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

by John Keahey

  Various early nineteenth-century writers journeying to the island reported seeing litters and small carts, giving us the first descriptions of their adornment.

  An American, Henry Tuckerman, writing in the 1830s, said a litter he saw near the temple of Segesta in western Sicily “was rudely painted with the effigies of saints and martyrs.” Late nineteenth-century writer Baron Gonzalve de Nervo reported seeing, on the north coast near Palermo, a small cart painted blue with images of the Virgin and saints on the side panels. His was an early description of the horses, which he said had colored plumes on their heads and wore harnesses with designs in copper or gilded heads of nails.

  Marcella Croce and Moira F. Harris have written History on the Road: The Painted Carts of Sicily. In it we learn how carts differed from one part of the island to the other, based upon their function and the type of environment in which they were used. For example, carts that hauled salt around the western Sicilian port of Trapani had higher wheels and did not have decorative iron axles because of the salty water they drove through. Other carts were named by type: The tirraloru carried sand, gravel, or dirt. The vinarulo hauled grapes or wine barrels; the frumentaru hauled wheat.

  And the style of painting differed as well: In the eastern part of the island, around Catania, paintings are framed in squares; around Palermo, they appear on trapezoidal panels.

  * * *

  The black-and-white photograph, its high-contrast image beautifully composed, jumped out at me from the page of Enzo Sellerio’s book A Photographer in Sicily. A shirtless boy, perhaps eight, maybe ten, with tousled hair, knee-length shorts, and appearing to be barefoot, is clinging to the back of a horse-drawn carriage, the type used today to haul tourists around Palermo. The boy’s legs are draped around the axle casing, his hands gripping an iron rod high across the back. The carriage driver, seemingly oblivious as he pays attention to his horse, sits in the front, his back to the camera.

  I happened upon that photograph several months after my first trip to Palermo in March 2009, and it reminded me instantly of my visit with Franco Bertolino, who claims to be the last of the traditional Sicilian cart painters. The caption under Sellerio’s photo reads simply: “Palermo 1960.” That is the year before Bertolino, forty-eight when we meet, was born in a small stone house opposite the west end of the cathedral on the edge of Piazza Sett’Angeli.

  I ask Franco how he learned the art practiced by his father and, on both sides of the family, by his grandfathers. This tall, handsome, thin-featured man, who exudes passion about his dying craft, tells me he had not been a willing student.

  “I absolutely did not want to hear or learn any of this,” he says, his arm gesturing around a stone-floored room full of paintings on large sheets of heavy paper and canvas, as well as on wooden panels that would one day make up a Sicilian cart. “Because when we were young, we wanted to go out, play, have fun. We had the habit of—you know the horse and buggy, the tourist ones?—well, we would get behind these buggies and hang on as the horses were moving”—like the small boy in Sellerio’s photograph.

  It was apparently a well-established tradition for little boys to do this. This would have been before most Sicilian youngsters had televisions to watch in this postwar city that, two decades after Italy’s surrender, was still struggling out of the rubble of Allied bombing.

  “Today, young people have scooters, they have discos; we didn’t have anything,” Franco tells me that warm afternoon. “So we chased after the carriages and hung on for a ride. We would tease and insult the driver in Palermitano [the local dialect]. We would insult the name of his father,” he says, laughing to cover up a hint of embarrassment. The driver couldn’t stop in the middle of the road, and he would take his frustration out on the young boy hanging out of sight on the rear of the carriage by flicking his whip backward, mostly missing its mark.

  “One day he couldn’t take it anymore; he came to my dad and told him what I was up to.” His father caught him in the act one afternoon and, enraged at his son’s misbehavior and disrespect for the hardworking carriage driver, grabbed a wood-handled umbrella and started to beat him around the legs. “I fell on the floor,” Franco says. “I couldn’t walk.”

  For one month, while his legs healed, his father forced Franco to sit on a chair in the corner of the workshop where he and the boy’s grandfather worked to create and paint Sicilian carts.

