by A. A. Gill
And you can examine the rewards of your forage, the amulets of pilgrimage. Oh, I didn’t get much – just this artichoke, because I liked the colour. Oh well, we got this marvellous chèvre. The man said it was made with his grandmother’s goats, or perhaps that his grandmother was a goat. And this charming gingham bag for hanging on the back of the kitchen door and keeping old plastic bags in. Not, of course, that we now use plastic bags anymore, on principle. And no, you’re right – we don’t actually have a kitchen door, either. But still, it seemed so here, so right. I’ll give it to the daily; she’s from the Philippines. Did anyone get any olives? I tried to get some of that divinelooking pâté, but I think I bought an eggtimer instead.
And here is the truth of French markets: it’s almost impossible to actually buy anything in them. If you had to really do your entire weekly shop in one, it would take you a fortnight. So consequently the French don’t – they use supermarkets like everyone else. This isn’t for buying, it’s for worshipping. France isn’t really like this at all, it’s just an idea of a France just like this. This is where they teach their je ne sais quoi before they go to the convenience store, the gym and the office and figure out how to be more like the Germans and the English and the Irish and the Americans. I said that what I liked about markets was that you couldn’t fake them, that they’re immutably driven by commerce. Except for these ones. They are the exception that proves the rule. The French are not like their markets at all. Their markets are actually like the rest of us, or our ideal selves. Somebody once said that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Well, the rest of us go to a market somewhere in the south of France.
All in the family
Only in Sicily is organised crime a tourist attraction. Just don’t ask the locals about it.
There are many singular and specific things about Sicily. Indeed, Sicily is a specifically singular place. But perhaps the most striking singular thing is that it’s the only holiday destination on earth that tourists visit because of the organised crime. Sicily has the distinction, dubious or ironic, of having murderous kidnapping and extortion as an attraction, like the whirling dervishes of Istanbul or the street mimes of Vienna. (Actually, slightly less murderous than the street mimes of Vienna.)
The mafia’s USP – and I think in this it is also alone in the world of crime – is having a strict rulebook that prohibits the robbing of strangers. You keep it in the family. Sicilians are understandably taciturn and annoyed by the visitors’ interest in their thugs. It’s like having a psychopath in the family that everyone else thinks is a charming and exciting raconteur. The black hand of crime families grew out of the grotesque feudal poverty of the Bourbon rule of Sicily. Peasants had no rights, no redress and no justice; the secret organisation grew from the aching tumour of revenge. But unlike Robin Hood, the mafia didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor; it robbed the poor and protected the poor against robbery, setting up a circular monopoly of both crime and crime prevention that has lasted ever since. Taxi drivers and hotel concierges fend off the inquisitive questions from tourists with a wearied thin politeness, like men being asked about their prostates.
From the moment you land in Palermo, you’re aware that one of the defining characteristics of Sicily is that it isn’t like the rest of Italy. A secretive, watchful, hard and self-contained place, there is none of the light-hearted bantering and flirtation you associate with the mainland. Indeed, there are few women around, and it’s outwardly as overtly masculine as the countries across the straits in North Africa. I was always aware of being watched in the hugger-mugger collapsing streets of the old capital. Whenever I looked over my shoulder there was somebody looking back. Not threatening or intimidating, just noticing, marking your movements through the teeming streets. The balconies of the old baroque houses have blankets hung over their metal balustrades to protect the modesty of daughters leaning over to whisper secrets and dart dark, meaningful glances. Or just hang out the washing.
There are hundreds of huge and vainglorious palaces here, ancient and decrepit, dropping their decoration and pediment like stone lepers. They’re blackened and crippled, strung with utility cables like life-support, and inside the warren of rooms is a mass of illegal immigrants from Tunisia and points south from Africa. The poignancy and beauty of extreme penury and desperation set against crumbling, reduced grandeur is one of the endearing pleasures of sightseeing. Picturesque slums were ever the background of The Grand Tour, which took in Sicily for the poorest and most aesthetically pleasing peasants in Europe. Its ruins of half-a-dozen defunct civilisations and Mount Etna continue to be the living symbols of hubris and nemesis: compared to the power of ancient gods, human vanity and aesthetics are merely laughable graffiti.
There are few places that have quite so much naked, molten history as Sicily. Dozens of invasions, uncountable massacres and clearances, relentless vendettas. The past infects the present and the future, it glows in the brooding, and seeps from one generation to the next. Blood, as they say around here, calls for blood. Everything about Sicily seems to be a cautionary tale. Everything is itself and a symbol and part of a code. It’s not an easy place to grasp, or necessarily one that you’re drawn to. There are a lot of people here, a lot of poor people and a lot of corruption. Modern buildings of the most dispiriting type seen outside the dreams of Stalinism crust every hillside and elbow every small town. There was a time in the ’70s when they said Sicily was the second-biggest importer of concrete in the world after Nigeria. It was a society adept at milking the guilt and hush-money of European grants for the least lasting good.
