Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  To the memory of my teacher Bessie Mae Savage Baker.

  Long ago, when I was sixteen, she encouraged me to take her journalism class, opening the door to the rest of my life.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  CHRONOLOGY

  MAP OF SICILY AND ENVIRONS

  1 “A Leopard in Very Bad Trim”

  2 Palermo

  3 The Cart Painter

  4 Racalmuto

  5 Sulfur

  6 Sciascia and the Inquisition

  7 Sicilitudine

  8 Never in Control

  9 A Mother’s Rage

  10 Aci Trezza and the Cyclops

  11 The Language

  12 The Mafia

  13 The Forge of Hephaestus

  14 Food

  15 Un Giro

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  PERMISSIONS

  ALSO BY JOHN KEAHEY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PREFACE

  MOST SUMMER afternoons when I was six or seven, and for many years beyond, I would walk two miles from my southwest Idaho home to the Carnegie Library in downtown Nampa. I would grasp the large door handle with its beautifully rubbed patina, pull open the heavy leaded-glass portal surrounded by wonderfully smooth and polished-oak frames, turn to my left, and head downstairs along a narrow stairway, its creaking treads worn into shallow depressions.

  There, in a long, narrow room that served as the library’s children’s section, I would sit for hours at a large table poring through stacks of stereo cards imprinted with mysterious, sepia-toned double images, slipping one at a time into the frame of a stereoscopic holder. Through the eyepiece, I could see—magically I thought—the double photograph now as one startling, sharply focused 3-D image.

  I absorbed thousands of these images of Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Rome or Paris, and vivid scenes of the European countryside. I discovered the Empire State Building, the Roman Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower. But what I luxuriated in were the foreign scenes of peasant farmers—men, women, and children—threshing wheat or picking grapes that were piled high in baskets strapped tight onto sturdy backs, or images showing large milk cans being hauled in the back of donkey-drawn carts.

  These photographs, which I viewed in the days long before my family got its first television and for years afterward, were my introduction to the world far beyond my neighborhood of neat two-bedroom, postwar houses. The scenes, probably dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are how I visualized Europe, and in particular Italy, well into adulthood.

  When I eventually got to Rome, Florence, and then Sicily in 1986 at age forty, I saw nothing like those pictures. There were no donkey-pulled carts with drivers chewing on the stems of stubby pipes, no families gathering and bundling wheat by hand. Instead, there were tractors like the ones farmers used in the countryside around my hometown, and long, straight rows of corn and potato fields, and flowing acres of golden wheat punctuated here and there by mechanized combines. There were a few elderly women wearing black, but that was about it. During those first two weeks in Sicily, I found myself driving down well-paved roads, surrounded not by donkey carts but by Fiats.

  It didn’t take long to realize that the images I had absorbed in that quiet library basement of my boyhood were gone forever.

  Now, thankfully, this much-abused peasant class is gone. Tourists flock to Sicilian farms in agritouristic droves to help pick grapes or harvest lemons, oranges, or olives, and to eat hearty food prepared by Sicilian families who supplement their incomes off the land by hosting visitors from Germany or Great Britain or the United States—all willing to pay significant money to try to reconnect to the earth of their ancestors. But most of these visitors, who stay for only a few days or perhaps a week, don’t take the time to understand what it was like in these once malaria-ridden plains and valleys just a few generations earlier.

  I discovered that there was a better way to find out what it was really like way back then, at a time before or during the taking of those stereoscopic images. It happened one day when, absently thumbing through books on a bookstore shelf, I came across a Penguin Classic edition of Giovanni Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories. Like a hand leaping out of the pages, the stories grabbed me, reminding me of those sepia images discovered in childhood. Once again I could visualize reapers heading to or from their fields on foot, sometimes traveling so far that, during the harvest, they had to sleep out in the open in the fields or in tiny huts, eating like soldiers in an army: “biscuit in the morning and bread and bitter oranges at nine o’clock and midday, and homemade pasta in the evening … served from kneading troughs as big as washtubs.”

