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

by John Keahey

  * * *

  One afternoon during my fourth trip in March 2010, Steve McCurdy, my Italian-speaking photographer friend and fellow traveler, struck up a conversation with a group of elderly men sitting outside in the pre-Easter sunshine in front of their social club. These retirees, like older men in Sicily, are well-dressed during their morning and afternoon sojourns to the club and their walks up and down Racalmuto’s main street.

  They invite us to have a drink with them, a limonata, or lemon squash. I ask if they know the house where Sciascia was born. Of course, they nod. After all, many of these men likely grew up and walked the streets of the village with him in the afternoons when he would take a break from writing to spend time with his friends.

  Lillo Nalbone, a burly, heavily mustachioed gentleman in a black jacket, finely pressed blue shirt, and gray pants, says he will show us. We walk across Via Garibaldi and up a side street, turning left after a few dozen feet onto Via Leonardo Sciascia. There we pause before a two-story house, clearly empty of any inhabitants. No plaque is there to note its famous occupant. The stone is crumbling, the façade is badly in need of paint, and weeds grow here and there around the front door. I can just imagine what the interior must look like. I had been told by Sciascia’s daughters that the house was in the hands of cousins. Lillo points down the street to a corner house. “Sciascia’s aunt still lives there,” he said.

  On the house’s second level is a small terrace. It no longer appears like it can hold one person’s weight. Looking at it, I remembered a few lines from one of Sciascia’s books where he describes how his grandfather, the family patriarch, would sit on that terrace, impatiently tapping his cane when he wanted a drink or a coffee. One of his daughters would come out the door, dutifully take his order, and disappear inside.

  Lillo relishes his role as tour guide. He leads us down to the restored nineteenth-century theater, shows us the gilded interior, and then takes us upstairs to a room containing dozens of Puma’s costumes. I remember an earlier local guide, Concetta Barbieri, lamenting that they should be protected in glass cases, but there is no money for such an extravagance. Lillo introduces us to the folks who run the theater, and we wander back to the social club, shake hands with him and his companions, and take our leave.

  * * *

  Librarian and curator Linda Graci, a young, lively, engaging Siciliana who speaks a touch of English to complement my touch of Italian, is showing me the Sciascia collections housed in his foundation building with its sweeping view of the village below. We put what we know of each other’s language together and have an easy visit. Most interesting to me, beyond the scholarly files of Sciascia’s papers, are the dozens of prints, etchings, and photographs of famous authors, politicians, and others of various nationalities—although most are Italian—who particularly influenced him. They came from his personal collection, and the foundation has had them tastefully framed. After his death in 1989 at age sixty-eight, Sciascia’s family donated them.

  The collection includes classic images of Pirandello, Moravia, and Frenchmen Paul Verlaine and Voltaire. There is a stunning print of a newly discovered favorite of mine, Guy de Maupassant, who wrote so passionately about Sicily at a time when most Frenchmen were “convinced that Sicily is an uncivilized country, difficult and even dangerous to visit.” The island, de Maupassant insisted, is the “pearl of the Mediterranean.”

  Sciascia, it seems, collected prints only of those he liked and respected. Two Americans, while not represented in the print collection, also ranked high in his estimation, Linda Graci says: John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. As for his other influences, it seems strange to me that Verga is not present in the grouping. And there are only a few women: Madame Adam ( Juliette Lamber), Colette, Gyp, and the French writer George Sand, who, born as Amantine or Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, took a man’s name to advance her professional life in what was then a male-dominated world.

  Linda Graci sheds some light about Sciascia’s choices.

  “Verga was a realist; Sciascia didn’t like this literary form. He liked the illuminati, and this is why he liked a lot of the French writers,” she told me. And, she continues, Italian or Sicilian writers who are women had little impact on Sciascia. For example, while he certainly knew the Italian feminist and writer Dacia Maraini, who spent her formative years in a village near Palermo, her picture does not appear in his collection.