  “I was forced to actually see how my father and grandfather worked here. I sat and observed. There was nothing else to do. My father told me, ‘Learn the craft while you are sitting there.’ And I did. So it’s been thirty-eight years that I have been doing this job. I came off that chair and started painting.”

  The years passed. His grandfather and father passed on, as did other craftsmen. Franco’s advantage was that as a child and young apprentice in the shop, he was surrounded by family members who practiced the cart art in a variety of styles and disciplines. While his father and both grandfathers were cart painters, other family members on his mother’s side were in charge of making the iron parts. On his father’s side were woodworkers as well as painters. He got to watch them all; now, as the lone survivor of the craft in his family, he does it all: cart building, wheel making, ironworking, painting. Mostly painting and making small models for collectors and tourists, he says, because no one wants a full-size cart anymore. They might want an old one repaired, touched up, or a part replaced.

  Franco acknowledges that he knows of a young woman in Catania—two hours away by car and a world apart from Palermo—who paints carts. As he puts it: “It’s a girl who graduated from fine arts academy. Her technique is different from the traditional technique that I use.

  “You see, the images that I reproduce, they are fuller images. There are more characters in my work compared to what others are doing. They might have two ‘puppets’ in one square. I paint entire scenes” that might contain many figures. “I use actual pigments; she might use oil-based paints.” Therefore, he says, his colors are bolder and stand out in a dramatic way.

  “The actual cart is full and rich in imagery and rich in character. I concentrate on the decorations, on the arms, the costumes, or I concentrate more on more colors for the art itself. But I guarantee you that the style today is the style that was used two hundred years ago.”

  He chuckles as I point out something to him that I saw in one of his puppet-show backdrops: six fingers on a knight’s hand gripping a sword. “There is no perfection in art.” He smiles. I get the impression he slips in that kind of anatomical mistake every once in a while as a sort of trademark. Or maybe he does these scenes so quickly he loses track of how many fingers he puts on a knight’s hand. He keeps the truth a mystery.

  Now Franco’s tone is one of resignation.

  “No one’s going to continue it,” he tells me. “Even if there is someone who actually takes it upon himself to continue this tradition, there is not the technique anymore. No one teaches what our ancestors taught us. All that will be left are the historic carts, and then what will happen?” he asks. “My generation and the generation before me won’t be around to actually tend to the carts,” to keep the colors vibrant, the iron pieces from crumbling.

  Franco looks around the room, now full of small-scale versions of carts to sell to collectors or to the infrequent tourists who stumble across his unadvertised workshop down a narrow side street. To make ends meet, he also creates and paints small figurines, outfitted in traditional peasant garb, that sit in the small models of carts. In an adjoining room, tipped backward on their shafts, is a jumble of carts—older, historic ones that he owns. Other carts line his narrow street, also tipped back to show off the ironwork and designs of the axles.

  He finds it hard to believe that his ancestors, just one or two generations ago, lived and worked in this tiny shop’s space.

  “In this room, we used to have the mother, the children, the horse, the cart.” The families, of course, eventually moved into nearby homes. “For
hygienic reasons,” he chuckles, “you can’t keep the horse in the house. Up to five years ago, we kept the horses here for the parades. The room was called the cartorio.”

  He pauses as a sense of sadness, of nostalgia, sweeps over his features. “A lot of things are being lost; slowly everything will come to an end.”

  Perhaps that will happen sooner rather than later. Franco is battling the city and the cathedral over ownership of the workshop that once housed two or three generations of cart makers and painters. His family, decades ago, put up this particular building, squatting on cathedral-owned land. Nothing was done about it until recently, when the church and the city wanted it back to build a multistory building there.

  Several months after my first visit and in the midst of his court battle (which he lost and has under appeal—it could take years to resolve, given the slow way things happen in Sicily), the tin roof collapsed. Franco was forced to move all of his carts, large and miniature, and his puppet-show scenery, paints, brushes, and tools into other buildings he owns farther along the narrow street.

