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

by John Keahey

  I think of the American author Mary McCarthy who, writing about Florence in the mid-twentieth century, described the dangers from Florentine traffic when one steps off the narrow sidewalks in order to look at the upper levels of medieval buildings. In Florence, many of the streets are a bit narrower than in Palermo. This city at least allows you to look down slightly wider boulevards at buildings perhaps not as tall or as stony gray as those in the Tuscan capital without taking the chance of being nailed by a tiny Fiat or a scooter screaming its bone-chilling whine.

  If you stand and look too long, you soon realize you are blocking those behind you, forcing them onto the street’s edge where they can be clipped by fast-moving cars—or Vespas built more for speed than the pure transportation function of their 1950s counterparts.

  We can’t escape it; it is a grinding reality, and it’s one of the images that most visitors carry home, along with memories of the art, the food, the passion, and the soul exhibited by Italians, Sicilians, and Calabrese. I, for one, occasionally dart into the calming, cooling climes of a nearby church to get respite from the clamor.

  * * *

  Palermo is a rough-appearing place. That doesn’t mean one should feel unsafe here; I never did. It’s more of a visual thing. Palermo’s buildings, like those in Florence, exude both the roughness of the region’s stone and the aesthetics of a long succession of invaders. This city’s buildings do not reflect the gentle apricot colors of Rome that glow in the warm Italian sun. There are few soft colors here to contrast with the shifting blues and grays of the sea just a few hundred meters to the north.

  Palermo instead is made up of harsh, gray stones that, to me, suggest the colder northern climes of the Normans who, centuries ago, left western France for the southern Mediterranean and, beginning one thousand years ago in the eleventh century, forever chiseled their mark onto Sicily and southern Italy. These descendants of the Vikings mixed together their architectural sensibilities with those of the Arabs whom they overtook around the mid-eleventh century.

  While the ruling class of Muslims left, many of its people remained. And their writing, poetry, and craftsmanship were sought after by the Normans and their immediate successors for a few hundred years more.

  Middle Easterners and North Africans had intermingled with the Sicilians who were a combination of Greek, Carthaginian and, perhaps, a few Romans—not to mention the remnants of the indigenous peoples the colonizing Greeks absorbed into their culture during the seventh through third centuries B.C.

  It’s a complicated history on this island, the Mediterranean’s largest and most contested from ancient times onward. The Arabs, who came in the ninth century A.D., had in turn chased out the Byzantine Greeks—the successors to Rome and the earlier Carthaginians. These North African invaders had succeeded the original Greek colonists and the indigenous peoples the Greeks found here—the long-lost Sicels, Sicani, and Elymians whose DNA is carried by modern islanders.

  * * *

  All this human stew from the melting pot called Sicily seems to come together in one place in Palermo: the centuries-old marketplace of the Vucciria, the city’s warren of twisting streets, most no wider than footpaths that snake among clusters of medieval buildings and then suddenly open into tiny squares and piazzas. Street names are unique here. Travel writer Aldo Buzzi caused me to look for the street of the Land of Flies, Via Terra delle Mosche, and the street of the Flying Chairs, Via delle Sedie Volanti. If a car makes it into here—and they certainly do—it cannot pass another coming from the opposite direction. One must wait or back out and try another route. Usually this is done with little argument. One driver, typically the one closest to an escape route, makes eye contact with the other, acknowledges with a slight shrug his willingness to move, and then does so. As the two drivers pass, they will nod and go on with their day, accepting that life is full of delays and compromises.

  Buzzi also describes a scene that I was able to witness during my first research visit, in March 2009: the periodic grilling in the Vucciria’s food market of lamb entrails “roasted on a spit with onions and parsley,” called stigghiole. His description of the “azure smoke and exquisite aroma” was just like I saw with my Palermo friend Conchita Vecchio, who brought me here to taste the delicacy. It wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. Years earlier I had consumed, while dining with friends in Calabria, a stew of heavily spiced organ meat—liver, heart, spleen, and who knows what else. I was no stranger to the exotic dishes of the South.