  “Italian men, in particular Sicilian men, are much closed” when it comes to being influenced by women writers or women artists, Linda tells me. “For the girl, the woman, to write is molto difficile, even today.

  “That is why, for me, Maraini is very important,” she said.

  It appears that only George Sand and a couple of others, on the strength of their skills and being French, won a place where most women failed in his estimation.

  I had a conversation in Rome with Maraini—author of dozens of books, movie scripts, and plays—several months before, and had asked her about Sciascia.

  “Oh, we served on some literary panels,” she told me over a lunch of pasta, vegetables, and fresh fruit. “But, you know, he was a man of his culture and very much has Arab blood in his veins. We liked each other, I suspect, but we were not close friends.”

  * * *

  I want to visit Sciascia’s grave. B and B host Giuseppe Andini, partner of Paola Prandi, says the writer is in the Racalmuto cimitero. “It is interesting there because, in tradition here, each family tries to outdo the other families by piling on a lot of flowers onto their relations’ grave, but Sciascia’s grave is very simple, and usually there is only a single flower, perhaps a rose, placed there. It is Racalmuto’s way—the simplicity and cleanness of it all—of honoring him above all others; of not making him the same as the others.”

  After a few aborted tries to get into the frequently locked cemetery, located on the village’s lower edge where the open countryside begins, I finally find it open on a cold, windy, and rain-splattered Saturday morning. The place appears deserted. I wander around the plots of tightly clustered tombs, some gaudy and ornate, others cleanly simple, but nothing indicates Sciascia.

  Then I see a young woman, nearly hidden in a cluster of white tombs with tall headstones, sweeping dried leaves and the clutter of a hard winter off one stone-covered grave. I ask her if she knows of Sciascia’s grave. She nods and offers to lead me there. We go back toward the entrance, and she points to a space that is enclosed by a fence of tall, rust-streaked tin.

  “It is being changed,” she said simply, and then turned to head back to her grave-cleaning task. I walk around the enclosure and find an opening in the back. Through it, I see two unadorned, white-stone boxes partially buried but with their tops protruding perhaps two feet aboveground. This is much in the tradition of the ancient Greeks, Romans, or Muslims in North Africa, I think—places where people aren’t usually buried six feet beneath the ground but are sealed in stone boxes that show partially above the surface. The earth around the stone tombs was freshly turned over, and construction tools were scattered about.

  I headed for the front gate, passing by the custodian’s office. He looks up as I tap on his glass door. “When will Sciascia’s tomb be finished?” I ask. “È a tempo indeterminate” (It is indefinite), he said, shrugging his shoulder in that typical Sicilian way that says these things take time and who knows. “Why is it being done?” I ask. “Per la moglie” (for the wife), he says. “È morta due mesi fa.” (She died two months ago.)

  No one had told me about her death during all my discussions here about Sciascia. I later looked it up. Maria Andronico, age eighty-six, died on January 6, 2009—barely two months before my March visit. She was placed in the tomb next to her husband two days later, on what would have been Sciascia’s eighty-eighth birthday. Months later, during subsequent visits, the tin sheets enclosing the gravesite were gone. Two unadorned white-marble stone tombs surrounded by healthy grass and with carved inscriptions identifying their occupants lay side by sid
e.

  * * *

  Four months beyond that day in the cold drizzle in Racalmuto’s cemetery, in the brutal month of July when the warm breath of Africa blows across the island, baking crops and creatures large and small, I stood, at the family’s invitation, in Sciascia’s study at Noce, the family home in the countryside just outside Racalmuto. On the wall, next to the doorway, was a black-and-white photo of the writer on horseback, being led up the stone steps of the Church of the Santa Maria del Monte, high on a small hill near the center of the village.

  He was participating in a festival unique to this place; I could not find a reference to anything similar elsewhere on the island. On the final day of this three-day festival, men and older boys would mount richly decorated horses and, one at a time, be led along the main street to the steady beat of tom-tom drums pounded by a rank of four men. The short procession would turn onto the street at the base of the steep, gray stone steps leading up to the church full of worshippers attending high Mass.