  I began to live vicariously in another time. Nineteenth-century Verga led me to Luigi Pirandello, whose writings spanned both centuries, then on to twentieth-century Leonardo Sciascia, perhaps the greatest Sicilian writer of them all. They taught me about a world unlike anything on the peninsula of nearby Italy that I had experienced during all my years of traveling there. Through the pages of story after story, novel after novel, essay after essay, they whispered to me that Sicily, in the entire Mediterranean world, is truly unique, that in many ways it is like a puzzle made up of thousands of tiny pieces and is almost impossible to put together completely. But each piece, standing alone, is complicated, complex, and rich.

  * * *

  I have gone to Sicily several times since 1986. Most recently, for this project, I made four trips in one year: March and July 2009 alone, November 2009 with my son Brad, and early March 2010 with photographer and documentary filmmaker Steve McCurdy. My idea was to see the island in various seasons, and the final visit in late March was to witness Easter, a major event for most Sicilians.

  The goal in writing this book is to develop a better understanding of Sicilians and their unique culture, which is demonstrably separate from Italy itself, through conversations with these Mediterranean islanders and by studying their writers, their myths, and a history that spans more than three thousand years. This history is a key to everything else. One foreign power after another has trampled over this land—northern Italians were the final conquerors—adding to and co-opting unique aspects of the island’s character. This is a people who never had control of their own destiny.

  I don’t know if I can do this strange, magnificent, brooding island justice. But if I can look at it through these various eyes and compare that to what I have personally witnessed, maybe I can begin—just barely—to understand a land that has been scourged by so many and lovingly embraced by a few.

  CHRONOLOGY

  B.C.

  8000–7000—Evidence has been uncovered of the earliest occupation in Sicily by humans, particularly in caves around present-day Scopello and Palermo.

  2000–1100—Three major groups of people settle on the island, coming from areas around the Mediterranean. They are the Sicani, who first went to the western part. Different sources give different guesses about who came next, but the Sicels and the Elymians arrived in due course. The Elymians settled in the west, forcing the Sicani to the island’s center, and the Sicels settled in the east.

  1000—Phoenician merchants begin landing along the island’s coastal areas, ending up primarily in the west after the Greeks arrived. Legend has it that in 814 the Ph
oenicians had established a colony at Carthage in North Africa from which the Carthaginian Empire developed.

  Ca. 800—Greek merchants begin arriving in Sicily, establishing outposts. Carthage also creates way stations, particularly in the west.

  735—The Greeks start colonizing the island. The first is Naxos, near Taormina, between Catania and Messina. Eventually numerous colonies are established as far west as Selinous (established in 630), now referred to as Selinunte.

  Ca. 500–280—Syracusae, today’s Siracusa, grows into the most powerful Greek city on Sicily. The Greeks are firmly entrenched on the island’s eastern half. Carthaginians dominate the western half. Earlier peoples are absorbed into the newer cultures.

  264–212—Rome and Carthage fight the first of three Punic wars. Rome wins, eventually taking over the island from the Greeks as well and turning it, in 227, into its first province, primarily to serve as a wheat-growing area. Siracusani resist Rome but are finally defeated in 212; Archimedes, a resident of Syracusae, is killed by a Roman soldier.

  A.D.

  410–535—As the Roman Empire in the West disintegrates, Sicily is controlled for a time by Germanic Vandals, until 476, and other foreign rulers, such as the Ostrogoths, until 535.

  535—Sicily once again comes under Greek control, but these are Byzantine Greeks centered in Constantinople.

  827–1061—The Arabs fight to take the island from the Byzantines. They bring in emigrants from all over the Muslim world, particularly North Africa, and these people begin to blend in with, and become, Sicilians.

