by Matthew Fort
Mariano Brischetto rings me to say that he’s going to appear in a performance of La Bohème in the Teatro Antico in Taormina that evening. Would I like to go? Why not? The Teatro Antico. Taormina. A performance of La Bohème. A warm summer’s night. What else have I got on that’s half as interesting? I tell Mariano to count me in.
The Teatro Antico at Taormina is spectacular in the evening light; a happy synthesis of Greek aesthetics and mastery of acoustics and Roman engineering, of stone and brick, of time and place. Curved banks of stone seats line the hillside. In a gap in the middle of the wall of Roman brick behind the scena, the lights of Giardini di Naxos and Calatabiano glitter beneath Etna. A plume of gas streams from its summit. A tiny slice of moon is just beginning to show in the darkening, velvet sky. It’s a dreamscape of incomparable beauty, as dramatic as any production in the theatre. I wonder if Sophocles or Aeschylus had sat where I’m sitting, supervising production of their plays.
All, however, is not quite so harmonious down at the performance area.
‘I’ve only just been told I’m singing Marcello,’ says one tenor.
‘But you’ve sung it before,’ says Ross, the Welsh chorus master of the Teatro Massimo Bellini, and the man in charge of the Catania contingent.
‘Oh yes. But I haven’t been told who’s singing Mimì.’
A woman comes up looking cross. ‘There aren’t any costumes for the band.’
‘What do you mean?’ says Ross.
‘We were promised costumes and there aren’t any.’
‘Oh God. Perhaps you can play off stage,’ suggests Ross.
There’s a tremendous crash followed by a tinkling sound. The frame holding the tubular bells has fallen over. For a moment everyone looks rather embarrassed, and then the hubbub of preparation rises up again.
‘This is meta-theatre,’ Mariano says cheerfully, as he goes off to check his costume and changing room. ‘Theatre within theatre.’
‘I’m not religious,’ says Ross, ‘but, do you know, I’ve only been in this job for seven months, and they’ve got me believing in fate, destiny, the whole shooting match.’
The production is part of the Taormina Lirica Festival, a co-operation between the Taormina Musical Festival organisation and the Teatro Massimo Bellini of Catania. In theory the Teatro Massimo Bellini is providing the chorus and orchestra, the Taormina Lirica Musical Festival organisation is supplying everything else – the conductor, soloists, costumes and changing rooms. The Festival Puccini di Torre del Lago near Viareggio is responsible for the scenery. I ask Ross if involving three separate companies is normal practice in opera productions. He’s about to answer when Mariano returns, no longer quite so cheerful.
‘There aren’t any changing rooms for the chorus.’
‘No changing rooms for the chorus!’ says Ross. ‘But there must be! That was expressly specified in the letter we sent them. I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll go and talk to the director.’
It’s about 7 p.m. and the performance is due to start at 9.15 p.m. As the three opera forces have never met each other before, it strikes me that this seems to be leaving such essentials as rehearsals and staging until rather late in the day. Still, they know what they’re doing. Don’t they?
Ross comes back. It’s clear that, while the two organisations might know what they’re doing, they don’t necessarily know the same thing. The professional warmth is curdling to professional animosity. Mariano’s becoming increasingly pessimistic.
‘The trouble is,’ he says, ‘if we don’t feel that they respect us, look after us properly, why should we care about the performance?’
Ross returns. His early affability has turned to outrage.
‘I asked the festival director why he had ignored everything we had specified in the letter. Do you know what he said? “And why have you ignored all the things we requested?”’ Ross’s voice rises in indignation. ‘He said that he’d never come across such an unprofessional company as the Teatro Massimo Bellini. Yes, he actually said that. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘When I asked about changing rooms for the chorus,’ says Mariano, ‘the conductor said, “The Berlin Philharmonic don’t ask for changing rooms.”’
‘The conductor’s an idiot. The Berlin Phil don’t wear costumes,’ snaps Ross.
They go back to their respective battles. I retreat to the higher reaches of the seats high above the fray.
