated not by history or by contemporary reality (outside Italy, few people could name one Sicilian principe or contessa) but by literature, by one writer, one novel—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard—and by the somewhat shapeless but popular film that Luchino Visconti made from Lampedusa’s book, starring Burt Lancaster in the title role of Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, the proud leopard who watches the old order disintegrate and surrender to the imperatives of progress, social change, and populist revolution.
First published in 1958, translated into dozens of languages, the book became an international best-seller, its reputation partly fueled by the romance of its aristocratic author’s idiosyncratic literary career. Lampedusa mulled over his projected novel for a quarter of a century but did not begin writing the book until he was sixty. He composed almost nothing besides The Leopard. Informed by an editor that his work was not good enough to be published, he died before the novel was printed and acclaimed as a masterpiece.
A brochure funded by the European Union maps the borders of the Parco Letterario Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and outlines a series of walks past the places in Palermo that Lampedusa frequented and that he described in his novel, including the route that Don Fabrizio’s family takes as they travel down from their home in the hills to attend a glamorous ball in the city. Near the Piazza Ungheria is a café where the writer is supposed to have spent mornings working on his book. During the time it takes me to consume a small dish of pistachio ice cream in the back room, we see two literary pilgrims enter, poke around, and leave, obviously disappointed and bewildered by the café’s gleaming chrome interior and apparently unaware that, as the brochure explains, the author’s actual haunt was next door to its current namesake—and no longer exists.
Yet unlike other novels that have inspired cultish veneration and devotional travel itineraries, The Leopard truly is a work of genius. Beautifully written, at once lyrical and precise, it has enjoyed the rare good fortune of having been expertly translated into English by Archibald Colquhoun. Though relatively brief, it deftly and telescopically encompasses a long span of time—the maturity, the decline, and the death of its hero, the Prince of Salina, and the sweeping historical changes (the arrival of Garibaldi and his forces, the unification of Italy, the end of the rigidly stratified feudal system, and the rarefied, aristocratic milieu in which the prince has lived) that take place during his lifetime.
One reason why the book inspires such fervent admiration is the enormously moving and (we feel) accurate way in which it conveys how swiftly time seems to pass and the shocking surprises it delivers, the immense and humbling chasm between our hopes and expectations—and what ultimately occurs. Also the novel functions—and can be read—on a number of different levels. Most people remember the Salinas’s sumptuous Sunday lunch and the gargantuan baked maccheroni, possibly one of the greatest descriptions of food in all of literature; I thought of it several times during our own lunch at Gangivecchio. And what also lodges in the reader’s mind is the passionate love affair and the ultimately unhappy marriage between the prince’s nephew Tancredi and Angelica, the beautiful daughter of the mayor of the town in which the prince’s ancestral estate is located.
But what fewer readers remember is how profoundly this marriage symbolizes the decay of the old social order; and even fewer may notice the fact that the bride’s father, Don Calogero, represents a type—ambitious, financially astute, devious, and manipulative—who will reappear among the small-town Mafia dons in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia. On rereading the book, you may find that it has much more to do with politics and with its specific historical setting than you might have recalled; i
n fact, it can almost be studied as a textbook (of a certain sort) on the history of Sicily in the mid-nineteenth century. But finally what gives the book its particular—and particularly Sicilian—character is its ability to accept and embrace the paradoxical, to celebrate and at the same time critique a system of values that is simultaneously heroic and decadent, admirable and insupportable, suffocating and liberating.
These paradoxes, this romantic and ironic nostalgia suffuses the sites on which the old order has left its mark. In the Kalsa district of Palermo, not far from where the appropriately forlorn office of the Lampedusa Institute dispenses its brochures, is the Palazzo Mirto, the former home of the princes of Lanza Filangeri. Perhaps it has something to do with the hour (late afternoon), or the time of year, or the fact that we’re the only visitors, but the palace is kept in total darkness; possibly, there’s some concern that the sun might damage the fragile pastel silk upholstery of its sofas and chairs.
One ornate interior flows into another, and a guard follows us from salon to salon, from parlor to parlor. As we enter each room, he switches on the lights, illuminating the crystal sconces, the massive Murano glass chandeliers, then switches them off the moment we leave. Our eyes have to keep adjusting to the change, to the brilliance and then the blackness. Afterimages from the previous room float, disorientingly, in the gloom before us, all of it adding to the magical, slightly disturbing impression that the place has been slumbering, alone with its ghosts and its shadows, and is waking up, grudgingly, little by little and only briefly, to greet and then dismiss us.
Faded and more than slightly tatty, the decor could hardly be more theatrical or more revealing of the sweet, vanished dream in which its former owners passed their nights and days. The dark embossed leather that covers the walls of the smoking room seems to have absorbed—and to emit—not merely a faint whiff of the tobacco that the men enjoyed after dinner, but a dim echo of their laughter and their conversation. Furnished with scrolled and filigreed black lacquer settees and fanciful Chinoiserie, surrounded by eighteenth-century murals depicting a landscape of pagodas and temples, the charming Salottino Cinese is like a miniature stage set for an operetta set in an Asian garden. In a courtyard visible through the windows of a sitting room is a fountain encrusted with sea shells arranged in rococo patterns that—evidently, the funerary aura of the palace has begun to get to me—evoke the gaudy ossuaries that, in certain catacombs and chapels, explore the decorative potential of the cranium and the femur. And from the grand piano, photographs of the dead prince and princess stare at us with unreadable, distant expressions—as removed, as melancholy, as turned inward as the dying prince in the final pages of Lampedusa’s novel.
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