  In the photo, Sciascia is wearing a vest with intricate designs. He is leaning forward on his horse as the animal struggles to climb the forty-two steps. There are men on both sides of the animal, gripping its harnesses and shouting to encourage it upward.

  To the uninitiated standing at the bottom of the scala, looking at the door of the church high above, the exercise looks impossible. An observer might wonder how hard it is on the horses. But every July, for centuries, men have been doing this, and in modern times, Racalmuto is jam-packed with several thousand visitors as well as the locals to witness the spectacle.

  Despite the crush of out-of-towners, in many ways this giant festival still exudes a sense of being “local.” The five-hundred-foot-long stretch of Via Garibaldi is jammed elbow to elbow, from Piazza Francesco Crispi and its fountain at the south end to the front door of the cathedral at the north. It seems like every one of the village’s ten thousand residents is there, along with cousins from families that have, in the last century or longer, immigrated to North or South America.

  This festival became the tie that binds. Early on, the original immigrants would return to Racalmuto to witness the major festival of their childhoods and visit family members who had stayed put in this land of vineyards and now-abandoned sulfur and salt mines. Then, they came with their American-born children, who later brought their children. And the newer generations keep coming.

  For three days, there is almost nonstop band music and processions, often running late into the night. Food and trinket stalls, run most likely by outsiders who go from festival to festival across this island, are stretched up and down side streets.

  The running of the horses up the steep steps comes on the last day, Sunday. I saw that photo of Sciascia participating in a festival he had witnessed from infancy; two days later I was a speck among the masses gathered around the stairway, cheering as each horse and rider struggled upward, horseshoe-clad hooves clattering loudly against the centuries-old stone steps.

  Participants in the early festivals rode donkeys up these steps; later came mules; today it is only horses brightly outfitted in colorful drapery held together by gold-colored rivets.

  * * *

  Originally, in past centuries, the peasants brought their wheat harvest to be weighed here. The weighing, according to legend, took place inside the church.

  Why the wheat-loaded donkeys were originally taken up the forty-two steep steps to the doors at the church’s side, no one seems to know. There certainly is an easier way—the street along the front of the church, for instance—for them to get there. And it doesn’t make sense in another way: A peasant’s harvest would be much greater than his donkey could carry in a single trip.

  A Sicilian-American friend who has witnessed the tradition speculates that the grain might have been hauled along the easily accessed street and into the church where it was dumped for weighing. Eventually, perhaps after a good crop year, the farmers may have started the tradition, as a form of thanksgiving, of taking a donkey ride up the stone steps and into the church with a symbolic load of grain. The event likely followed each year’s harvest and grew over the centuries in its pageantry—its origins and meaning lost to modern participants.

  Nobody today cares about the lack of logic to this event. The festival is a riotous, colorful, musically noisy affair that puts smiles on everyone’s faces and incredible local foods and pastries into their stomachs.

  The capstone, however, is not the running of the horses up to the base of the steps. When man and beast reach the top, they burst into the wide-open doors of the church, which is full of parishioners attending Mass. I watched six riders and their horses over a period of about ninety minutes, with each being paraded through the village to the unrelenting beat of the drums, clamber up those steps. Once inside the church, just beyond the giant doors, the victorious rider and his steed were met by the smiles of an accommodating congregation.

  This Sunday morning’s event followed still another spectacle from the night before that lasted until the early hours of the new day: The u ciliu il cero dei borgesi, or quest by young, unmarried men of a landowner class, the borgesi, for a flag fluttering high atop a tall structure pulled through the main street packed with revelers.

  That event is truly steeped in antiquity. A Racalmutese who immigrated to Hamilton, Canada, wrote about it in his 1993 memoir of his ancestral village, Traditions of Our Fathers: The True Sicilians. Peppi Pillitteri, a close friend and contemporary, albeit ten years younger, of Leonardo Sciascia, describes the ciliu as having deep Arabic origins; its Arabic name was taazia. He says in the Arab world that taazias “were built as a living proof of martyrdom for a cause and also as an expression to show hope for the future.”