But it still manages a striking and harsh beauty, an unpolished or unfenced sense of the ages made palpable and accessible. A people whose hardship and secrets have also given surprising moments of sweetness and sympathy. I was particularly drawn to the confectionery. Traditionally cakes and pastries are made by nuns in closed and silent orders, who make delicate and intricate moments of almond and honey with infusions of soft fruit and citrus and chestnut, sugared and shaped into devout little braille prayers. There are hundreds of these sweet things offered to martyrs or on religious holidays. The intensity and the hardness of the belief and the life made them give each a flavour that transcends the marzipan and ricotta. They have a memory of the crypt, a veiled reminder of incense and death. And behind the childish pleasure of sweetness is mortality and pain and guilt and mortification. The island is heavy with mandarin oranges. The air is full of the smell of their blossom, heady and morbid.
I went up to the small hill village of Savoca in the south-west. Not many people make it up here. It’s a typical Sicilian village, buttoned down and shuttered. It curls in on itself like a stone snake with an itch. There’s a good church, which is locked, with an interesting Norman mural, a crypt of dried mummies with bay leaves and rags in their stomachs, and a view that stretches across the centuries to the sea.
‘Wait for me ’round the corner,’ said the Sicilian I was working with. ‘There’s a bar, you may know it. They made that film there.’ And indeed I did know it. This is the bar from The Godfather, where Michael meets the girl that he will briefly marry. It’s one of the great scenes, one of the great locations, in all of the short history of movies. Coppola used it to stand in for Corleone, a real place with long mafia associations but which has become too modern.
Film tourism has now become big business, and I sat in the park opposite, where Michael had his wedding reception, and wondered why there was not a single intimation of what this place had once briefly been. My friend found me. ‘Do you recognise it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it’s exactly the way it is in the film, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen it.’
‘You haven’t seen The Godfather? Everyone’s seen The Godfather.’
‘Not in Sicily,’ he said. ‘Why would we?’
Battle of the bulge
Budgie-smugglers, apple-catchers … call them what you will,
there’s no doubting there are strong cultural ties that bind us to our more extreme swimwear choices.
I spent my first holiday in Spain for years. Andalusia. I’d forgotten what a vast business holidays are here. What Seattle is to computers, Bangladesh is to T-shirts, and Guangzhou is to small plastic toy cars with cartoon drivers, so Spain is to getting your bits burnt. Spain invented tourism. Obviously people had to go places before Spain came up with sea, sun, sex and sangria, but tourists tended to do what it said on the package: they toured. They went to look at things. Tourism was cities and ruins and self-improvement, not snoggery.
It was the Spanish who had the uncharacteristically blue-sky idea of taking the interest out of travel, of removing the place from the destination. At the moment when aeroplanes got to their destinations more often than they disappeared into oceans, and working people thought it was safe enough and cheap enough to go away for a couple of weeks abroad instead of staying in Torquay or Bournemouth, the Spanish realised that the one thing that had been putting most Europeans off being tourists was the touring bit, the self-improvement, the churches and the ruins and the guide with the raised umbrella saying, ‘This way please – we have half an hour to do six centuries of frescoes, so no talking.’ The Spanish brilliantly discerned that what really attracted people was each other. The dons heard a mysterious disembodied voice saying, ‘Build it and they will come.’ (He probably said it in Spanish.)
So they built Malága, and come they did, in their hundreds of thousands. They came because of the sun, and the bit of water, and the cheap wine and the paella, but mostly just for the sun. And the Spanish also realised that if the tourists wanted to go and see something exciting or edifying, then they’d just look at each other. And it turned out that most people would far rather look at each other than some old statue without arms. And to those who pointed out that they could have stayed home and looked at each other on the bus, the answer was plain: not in this colour, and certainly not wearing that. Where else could you see that particular swatch of human colouring range from deep-flayed puce to wizened-sideboard teak, and wearing such spectacular attention-seeking clobber?
It is no accident that both the British and the Germans so often find themselves rubbing peeling shoulders as guests of the incredulous Spanish. The Poms and the Krauts are the two most dowdy dressers at home, but when it comes to packing for the summer, then some pantomime switch is flicked on in their heads, some exhibitionist pheromone perhaps contained in suntan cream. The astonishing ability to throw caution, taste, sense and decorum to the breeze is particularly strong in both the Germans and the British.
It has always been a matter of mutually fond embarrassment, but now something has happened on the beaches and lidos and swimming pools of Europe, and of course it’s been precipitated by the French, who are people who wear more casual clothes on holiday than they do formal ones at funerals. Nobody looks quite as uncomfortably creased, polished and preened as a French man trying to look relaxed. A French woman has just been turned away from the municipal swimming pool dressed in what they’re calling a burqini, which is essentially all her clothes and a headscarf. This is the accepted sharia outfit for mixed bathing. The pool guard turned her away for being unhygienic, a swimming hazard, unfavourable and a fashion disaster. At the same time, it transpires that it is illegal in France for men to approach swimming pools unless they’re wearing Speedos. The shorts that most of us wear are apparently unhygienic. In response, an English holiday camp has banned Speedos. Europe is now bristling and pouting and posing its particular pet intolerances about what you should wear to go swimming.