  On top of that, he was sent a bill for more than €30,000: back “rent” for decades of squatting on that tiny strip of land, plus €6,000 for the other side’s attorney fees. When I visit him a year later, he hasn’t paid. “It’s under appeal.” He shrugs when asked how long that would take.

  Meanwhile, during a late March 2010 afternoon, he sits with family members in an open doorway down the street from the condemned building that once housed three generations of cart builders, their horses, their workshop, and carts. Behind him, on shelves, are rows of the miniature carts and figures, all for sale. There are no customers.

  As I turn to leave, Franco leans a ladder against the side of the building, climbs up, and hooks one dangling bare wire against another dangling bare wire. Christmas-like lights come on, lighting the street and a small sign indicating a cart painter’s shop is there, open for business.

  * * *

  In the old days, according to cart historians Croce and Harris, and as Franco described, each part of the cart had its own craftsman: the cart maker would select “walnut for the box, beams, and wheel rims; beech for the shafts; and ash for the spokes,” wrote the cart historians. Metalsmiths, or fabbri, created the wrought-iron designs above the axles, best seen when the cart, like those in Franco’s shop, is tipped backward. Then, the painters took over, creating scenes from mythology and history. In their book, for example, the authors show paintings on the side panels of one cart that feature scenes from “Cavalleria Rusticana,” the nineteenth-century Giovanni Verga story that was made into the well-loved Sicilian opera.

  Some of these carts still exist, owned by collectors, museums, or others who care for the carts passed down in their families through generations. Occasionally, for parades, some are brought out of storage; horses are brought in from the fields and dressed in their finery (which in the old days was created by still another group of craftsmen). But the parades are becoming fewer and less frequent.

  Says Franco: “We only do the displays on request now, perhaps in the different quarters of the city or a particular neighborhood. They might want two or three carts. When they have Santa Rosalia’s festa, there might be ten or more.” In this case, Franco provides all the carts from his own collection.

  “I will get the old-timers, the carrettieri, to drive them.”

  * * *

  Three days following that first visit with Franco in March 2009, I am driving along a narrow highway southwest of Palermo, just inland from the west coast. The day is bright, clear—a glorious day for a ride through the countryside. I stop for a coffee and a cream-filled cornetto at a roadside stand. As I stand there, looking across a broad field of wildflowers, the sound of horse hooves rises in the distance. Around the corner comes a gaily painted Sicilian cart pulled by a single horse. The driver is wearing a brown leather jacket and Sicilian-style wool cap pulled tight across his forehead. He clucks as he flicks the leather reins against the horse’s broad, glistening brown back that anchors a tall red plume, like one described by Baron Gonzalve de Nervo nearly two centuries ago.

  I get back into the car, follow behind the cart for a few minutes, and then pass it, getting far ahead. I pull over, grab my camera, wait, and, as the cart passes by, snap a series of photographs. The driver keeps his gaze straight ahead. He and his brightly painted cart fade into the distance. Other than the ones in Franco’s shop, it is the only cart I see during four trips to the island.

  FOUR

  Racalmuto

  I tried to tell something about the life of a town I love, and I hope to have given the sense of how far this life is from freedom and from justice, that is, from reason.

  —Leonardo Sciascia, on plaque overlooking the village of his birth, translated from the Italian by Anna Camaiti Hostert

  MY FIRST view in March 2009 of Racalmuto, home of Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia and famed opera tenore Salvatore Puma, was through the back door. That’s the way in for most folks traveling along the highway between Agrigento and Caltanissetta. My B and B, Tra i frutti (Among the Fruit), is situated in an orchard down the hill and just off the highway. The directions to the village from my hostess, Paola Prandi, were simple: Cross the highway on the bridge, travel up the hill and over the crest, and drop down into the village.

  To the uninitiated visitor, Racalmuto can appear complicated. I was there nearly a week before I got comfortable and felt that I knew my way around. The streets, laid out on a steep hillside more than a thousand years ago to accommodate foot traffic and donkeys, are narrow and twisting. It seemed I was always getting lost trying to find the main street, say, or the theater, or the piazza.