There’s a tremendous banging going on on the stage as the carpenters erect the scenery kindly provided by the Festival Puccini di Torre del Lago. The lights over the music stands begin to shine brightly. The orchestra coming to life issues genial burbling sounds. A man walks past me and waves in a friendly manner as if I’m a colleague. I’ve never seen him before. I assume that he assumes that I’m part of the great enterprise, too. I’m flattered. Would Aeschylus or Sophocles have recognised the scene below me? I rather think they would. I don’t suppose the tropes, dramas and artistic tensions of theatre life have changed much in a couple of thousand years.
Lighting tests begin. Various sections of the stage suddenly leap into brilliant relief and then vanish into darkness. The evening is warm and humid. I wonder if there’s going to be enough willing suspension of disbelief to carry us through ‘Che manina gelida’.
A short, plump man balanced precariously on a chair keeps trying to adjust a light at the top of a high stand. He stands on his tiptoes. His fingers keep just brushing the lower rim of the shade. He does it over and over and over again. I wonder at his obstinacy and persistence and futility. The French horns begin their warm-up routine. Parp, parp-parp, parp-parp-parp. Then the trumpets and the strings. What a splendid, civilised cacophony.
At 7.45, the conductor turns up. He’s slender, fiftyish, long hair curling over the collar of his open-necked shirt. He appears crisp and autocratic. He takes the orchestra through various parts of the overture. The soloists appear looking nonchalant. The conductor moves on to key arias and staging of Act One. Everyone eases into their role as if they’re sliding their feet into old slippers. They must have done this hundreds of times. Not with this conductor, perhaps. It takes a little time before the maestro’s happy. Act Two: ditto. There’s just time to run through Act Three, but not, sadly, for Act Four.
By this time it’s 8.40. I see Ross and Mariano for the last time before the performance. They are not in the best of moods. Still no changing rooms for the chorus.
How did the rehearsal go?
‘Not so good,’ says Mariano.
‘He [the conductor] didn’t even notice the set for Act Two wasn’t the right one,’ hisses Ross.
When someone asked George V which was his favourite opera, he replied, ‘La Bohème.’
‘Why is that, Your Majesty?’
‘Because it’s the shortest.’
His majesty would have been disappointed in the Lirica production. It begins at 9.40. I realise we’re in for the long haul when the carpenters reappear after Act Two, and spend the best part of forty minutes constructing the set for Act Three, the Barrière d’Enfer, in front of our eyes. The audience clap warmly when they finally finish and march off stage.
The music tugs at the heartstrings. The chorus is magnificent and the children particularly impressive. Mimi finally expires around 12.25 a.m., Rodolfo’s grief-stricken and it’s all over. The rather diminished audience give enthusiastic, if rather relieved, applause. And, of course, I enjoy it all hugely, the theatre and the meta-theatre. Who wouldn’t? It’s not often you get to see behind the scenes of any production, and witness the battles for artistic integrity at first hand. It’s all pure delight, stretched out over six hours. Forget Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Give me the dual drama of a production of La Bohème involving three opera companies any time.
As Mariano drives me back to Bronte, I tell him that I was surprised that Mimi hadn’t died of old age long before consumption took her.
Nicoletta and I glide out of Bronte, heading for Capo d’Orlando,
the last staging post before Messina. The road leads across fields of pumice towards Randazzo, ‘City of Wine’ as it declares itself. It was the headquarters of Peter I of Aragon during the Sicilian Vespers rebellion of 1282, and the town still has a distinctly medieval aspect, which is remarkable given that it was hit by something like 1,200 bombing raids during the war.
The road continues across the Alcantara Valley and up into the hills of the Nebrodi beyond, an area of Sicily more like the bosky uplands of the Aspromonte in Calabria than the rest of Sicily’s largely woodless interior. Thick stands of holm oak, cork trees, Sicilian pine, ash, beech, maple and hazel cast cool shadows across the road. Somewhere among them scamper and forage the suino nero dei Nebrodi, the Black Pig of the Nebrodi that, a few years back, had provided the sweetest, most exquisite slice of cured ham I’ve ever eaten in my life. Every now and then the forest gives way to clearings in which creamy cattle munch on mountain grasses, and to villages clinging to the sides of hills.