  1061–1190—The Normans, as mercenaries, land in Sicily and begin a decades-long battle to take over the entire island. What follows is a succession of Norman rulers, including Great Count Roger I and his son Roger II, who becomes the first king of Sicily (1130–1154), after serving as count (1105–1130) from age nine, and also ruler over Norman possessions in southern Italy.

  1194—Sicily falls into the hands of the Germanic Hohenstaufen dynasty when Constance—daughter of Roger II, ruler of Sicily for four years after the death of William II, and one of the last in the Norman line—marries Henry VI, who becomes Holy Roman Emperor. Henry is crowned in Palermo. His son becomes Frederick II, one of the most able and progressive of Sicily’s early rulers following the Arab period. Frederick is born in a tent in Jesi, midway down the Italian peninsula, while Constance was en route to Henry’s coronation.

  1250—Frederick II dies, followed by minor, ineffective successors.

  1266—The pope names the Frenchman Charles I to the throne, a move bitterly resented by Sicilians. He is from the House of Anjou, also known as the Angevins.

  1282—A revolt, known as the Sicilian Vespers, erupts on Easter Monday on the outskirts of Palermo at the church of Santo Spirito. Sicilians launch a revolution against the French in an attempt to force them out, killing most of the French on the island. The Angevin ruler, Charles I, sends an army to put down the rebels. When the revolt gets too big for Sicilians to handle by themselves, they call on the Spaniard Peter III of Aragon for help. He defeats the French, effectively halting Charles I’s expansionist dreams for the eastern Mediterranean. In 1283, Peter takes control of the island, leaving it in Spanish hands for most of the next 575 years.

  1302—The War of the Vespers officially ends at the Sicilian village of Caltabellotta. The French ruler Charles I and the pope agree that the Spanish ruler Peter’s third son will be recognized as king, but under the designation “king of Trinacria” during his lifetime rather than as king of Sicily.

  1479—The Spanish Inquisition is launched in Spain, eventually spreading throughout the Spanish world, including Sicily. Ultimately, Jews are expelled from Sicily.

  1693—Much of eastern Sicily is devastated by an earthquake. Noto is leveled and later rebuilt at another location. Caltagirone and numerous other towns and villages are badly damaged.

  1713–1720—The House of Savoy, lodged in what today is southeast France and northern Italy, gains control of Sicily and Victor Amadeus II becomes king. This is short-lived because Sicily is traded to Austria for the island of Sardinia.

  1734—Another Spanish dynasty, the Bourbons, takes over Sicily and Naples.

  1782—The Spanish Inquisition is abolished in Sicily.

  1812—Sicily briefly gains independence from Naples but is still under the Bourbons. In 1816, the king reneges on his promise of autonomy and combines Sicily and Naples once more.

  1848—A revolution breaks out, Palermo and Messina are bombed, and Palermo surrenders to the Bourbons.

  1860–61—Northern Italians, led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, take control of the island from the Bourbons and eventually take southern Italy, too, unifying the nation from north to south. An 1861 vote shows overwhelming support of Sicilians to become a part of Italy. Italy comes under Vittorio Emanuele II, head of the House of Savoy.

  1866—A brief revolution breaks out as a response to Sicilian belief that the 1861 election was fraudulent. Palermo is bombed by Italian ships, and the revolt is put down after three days.

  1908—A massive earthquake destroys much of southern Calabria and the northeast of Sicily, including the city of Messina. The two areas lose as many as one hundred thousand people.

  1922—Mussolini comes to power and launches a movement to force Sicilians to speak only Italian. He also clamps down on the Mafia, heavily diluting its power until the Allies in World War II use Mafia leaders to regain control of towns and villages when the Germans are driven out in 1943.

  1946—Italy, in an attempt to quell a bloody separatist movement, names Sicily as one of its five autonomous regions.

  1948—Italians vote to toss out the monarchy. Italy becomes a republic.