  This event is tied to another procession conducted as part of this multiday festival. It involves a boatlike float containing a representation of the Madonna housed in the church at the top of the stone steps, the Santa Maria del Monte. This brief procession symbolizes, according to Pillitteri, the discovery in the early 1500s of a hidden statue of the Madonna in a North African cave. A Sicilian prince on a hunting trip reportedly found it as he and his party were seeking shelter from a storm.

  The prince transported it, first in a ship across the Strait of Sicily, then by oxcart to his home near Racalmuto. When the cart got to the village, the oxen stopped and refused to move. The church dedicated to the Madonna was built in 1503 on the spot where that cart stopped.

  Pillitteri acknowledges that this story has “the untenability of some historical facts. But for the sake of simplicity we would like to adhere to the myth and faith as reported to us by our forefathers.”

  The procession of the Madonna is well attended, but the ciliu is what everyone is waiting for. Late on the night of Racalmuto’s ciliu, the ubiquitous drummers, who precede just about everything public in Sicily, pounded their way through the crowd. The town band and a visiting band from Calabria, across the water in southern Italy, were arrayed around the fountain in Piazza Francesco Crispi, playing marches. The flag-festooned structure would be pulled along the street ever so slowly. High atop was a trophy flag. A gang of young men, usually in their late teens or early twenties, would suddenly, either spontaneously or on some mysterious prearranged signal, burst out of the crowd from all sides and scramble onto the spiral structure. They would push and shove one another trying to be the first to get to the top and grab the flag, fighting off all those trying to take it away.

  In times past, blood flowed freely as the young men clawed their way to the top. But there seemed to be no hard feelings among winners and losers. The idea is for the winner to take the flag, present it to a young woman he wishes to marry, and then be married before the next year’s festival rolls around.

  I had heard this story and wanted to witness the event. No one could tell me where the scramble would take place. It was spontaneous, they said, and could happen anywhere along the street.

  I got there early in the evening, before the crow
d had begun to grow, and sat down on the curb. The evening wore on, the crowd ballooned, various drum groups marched down the clogged street, pushing their way through the tightly clustered throng. About midnight, an engine’s roar could be heard. Seconds later, from around a corner, a small tractor pulling the flag-bedecked tower came into view.

  The tractor moved slowly down the street, gently nudging revelers out of the way. It passed me as I stood up, watching the tower, waiting for the scramble to begin.

  The engine roared again and, erupting from out of the crowd, perhaps a dozen young men, pushing and shoving one another as they fought for position, jumped aboard and struggled upward. It was happening directly in front of me. The scramblers instantly became sweat-drenched—this was mid-July in Sicily, remember—and for perhaps ten minutes or so the battle ensued. No punches were thrown, as near as I could tell; it involved just yelling, pushing, shoving, and the grabbing of sweaty shirts. If there was any blood during this frenzied skirmish, I missed it.

  The crowd roared. One young man was standing high atop the structure, waving the banner and shouting in glee. The combatants stopped, clinging quietly to the tower’s sides. Slowly, the tractor started up, pulling the tower through the crowd slowly with the victor waving the flag the full length of the street. A few younger boys, perhaps fourteen or so and anticipating their battle for the flag in a few years, climbed aboard quietly for the ride.

  This has been going on for centuries here. A woman who had been standing behind me during the battle saw me shaking my head in exhausted wonderment.

  “Tradizione,” she said with a broad smile. “E ci tiene tutti vivi.” (It keeps us all alive).

  Pillitteri put it nicely as well, his words blending together all that I saw over the period of a year—from Saint Rosalia’s procession in Palermo to Racalmuto’s pagan falò, the ciliu, the horses scrambling up the stone steps, and later, Easter processions in Enna—all mixed in with massive doses of Christianity. He wrote: “One of the beauties of faith is the ability to believe in religion, myth, and legend. The great gray area of myth and religion allows one to dream and hope, especially when mystery abounds everywhere.”