Even though it’s deliciously sunny, there’s the slight murmur of autumn in the air, of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Rose hips and crab apples, as bright as Christmas lights, light up the verge. Wild pears, blackberries, hazels and walnuts crowd the tangle of vegetation. The leaves on the maples are just, just starting to turn, the faintest tinge of yellow infusing the green.
Presently I pass a man bent over in a rough field gathering something. Cicoria, he says. Wild chicories.They look like the flattened clumps of leaves you see around the base of a dandelion flower, but slightly furry rather than shiny.
‘Are they good to eat?’
‘They’re good for cows,’ he replies. ‘They must be good for us.’
I don’t challenge his logic, but ask if I can taste one.
He trims off the earthy root with a sharp, worn knife, bracing the plant against a gnarled thumb.
‘These are the first of the season,’ he says. ‘They’re best right now, just after a bit of rain.’
The leaves are subtly fleshy and crunchy and slightly bitter.
‘How do you eat them?’
‘Raw, like a salad,’ he says, ‘with oil and lemon. And cooked, boiled.’
He goes back to picking, and I go back to the road, following its switchbacks until it comes out by the sea and the highway that leads to Capo d’Orlando.
A melancholy sweetness and quiet has descended on the town. When I passed through in July, it’d been pulsating with the unconstrained energy of holiday-making. The beach had been all but invisible beneath groves of sunbrellas. The sea had been a playground, the air raucous with the seagull cries of children. Bars bustled. Restaurants turned away customers. Traffic streamed along the promenade without cease. The streets hummed with folk bent on having a jolly time.
All that’s ebbed away. Only one or two sunbrellas dot the tawny sand, brightly coloured, abstract circles. The sea is flat blue. The sky is flat blue. The occasional car trundles along the seafront. Some of the restaurants are shut up. In others waiters go about their business in a listless fashion, more in hope than expectation. The scene has the stillness of one of those long takes designed to express the ennui of life in such films as L’Avventura or La Notte directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
The Ristorante Odeon, where I’d had that splendid dinner with Anna Venturi and her husband, is open, even if hardly a quarter full. I settle to zuppa di ceci e vongole, earthy with chickpeas, sweet with clams, rife with garlic, fruity with tomatoes; and then something called piatto rustico, a splendid hurly-burly of bits of sausage, strips of egg, shreds of green chicory and battlements of fried bread. What a splendid pub dish this would make.
The following day I make for Messina, where I meet up with Mariano Brischetto once more, and we settle down in a café, Irrera 1910, that I first visited in 2005. I renew my passionate affair with the sublime granita di caffè con panna e brioche, fall almost as deeply in love with a sospiro di monaca (nun’s sigh)a kind of ethereal macaroon; and satisfy my lust for Irrera’s incomparable pistachio and coffee ice creams. Ah me, what bliss. I tell Mariano about the hours I’d spent in Irrera’s laboratorio, where these incomparable delicacies are created by gnarled, sceptical, passionate craftsmen.
For logistical reasons I have to leave Nicoletta in Messina. She’s going to be transported by truck to Termoli in Puglia on the far side of Italy, where we’ll be reunited after I’ve finished with the Tremiti. I’m travelling by train. It’s time to go, to say goodbye to the bosom of the Madre Mediterranea that’s sustained me for so long.
In his majestic study, La Mediterranée, Fernand Braudel proposes the concept of la longue durée, which I roughly interpret as ‘the long haul’. Braudel’s theory, as I understand it, is that there are various levels of time: geographical time; social, economic and cultural cycles; and the histoire des évènements, the events that impact on transitory, ephemeral lives of individuals. The last months reflect all three aspects of Braudel’s longue durée.
Of course Mediterranean isn’t simply one, but a mosaic of multiple seas – Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, Aegean, Ionian, Balearic and even small sub-set seas such as the Ligurian, the Levantine, the Saharan, the Sardinian, the Thracian, the Myrtoan, the Icarian – each of which has its own particularity to the people who live by it. It’s a kaleidoscope rather than a jigsaw, as the relationships between them are forever in flux, fracturing, shifting, changing and exchanging.