  If visitors are familiar with the well-scrubbed villages of, say, Tuscany, where fruit, vegetable, and meat sellers line up in orderly rows against a backdrop of the freshly plastered and painted walls of recently restored buildings, then they would be amazed at the contrast here. Vucciria’s meat, fish, produce, and fruit sellers appear in what can only be described as well-orchestrated disarray. They are loosely strung along the edges of the narrow streets, cluttering their spaces with piles of trimmings from the huge heads of broccoli that, in March, dominate vegetable displays. Stacks of cardboard boxes and worn wooden crates that once held Sicilian blood oranges from the eastern edge of the island, near Catania, or the imported bananas, or the tiny strawberries, also are casually tossed in among the fruit and vegetables now strewn helter-skelter on low, rough tables.

  The streets, paved in blocks chiseled out of some nearby quarry, are slimy with refuse. One or two scrawny, ownerless dogs trot up and down the street, pawing through the leavings looking for, and finding, scraps. Feral cats, with scars and torn ears—one I saw was missing an eye and the other was nearly festered shut—are either curled up on top of a parked car’s still-warm hood or on the pavement next to the fish seller’s stand, munching on a castaway gift from the sea.

  For parts of three days I walked among this melee of food, taking in the spectacle of disorder: the low-slung tables groaning under the weight of the fruits of the earth and sliced cuts of lamb, veal, beef, chicken. Occasionally I saw a hanging skinned hare, a cow’s head stripped of its skin, exposing a thin layer of meat below, a pair of calves’ heads, also skinned and neatly arrayed in a meat-seller’s glass-lined refrigerated case.

  Then, on my third night, I watched over it all from above as I ate dinner at a place incongruently called Trattoria Shanghai, a small family-run operation on the upper level of a medieval building. The ground-floor entrance took me through an unpainted, dented, splintered doorway. A set of narrow, twisting stairs carried me up a roughly plastered corridor with decades-old paint peeling from the walls.

  Reaching the first level, I entered a kitchen area where a small television, perched precariously on a narrow counter along one wall, was presenting the news. A man, obviously part of the family that ran the trattoria that doubled as their home, sat at the table, munching from a plate of spaghetti crowned with a hint of red sauce and sprinkled with a heavy dose of finely slivered cheese. His back was to me; my presence went unnoticed for a few moments. I stood, wondering whether I had barged into a family’s private quarters.

  Then a young woman, wrapped in a dark coat against the chill of the early-March evening, appeared from out of a side doorway and motioned me toward the terrace outside.

  There were a few scattered tables covered in clean red-and-white-checked cloths. They were set out next to a rickety iron railing roughly painted dark red. The view was stunning: the market, with its vegetable, fruit, and meat sellers, was arrayed below me, their ranks beginning in the tiny Piazza Caracciolo and flowing up along the narrow street of Discesa Maccheronai. Behind me, on the narrow street below, was blasting a loud American rendition of “Summer Nights” from the musical Grease. I looked over the terrace’s edge and saw a group of local teenagers dancing to the music, laughing loudly, and having a wonderful time.

  The young woman who had led me to the terrace reappeared with a simple, stained menu, and the first thing I saw was the low prices: €3 or €4 each for an antipasto, primo, or secondo. I chose antipasto of cheese and salami, a first dish of
spaghetti pomodoro, and a second dish of salsiccia, or sausage.

  Over the course of an hour, the dishes were delivered in slow succession; there seemed no reason to hurry here. Each was cooked to perfection—the antipasto just right with a few thick slices of tongue-tingling salami, a half dozen or so rich, flavorful dark-green olives, and two slices of milky mozzarella drizzled with just a hint of herb-enhanced olive oil. The pasta was perfectly al dente, and the tomato sauce lightly layered throughout, keeping to the true Sicilian culinary tradition where pasta should be the most important element and the sauce only secondary.