A tracksuit with three headscarves is a bit of a red herring, or perhaps a shoal of kippers. If you’re that modest, most women don’t want to swim with men at all. The Speedo thing, though, is interesting. The bits of Europe where they’re still popular generally coincide with places that still elect Communist mayors, where the most popular occupation for women is either housewife or prostitute, and where the local drink is made out of distilled plums or potatoes. So very tight budgie-smugglers, as I think the Australians call them, being the home of budgies, or apple-catchers, as they’re known in England, are generally popular all the way down the Black Sea, on the right-hand side of the Adriatic, and on the south side of the Baltic. So it’s Ukranians, Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians, and very, very small costumes are very, very big in Albania and in Hungarian spas. Germans, of course, adore them and always have. They wear them wherever possible. The Brits, the Italians and of course the Americans wouldn’t be seen dead in nylon girl pants. As far as I remember, Australia is pretty much split down the middle. A lot of them wear very baggy board shorts, but there’s also quite a lot of muscle Marys in lifeguard-style tanga.
The point of this argument in Europe is, like most arguments in Europe, not about what it says it’s about. It isn’t about swimming trunks. It’s about comparing versions of liberal intolerance. So the French banned women in burqinis because it’s an insult to women. Muslims complain it’s intolerant of faith. The Brits banned budgie-smugglers because they’re offensive to women and children. Very brown Polish men say it’s an infringement of their right to wear whatever they like. And actually we’re having this row because we’re so fed up with and frightened about having to argue about the things that really matter, like unemployment and house repossessions.
What no one has yet asked is: what’s worse in Speedos? A very little one, or a very big one? I mean, if your budgie-smugglers contain, say, a day-old chick or a cockatoo, which is worse?
What’s also interesting about Europe at the moment is that naturism is declining. Its particular sexless, healthy and rather dull image of hiking and caravans and woodland clearings is disappearing under a new Puritanism and the fear of paedophilia and sexual impropriety. The French, also, contrarily, have given up going topless on the beach. Again, this Bardot-esque symbol of equality and freedom has been usurped by so many plastic breasts and Ukranian students on the Riviera. It’s been a weirdly Calvinist summer here. Europe’s existential chickens have come home to roost. Or perhaps that’s budgies, or maybe cockatoos, or kookaburras, and the occasional albatross.
Food for thought
With the rapid devolution of fast food and the Darwinian drive of bastardised dishes around the globe, croissants and cappuccinos just aren’t what they used to be.
I just went out to have coffee. Normally I just go to the kitchen to have coffee, but today there are two Poles in the kitchen, and if I have to make coffee for me, then I’ve got to make it for them, too, which would involve the international mime of beverage-making, and searching under dust sheets for the fridge and biscuits. Poles, I’ve discovered, are quite fussy about biscuits, so I went out. I always associate going out for coffee in the morning with New York. It’s a ritual lots of American writers have: you take your Times and the Post and you do coffee. Some take their computers and sit in Starbucks and work. There’s a whole school of Starbucks journalism, movies and television, all frothy profundity and witty banter. A chance romantic meeting between two writers, one serious (her), the other sporty and not serious (him), in a coffee shop is the leitmotif of the Starbucks school.
So I went down the road and had a cappuccino. Like eggs Benedict and unhygienic sex, it’s one of those things that received wisdom says you never get at home. Everybody has a cappuccino thing, but whoever uses them twice? It takes hours, it coats the ceiling in watery milk, and finally you get cold coffee with scum. I rarely drink cappuccino. The waitress asked if I’d like a croissant (she was Polish, incidentally; Britain is now run entirely by Poles, and frankly they’re doing a far better job than any of the other people who have invaded us for the last 2000 years) and I said yes. I said yes because there is an old connection. We think of cappuccino as Italian and croissants as French, but actually they’re both Austrian. Precisely, they both originate with the siege of Vienna, which was the high water-mark of the Turkoman invasion of Europe, and the beginning
of the slow withering of Ottoman expansion. The croissant was made to celebrate the defeat of Islam by a grateful Viennese baker; it still comes under the heading of Viennoiserie in France. The coffee was discovered in a Turkish camp and mixed with milk and named after the monks in white hoods. They have since gone around the world.
I expect a cappuccino and a croissant are the two things you can pretty much get in every country on the globe. Mine came and the coffee was a pneumatic effluvium, not unlike cavity wall insulation. It was striped like a zebra’s bandage with a thick layer of cocoa. Finding the actual coffee in it was a trepidatious business; at last a grey liquid seeped from below. It was mildly coffee-flavoured warm milk. But the croissant was the real surprise. A lump covered in almonds and a shake of icing sugar that mice could’ve skied on, it was a fat, corpulent thing, like a croissant python that had swallowed a doughnut. As I tried to pick it up, it fell apart under its own adipose cholesterolic weight, spilling its guts of a slidey mousse made of fat and ground almonds and sugar, like a six-year-old’s cake mix. Together the coffee and the cake were to their original inspirations what a pantomime dame is to Elle Macpherson. It isn’t that they were horrible. It’s that they had descended so far from their template.