  Now, after a few visits, I feel as if I have always been there. I know I can zip up and down those streets in my small rental car and, if I meet someone coming in the opposite direction, they will smile accommodatingly as we slowly, inch by inch, jockey around each other.

  Around the third visit, people in restaurants or the local coffee bar or sitting on a bench in the warm sunlight of the town square would nod in recognition. The lady who served espresso during my last visit remembers me as the fellow who marveled, a year earlier, over her lemon granita. She nodded in warm recognition as I entered this friendliest of places saying, “Ah! Hai tornata. Bene, bene.” (Ah, you have returned. Good, good.)

  * * *

  Early March, in Sicily’s south, is on the cusp of cold days trying to turn warmer. Many of the fruit trees, by midmonth, are showing blossoms. I arrived in Racalmuto during my first trip to temperatures much chillier than expected; 2008–2009 had been a colder-than-usual winter here. There was snow in various high places around the island that had not seen it for years. Driving in the direction of Palermo early one morning on the A-19 autostrada where it turns north beyond the exit to Caltanissetta, I saw a huge mountain smothered in white, looming off to the east, a frosty presence almost all the way to the A-19’s junction with the Palermo-Messina autostrada.

  It was Pizzo Carbonara, or Carbonara Peak. In addition to being the name of a wonderful pasta dish, carbonara also refers to charcoal, which likely was a product produced by people living on the mountain. The peak, part of the Madonie mountain range, is second highest in Sicily at nearly 6,500 feet. (The highest is Etna.) The range extends eastward, joining the Nebrodi and Peloritani mountains that dive into the Strait of Messina. In times when Sicily was connected to Italy, these mountains would have extended into Calabria, hooking up with the Aspromonte range. To take them southwest, in the other direction, this chain, with all its differently named segments, would have plunged into Tunisia.

  But here, around the flanks of Pizzo Carbonara, are tiny villages still surrounded by white in early March. I knew Etna could have snow on the summit year-round, but discovering it elsewhere in Sicily was a shock.

  Back in Racalmuto, about an hour’s drive away and closer to sea level, branches on the fruit trees that surround my bed-and-breakfast were just comin
g alive. Bare branches, punctuated here and there with puffs of white, on the third morning of my visit, erupted into a sea of blossoms, interspersed with the light green of leaves. All the trees, except for a few tardy walnuts, began to explode with life.

  Wildflowers, especially the yellow ones, like the tall margaritas and the shorter coreopsis, were everywhere, and the fields grew greener with the passing of the days, each one slightly warmer than its predecessor. In the midst of this birth of spring, San Giuseppe’s, or Saint Joseph’s, feast day arrived in Racalmuto as it always has, on March 19.

  This is a festival practiced in many villages, and some, such as Salemi in western Sicily, make a huge celebration out of it, drawing tourists from all over. Because this festival also serves as an altar-bread feast, bakers create intricate examples of their bread-making art. One sees huge creations in all kinds of shapes and complicated designs—from large bread crosses with representations of Christ hanging from them, or the Madonna with child shaped from bread dough and baked, crisp and light. Some loaves form stars, large and small, or suns, complete with rays. Others are made into miniature castles or houses.

  Far away from Salemi, in an exhibit room in Racalmuto’s restored Chiaramonte castle, is an entire manger scene, complete with animals, the three wise men, and the baby in a cradle—all made of bread.

  Saint Joseph, of course, is the husband of Mary. He is revered because of his acceptance of the Immaculate Conception and his role in Christ’s upbringing. Racalmuto’s day honoring San Giuseppe is unique, and that is what drew me here instead of to the huge, tourist-packed festival at Salemi with its own Web site peppered with dozens of photographs. Racalmuto’s is purely a local affair. It seemed I was the only outsider. From all appearances over the twenty-four-hour period of festivities, there weren’t even any visitors from surrounding towns; they likely had their own festivals to attend.