  Mid-1980s—Hundreds of mafiosi stand trial in Palermo and most are convicted.

  1992—Anti-Mafia Judge Giovanni Falcone, a key figure in those trials, is murdered on May 23 along with his wife and three bodyguards. A Mafia bomb explodes underneath a highway at Capaci, northwest of Palermo, as his motorcade passes by. On July 19, his friend from childhood and fellow judge Paolo Borsellino, along with five bodyguards, is killed in Palermo when a bomb goes off as he gets out of a car in front of his mother’s house. Massive anti-Mafia demonstrations break out in Palermo.

  Present era—Most Mafia leaders have been arrested, along with their associates, and billions of dollars in assets have been confiscated and turned over for public use. No Sicilian deceives him or herself by believing that the Mafia will disappear anytime soon.

  ONE

  “A Leopard in Very Bad Trim”

  Don Fabrizio could not know it then, but a great deal of the slackness and acquiescence for which the people of the South were to be criticized during the next decades was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them.

  —Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1960)

  “IN SICILY, ‘no’ often becomes ‘yes’!”

  So proclaims Claudio Cutrona as we scramble down scaffolding erected against a nondescript building just a few blocks from the port of Palermo. It is a bright March morning in 2010 under a cloudless sky near the heart of Palermo’s old town. The day before, Claudio, my host at a bed-and-breakfast tucked nearby in a narrow medieval-era street of the Vucciria, had obtained permission from a group of painters to let us climb their scaffolding. From that perch, we could look down into the ruined grounds of the neighboring compound that holds the busted-up remains of the fabled Palazzo Lampedusa.

  The palazzo, in much gentler times, had been the home since his birth there in 1897 of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, author of the great Sicilian masterpiece, Il gattopardo (The Leopard), a novel that is a must-read for anyone who wants insight into Sicilians and how they became who they are, separate both culturally and emotionally from the rest of Italy.

  Locked doorways and stone walls, perhaps fifteen feet high, had closed off the 1,600-square-yard compound for the past sixty-seven years. An Allied bomb, dropped on April 5, 1943, and aim
ed at German and Italian ships in the nearby Port of Palermo, missed its target, blasting the palazzo apart, turning its western wing to chunks of stone and shattered plaster; its eastern wing, still standing, was peeled open like a can of beans, exposing rooms, some with ceiling frescoes and huge carved-stone fireplaces, to decades of rain and wind.

  Briefly, in the years immediately following the war, brick-making equipment had been set up in the rubble, complete with a tin roof held up on hastily poured concrete pillars. It served to help rebuild portions of bomb-damaged central Palermo. But that manufacturing site, too, was abandoned and the compound was closed off.

  Now this space, with its jumble of stones and large trees, palms and hardwoods springing out of the destruction, is inexplicably full of workers. From the scaffold, we watch them cut up the woody vegetation and haul it away.

  Claudio, from his perch, shouts down, asking one of the men piling up great chunks of freshly cut tree limbs if we can come in. His curt response: “No! It is too dangerous.”

  Then, the man in charge, an architect who joins the workers during this discussion, shouts up, asking Claudio why we want to come inside. Told that an American writer, an admirer of Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa, and his great Sicilian novel, is with him, the young architect doesn’t hesitate. “Yes! Of course,” he says. “Come around the wall and enter through the small doorway from Via Bara all’Olivella.”

  * * *

  The bombs that laid waste in 1943 to much of central Palermo and this once magnificent palazzo were preparing the way for the Allied invasion of Sicily. Some of the destruction was not Allied-caused, however. German sappers set explosives throughout the city center in preparation for their army’s departure. The island had been under the control of Axis troops of Germans and Italians. The Allied invasion, launched from newly conquered North Africa, began at the island’s south shore the night of July 9. On July 22, American general George Patton’s army, after slogging its way in a northwestern sweep from Gela and Licata, entered Palermo against light resistance, the Germans by then far to the east.