Sicilian Odyssey

by Francine Prose

  Looking at Letizia Battaglia’s photography is, in certain ways, like reading the novels of Leonardo Sciascia. It’s not merely that both artists have concerned themselves with the extent to which the open and covert operations of the Mafia have influenced the daily lives and the character of the Sicilian people. It’s also the intelligence and care with which both Sciascia and Battaglia render the Byzantine complication and subtlety of that influence—pervasive, omnipresent in the community, unmentionable, oppressive—unsurprisingly different from the way in which Mafia violence has been portrayed by Hollywood: a bunch of wise guys (goofy or courtly, psycho or coolly business-savvy) whacking each other and going to the mattresses.

  Letizia’s art both fueled and was fueled by the anti-Mafia struggle in which she was involved—a campaign with its own saints, heroes, and martyrs, most notably the courageous government prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, both of whom were killed by the mob. Falcone was murdered, together with his wife and three of his bodyguards, in the spring of 1992, when his car was blown up as he drove on the freeway from the Palermo airport toward the city. That same summer, Borsellino was blown up by a car bomb as he made his weekly visit to his mother; the explosion blew off the entire front of the building and shattered nearly all of its windows.

  During this grim period in Palermo’s history, Letizia became an increasingly vocal and visible presence. She was elected to the Palermo City Council and later the regional parliament, started a shelter for battered women and a woman’s publishing collective, and sparked campaigns to clean up (figuratively and literally; her activities included organizing teams to collect garbage) some of Palermo’s poorest, most despised and neglected neighborhoods. In 1979, she photographed the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, on a visit to Palermo, greeting Nino Salvo, a well-known Mafioso—tangible proof of the mob connection that was common knowledge but which the minister denied. Letizia’s photo became an important piece of evidence in Andreotti’s 1993 trial on charges of corruption—charges of which he was eventually acquitted; she received death threats, her life was often at risk—and yet she kept taking pictures.

  Talking to Letizia, you quickly realize how much emotion and energy she both expended on—and got back from—that struggle. So it’s disturbing but not surprising to hear her say that the new mood of the country, and the Mafia’s canny shift from car bombing to government lobbying, entrepreneurial speculation, and high-level influence peddling has somehow sucked the life and the blood out of the people’s will to combat it—and, in the process, to better the condition of their own lives. Still, the history of that campaign, and its ongoing legacy, is so much a part of Letizia’s experience that walking through the streets of Palermo with her is essentially like being taken on an anti-Mafia tour of her native city.

  When we mention that we’re changing hotels to stay at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes, the nineteenth-century villa-turned-hotel where Wagner stayed while finishing Parsifal, where a number of guests (including the French symbolist writer Raymond Roussel) committed suicide or died under sketchy circumstances, and where the Baron Castelvetrano lived in seclusion for fifty years, as penance for a murder, Letizia begins to expound on the hotel’s Mafia past. Lucky Luciano used the elegant belle epoque establishment as his headquarters, and in 1957 crime bosses from Italy and the United States convened for several days in the Sala Wagner to discuss the best ways to more efficiently systematize their organization and to parcel out the international heroin trade.

  “There’s a guy in the bar who was there in those days,” Letizia tells me. “He knows all about it, you should try and find him, though maybe he’s not talking about it anymore. Maybe the hotel’s trying to downplay all that.” In fact, the bartender doesn’t look old enough to have been born during Lucky Luciano’s lifetime, and we can’t quite figure out how to ask the rather stodgy desk clerk if there’s anyone around who’d like to have a little chat about the hotel’s notorious Mafia clients. Still, there is something about the place that makes you wonder about the table full of meticulously groomed, middle-aged men talking business over breakfast, while at the next table their bodyguards, who outnumber them two to one, closely monitor the activity—every motion anyone makes—in the mirrored, gilded salon.

  As I walk through the old part of the city with Letizia, she stops every few feet, sometimes in the middle of the street, in heavy traffic. She’s fully focused, intent and oblivious to the crowds of pedestrians or the cars streaming around her as she points out some landmark, something we might have missed…this successful business, that popular theater whose owner is friendly with Mafia leaders. An acquaintance stops and greets her. “How’s the revolution going?”

  “What revolution?” says Letizia.

  Pasted to one lamppost is a poster advertising an upcoming lecture by a lawyer, an old man with a very long white beard. “He’s a very good man,” Letizia remarks. “His son was a policeman, and the son and his pregnant wife were killed. Murdered, brutally murdered. So this guy took a vow that he would not cut his hair or his beard until he found out the truth about what had happened to his son and daughter-in-law.”

  “Did he ever find out?”

  “No,” she says. “But he’s old now, so his hair and beard aren’t growing so fast anymore.”

  As we pass the Church of San Domenico, she grabs my arms and stops me. “This is where they held Falcone’s funeral,” she says. “And it was very sad, because of course Borsellino was there, and of course he knew—everyone knew—that he was next, that his time was coming, that they would kill him soon….” She pauses. “People don’t always want to remember,” she says. “It’s too hard. There was a tree in the neighborhood where Falcone and Borsellino grew up, it became a kind of shrine…people would leave things on the branches, leave offerings at the base of the tree. But it was too painful for the people in the neighborhood, and finally they just cut the tree down.”