At the same time, the Mediterranean has a physical unity, a discrete identity, a wholeness which is appealing to the outsider. In the end, the Mediterranean is as much about the lands surrounding it as it is about the water. Land and water together create a vast canvas on which the history of conquest, trade, social change, migration, scientific progress and religious conflict has been acted out. They’ve shaped the narrative of Western Europe, which, in turn, has shaped, for good or ill, the rest of the world. The Mediterranean Sea, itself, is active and passive. It breeds myth and legend, and enforces harsh realities. Its characteristics open the way to a vast diversity of possibilities and have affected the course of history. It is both frame and picture, fable and reality.
Braudel might have treated the Mediterranean as a subject of study, something about which to be coolly analytical and objective, but I’m not coolly analytical or objective. I’m a sentimental kind of chap. I feel warmly towards the Mediterranean. Of course I know it isn’t sentient, any more than Iddu is, and yet, just like those cool, intelligent, rational professional folk on Stromboli, I find that I’ve developed a kind of relationship with Her. She’s been ample and kind and provided a fabulous panorama in which to travel, explore, experience, in which to swim, beside which to lie and dream.
Cardinal Newman wrote the hymn ‘Lead Kindly Light’ after crossing the same straits in a storm; his ship was guided to safety by the lighthouse at Messina. Thank heavens no storms are forecast, and ferries are busy, unsentimental things. They carry their passengers irrespective of their emotional condition. Thirty minutes from Messina to Villa San Giovanni on mainland Italy. Chop-chop. No time for regret or mourning. None of that sentimental nonsense. I hardly get on before I get off, and suddenly, there I am, sitting on the platform at Villa San Giovanni station, waiting for the train to take me on the first leg of my journey to Termoli, and the Tyrrhenian Sea part of my Mediterranean odyssey is over. I don’t even have Nicoletta for company.
San Domino
There’s a stiff wind. The sea’s fluid chipped slate. A shaft of sun illuminates a patch of water a kilometre or so away, for a moment giving the surface the silvery glimmer of chain mail. The aliscafo heading for San Domino sways back and forth, heavily laden with weekenders, mostly in their forties and fifties. It’s some relief when we dock.
I settle into the Hotel Rossana, which looks out over the harbour towards San Nicola, San Domino’s sister island. The day is cool and pale, with silver-grey clouds threatening rain. It soon clears however, the sun comes out and I head off to explore.
San Domino is
an exquisite, irregular hump, capped with a canopy of brilliant green Aleppo pines. They fill the warm air with the sharp perfume of resin. Their trunks form screens around functional, white-painted, cuboid holiday villas. Pathways wind between them, leading from cala to cala – cove to cove. They’re architectural and sculptural, aesthetic and practical.
San Domino is really just one large resort, artfully decked out as an island covered in beautiful pines. You can swim in the pristine waters. You can lie on the rocks in the sun or on the sand of the few beaches. There’re some fine, easy-paced walks. The adventurous can go diving. There’s a day trip to San Nicola, a five-minute water taxi ride away. There’s a bar or two, and that’s San Domino done. No night life to speak of, no cinemas or playgrounds or other distractions other than eating. There’re plenty of restaurants, and some are pretty good, but compared to the islands on the Tyrrhenian side of Italy, the Tremiti are virgin territories when it comes to shopping opportunities and other diversions. As on Ventotene, people come here to get away from all that stuff, to slip into neutral, soak up primal delights and chill.
Most of the villas and hotels stand a little way back from the shore perimeter. A few just peek through the green canopy; sensible family places, not unhandsome in a way, linked by broad streets paved with wavy bricks, just suitable for wheeling baby buggies and the odd car and van delivering luggage or other essentials. There’s a village of San Domino with a square that functions less as a common space and more as a gap around which cluster bars, gelaterias, trattorias and the island’s few mini-markets.