  I did not know what to expect for the secondo—the salsiccia—but a long roll, perhaps about twelve inches and as thick as a thumb, was set down before me. The sausage was shaped into a semicircle surrounding a wedge of lime that, when I sprinkled the juice onto the meat, drew out flavors I had never before experienced.

  While devouring all this, I noticed the tables around me filling with men in suits and ties and well-dressed women in fur coats. They appeared to be regulars at this rough little family restaurant, its walls in need of paint and its incongruous oriental name belying the pure Sicilian food and the unforgettable view of an ancient Sicilian marketplace.

  Meanwhile, in the piazza, a slice of Sicilian life passed by: a market that has happened in this same spot, day after day—except Sundays—year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

  * * *

  It is July 2009, the second of four visits to Palermo and just four months following that culinary experience at the Shanghai. For this particular trip, I had decided to stay in the famed Hotel Des Palmes, one of the city’s best and oldest. This was where many of the intrigues of Sicilian politics were carried out, where treaties were agreed upon over cognac and cigars, where famous people stayed. General George Patton reportedly lingered here for a few days after leading his American army south to north across the island, taking Palermo in the heat of summer 1943. Richard Wagner, just a year before his death in 1883, had written most of his final opera, Parsifal, in his room at Des Palmes. And it is where the nineteenth-century French writer Guy de Maupassant, star-struck by the fact his idol Wagner had lodged here while writing his finest opera, stayed before setting out on his journey via horseback around Sicily.

  It is a grand, modernized hotel and not overly expensive by the much more exalted standards of Paris or Rome. I once looked at its location on an 1880 Baedeker travel map—drawn before Via Roma was plowed through the city in the late 1890s. Baedeker liked the hotel’s beautiful garden. On my visit 129 years later, there was no such garden. The nineteenth-century map shows why. The building then had three multistory wings: a back and two sides. In the middle was an open space, obviously the spot for a garden. Today that spot is filled in, making the Des Palmes one large, blocky structure.

  * * *

  After a series of interviews and much wandering about, I was leaving for a journey eastward across the island. My rental car was delivered. The doorman helped me load luggage and offered a pleasant farewell. The streets along the port leading out of the center toward the Catania-Palermo autostrada were remarkably clean of the debris I had plowed through just eight hours earlier.

  The night before, friends and I had snaked our way through tens of thousands of revelers celebrating the annual procession, down Via Vittorio Emanuele, of the city’s patron saint, Santa Rosalia. She had lived as a hermit in a cave near the city and died in the mid-twelfth century. Her remains were found nearly five hundred years later and were carried through the city. A plague then in full swing, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, suddenly ended. Rosalia got the credit, and every July 14 her gold-gilded statue is carried from the cathedral to the port.

  Palermitani, even those who do not claim to be religious, revere their city’s patron saint. It seemed that all of Palermo turned out for her procession. Everywhere along this mile-long stretch of city street was packed, the masses spilling into side streets.

  There is no such thing as crowd control in Sicily. Processions, whether in the smallest villages or the largest cities, push their way through crowds of people who move slowly, ever so slowly, out of the way. And this particular one takes place in July, Sicily’s hottest, stickiest month.

  Traditionally, the statue was drawn by oxen. When I saw the procession in 2009, she was ensconced in a large boatlike structure that hid a motor vehicle. Rosalia not only delivered Palermo from the plague, but also she gets credit for everything that works, from good marriages and recovery from life-threatening diseases to protection from earthquakes. No one blames her when things go bad.

  Palermitani take the annual affair seriously. Thousands walk with the procession all the way. Thousands more jam the streets, waiting for the giant float to pass slowly, grindingly by.

  The handcrafted boat float was exceptional. It featured, arrayed around its deck, young bodysuited women who moved in slow rhythm, like mythical sirens calling to sailors on the sea. They kept going for the several hours it took the statue-laden craft to make its relatively short trip from the cathedral to the harbor’s edge.