  Over lunch, she asks what we’ve seen during our time in Palermo. When she asks if we’ve been to the Galleria Regionale in the Palazzo Abatellis—the Renaissance palace redesigned by the gifted Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa—we tell her how impressed we were by “The Triumph of Death,” a huge, ferociously animated fifteenth-century fresco depicting Death as a skeleton riding a horse that’s essentially a ribcage with legs. The ground beneath the horse’s hooves is littered with the corpses of aristocrats and church officials whose gray, lifeless faces have been painted with a palette entirely different from the one used to portray the pink flesh of the living men and women who play the lute and gather beside a splashing fountain, unaware of the fate that awaits them. A few of the figures are depicted at the moment of being struck by Death’s arrow, at the very instant of shock and realization; each separate death reflects (as it does in reality) the character and the personality of the individual who is dying. One side of the painting is a self-portrait of the artist, who, brush in hand, seems to be gazing at the viewer, no matter where the viewer is standing.

  Letizia shudders and shakes her head. “What did you like about it?” she asks.

  “It’s…amazing,” I say lamely. It seems far too difficult to attempt to explain that the fresco, like her photographs, embodies what from the start I have been hoping to find here in Sicily: that Sicilian gift for extracting beauty from the harshest and most painful truths, for compelling death to admit its debt and allegiance to life, for creating an enduring—a vital and living—masterpiece that, by its very existence, contradicts the grim determinism of its title.

  “I don’t like it all,” Letizia says, waving her hand dismissively. “I like the ‘Eleanor of Aragon.’” Bunching her fingertips, she glides them down in front of her face, as if to smooth and reorganize her own lively features into the placid, bemused, sphinxlike impassivity of Francesco Laurana’s fifteenth-century marble bust of a young woman. “That, I think, is beautiful.”

  “So what should we see in Palermo?” I ask.

  �
��The most beautiful, the most important places to see are the two churches, La Magione and Santa Maria dello Spasimo.” Both churches, she explains, were heavily bombed—all but completely destroyed—during World War II; both are in the Kalsa district, one of the most desolate areas of the city, a neighborhood that has only recently begun to see a revival that promises to clean up the rubble still remaining from the war, the decay and demoralization that were the by-products of the drug and Mafia violence of the last half century. Both churches, Letizia continues, have been restored. Spasimo, in particular, was rebuilt by the people of Palermo, by artists, by Letizia and her friends, by her political allies, by neighborhood residents. It is now used as a school for jazz musicians and as a cultural center, with performance and exhibition spaces available to artists.

  “Those are things you can’t miss,” she says. “You can’t leave Palermo without seeing them.”

  It takes me almost thirty-six hours to understand why Letizia had such a near-allergic reaction to our mention of the fifteenth-century fresco. One morning, I wake up and realize: At this point, she’s just not in the mood for a work of art entitled “The Triumph of Death,” a painting that almost appears to celebrate, to exult in, human helplessness and powerlessness in the face of the inevitable. Her response is a little like the boredom, the vague irritation, and even dread I feel at the prospect of returning for a second visit to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini. And at the instant that all this occurs to me, I decide that—although it’s our last morning in the city—we can’t, after all, leave Palermo without seeing, as Letizia suggested, La Magione and Santa Maria dello Spasimo.

  Like San Giovanni degli Eremiti, La Magione is one of those churches that has the power to make the city outside grow quiet and disappear. A palm-lined path leads to the door of the sturdy, spartan twelfth-century Cistercian chapel; off to one side is a tranquil cloister garden surrounded by arched walkways. There’s a purity about the place, as if the damage it suffered during the war functioned as a crucible in which the renovations and “improvements” done on the church since it was built (the addition of a neoclassic facade, etc.) were burned away. Actually, that is a crude summary of La Magione’s architectural history. The writer Christopher Kininmonth’s view—“One is grateful that its bombing provided the opportunity to restore it to its Norman form”—may seem a little extreme, but you understand what he means. In any event, the current restoration is so thoughtful and expert that you can’t imagine that La Magione was nearly destroyed, or that it ever looked any different than it does today.

  Not so Santa Maria dello Spasimo. Those who rebuilt it—not restored it so much as transformed and revitalized it—had other plans, an agenda that did not include the desire to make it look whole, fix, repaired: good as new. Wisely, they realized that its suffering—the insults it sustained during the years when it was used as a theater, a hospice for plague victims, a poorhouse, and a hospital, as well as the final coup de grâce delivered by the Allied bombing—was a significant aspect of its beauty, and an even greater part of what would give the structure its meaning and significance.

  As we enter the courtyard, we can hear the sounds of practice coming from the studios of the jazz school that surrounds it. But nothing can prepare us for the extreme and singular splendor of the half-ruined church, with its wooden floor, its shattered roof, its ragged holes and empty arches through which the Sicilian sun pours in, and through which we can see startling expanses of cottony clouds and blue sky.

  A tree grows up through the floor and cuts diagonally across the interior. Like the great Gothic cathedrals, like the chapels of Borromini and Bernini, it has the effect of drawing your gaze—and your spirit—upward. Except that here there is no vaulted ceiling for you to admire, or to stop you. You can keep looking higher, and then higher, toward the heavens, with nothing to come between you and the bright flash of eternity. I find myself thinking of the unfinished, roofless temples at Segesta, of Giovanna Tornabene’s account of how hard it had been to fix the roof at Gangivecchio, and of Sicily’s ability to cut through the frivolous and inessential and make you think of the most consequential, the most primal things: for example, the necessity, the value, the meaning of a roof.

  Santa Maria dello Spasimo, Palermo

  Behind the church is a garden planted with neat flowerbeds and crisscrossed with pathways; a team of gardeners is at work, transplanting, mowing, pruning. Every sound they make—the clinking of their trowels, the snip of their shears—sounds like a declaration of triumph over the forces of violence and disorder.

  Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, like Coventry Cathedral, the complex of Santa Maria dello Spasimo has accomplished the impossible; it moves us deeply without depressing us, it commemorates and honors the lives lost during the war that nearly destroyed the church and during the years of struggle against the tendrils of Mafia corruption that worked to strangle the neighborhood and to keep it from making itself anything but a rubble-strewn breeding ground for poverty and crime. What the people of Palermo have done with Spasimo is the essence of what I am looking for here, of what the Sicilians have, by necessity, learned how to do: to transmute the horrors of history into something extraordinary—and profoundly alive.

  Howie and I look at each other. Letizia was right. It’s the most beautiful place in Palermo.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Intensity

  Every detail you notice, every experience you have, every person you meet, every fact you learn makes it that much harder to generalize, to summarize, to synthesize—to say anything at all. For the more you know about anything, the more unavoidably its contradictions confront you. If I say that Sicily is beautiful, I can visualize the steel reinforcement bars poking through the sidewalk at Gibellina Nuova, the bleakness of a Palermo suburb at dusk on a chilly Sunday evening, the blight of towns like Geraci Siculo, in the Madonie Mountains, where what remains of its historic center is surrounded by a virtual fortress of cheap, unsightly, high-rise housing. If I say that even the most modern aspects of Sicily still seem authentic, unspoiled, I can see the busloads of travelers trawling the jammed, once-pretty streets of Taormina in the desperate hope of finding a sale on Prada, I can hear the British matron telling her tour group that she plans to spend the afternoon on her own, engaged in some “serious shopping.” And if I say that its people are welcoming and friendly, I can instantly conjure up the suspicious, hostile glare of an old woman in Racalmuto, watching us disappear and return as we drive, in frustrating and finally useless circles, around and around her town, or the chilly stares that the unemployed young men in Noto gave us as we consulted our tourist maps and snapped our photos.

  But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I’d say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done halfway, restrained or suppressed. There’s nothing to correspond to, say, the ironic, cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.

  After awhile, I began to realize that the way I can identify other Americans in Sicily has less to do with language and dress than with a kind of hesitance, a reticence, a fear of venturing too much and embarrassing themselves, a reluctance that I could not imagine in a group of Sicilians, no matter how far they were from home, how unfamiliar and daunting the circumstances. No tight British chuckle for these people; they laugh from the solar plexus, and when they gesture with their hands, they’re in motion up to the elbows. After the enjoyable and affecting morning and afternoon we spend with Letizia Battaglia, we’re so drained we go back to our hotel and lie down and don’t wake up until the next morning.

  All this fervor, this commitment to the intense and extreme, makes it hard to write about the place without overusing the superlative. The sun is the strongest, the lemons the sourest, the scenery most sublime, the mosaics and churches and temples the most perfectly preserved. Sicilian drivers make Roman motorists loo
k like the overcautious, nervous young people you see sometimes gripping the steering wheel beside the disaffected, chain-smoking driving instructors in the cars marked AUTOSCUOLA. If freshness is the hallmark of Sicilian cuisine, subtlety is not; the garlic is raw and biting, the sweet and the sour compete to assert themselves, one bite of the pastry is a ticket to sugar shock.

  If the Sicilians pride themselves on the fact that their Carnival is the most beautiful, the most raucous, the most joyous in Italy, they will also tell you that their Easter defines the solemnity, the fervor, the depth of emotion with which the holiday is meant to be celebrated. All over the island, processions re-create Jesus’ painful progress through the stations of the cross and commemorate his sufferings on the road to Calvary.

  In Trapani, where the most famous of the Easter celebrations is held, groups of men from the various professional guilds—the shoemakers, the salt workers, the barbers and hairdressers, the painters and interior decorators—wind through the streets of the old city on Good Friday. On their shoulders they carry heavy platforms on which arrangements of carved and painted eighteenth-century cypress and cork figures called Misteri dramatize, with tremendous expressiveness and complexity, episodes from the Passion of Christ.