  In the procession were two giant clusters of helium-filled balloons—one white, the other black. The balloons were held in place by several large ropes controlled by men who could play out the ropes and let the balloons rise slowly above the height of the two- and three-story buildings. Incredibly, hanging from each cluster was a single dangling trapeze with a young woman sitting on the bar. As the balloons rose, she would twist and turn high in the air, tumbling down, almost in slow motion, her arms entwined in the stout ropes.

  The ropes held, and the balloons stayed inflated and tight in their respective clusters until the very end, when they and the ship carrying the saint had safely passed under the arch that marks the northern end of Via Vittorio Emanuele and the entrance into Piazzetta San Spirito near the harbor shore. There the trapeze artists disembarked and the balloons were suddenly set free. They sailed up, up into the early-morning sky—it was now one A.M.—and disappeared over the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  After it was all over and the last of the fireworks had died out, we moved with a great flowing multicolored river of humanity along Via Cala and into the Vucciria en route to homes or vehicles parked far, far away.

  We had to plow through mounds of trash generated by the sweaty, thirsty, and hungry festivalgoers. Shards of broken beer bottles lay everywhere; soggy mounds of stomped-on food collected underfoot; paper—bales and bales of it—jammed gutters or was strewn along the street, the narrow sidewalks, and the flowerbeds like clumps of wrinkled snow.

  The next morning I am leaving Palermo for Catania on the island’s east coast. Driving along Via Cala just eight hours later and under the torturously hot July sun, I find the city surprisingly free of automobiles; the streets where we had trudged through garbage are now, unbelievably, swept clean.

  Sanitation workers, who just a month earlier had been on strike and who let Palermo swelter for weeks amid tons of stinking, piled-high garbage, had worked through the predawn hours. It seemed to be another miracle the Palermitani can give credit to their beloved saint.

  THREE

  The Cart Painter

  In centuries past, these works of art [carts] were everywhere in Sicily. The few that remain, and the few which are created each year, seem to represent more than another era. They symbolize a way of life, and the fact that Sicily’s unique medieval history has never been far from the popular mind.

  —Best of Sicily

  GIOVANNI VERGA wrote a short story that hints at what roads were like in inland Sicily in the mid-nineteenth century. They weren’t roads at all but mere tracks that, for centuries across the rolling hills, humans, mules, and donkeys hammered out of the dirt. When the Romans were here, they maintained the roads left by their predecessors, the Sicilian Greeks. It is said that they built fifty-three thousand miles of roads throughout their empire. However, despite their road-building prowess elsewhere, they appear not to have done m
uch in Sicily, the Roman breadbasket.

  The Romans eventually left, and others who had no sense of how to maintain these byways came and went. The roads, where carts were easily used by the earliest colonists, once again degenerated into paths. This forced folks to abandon carts for several hundred years, relying on foot power, mules, donkeys, or horses.

  In good weather, roads were passable; in bad weather, impassible, and people stayed put, unable to move even short distances. The peasant walked because his mule or donkey was used for carrying goods and harvested crops. The well-to-do sometimes rode on horseback, the women lying down or seated on litters attached to poles strung between sure-footed mules, one or two in the front and rear.

  Verga’s story “So Much for the King,” contained in a slim volume entitled Little Novels of Sicily, focuses on Cosimo, a litter driver who is summoned to transport the king’s wife between Caltagirone and Catania. The royal couple, based in Naples, is in Sicily to see firsthand the island’s need for roads. Cosimo successfully transports the queen and returns to his home and stables where, years later, his mules are confiscated in the name of that king because Cosimo could not pay his debts. The improved roads that resulted from that royal visit destroyed his ability to make a living with his litter.

  The advent of better roads in the sixteenth century made way, once again, for wheeled carts, or carretti. The mules now could pull them.

  Transportation became more efficient through the early nineteenth century. The Regia Strada, or royal highway, connected Palermo and Messina and, in the 1830s, was one of the earliest roads in post-Roman times to connect major Sicilian cities. Reports from early travelers indicated it could take five days to make the journey that now takes a few hours along a superhighway and through dozens of tunnels bored into coastal mountains that dip down to the sea.