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

by John Keahey

  Neighbors could turn on them in an instant over a perceived slight or a baseless rumor; fish buyers could cheat them, as in I Malavoglia; landowners and banks could take the hovels in which they lived if money was gone. If they didn’t pray hard enough to the Madonna, the crops could fail, the fish would disappear, and they wouldn’t have anything with which to survive the winter.

  The new conquerors, northern Italians who followed in the footsteps of the Spanish, French, Normans, Arabs, and others, could conscript their sons into armies and then turn a blind eye to the suffering of the South while enriching the North.

  Fascism, in the early twentieth century, offered hope briefly, and many of the peasants and middle-class Sicilians flocked to its cause. But Mussolini failed them as well. So all these people, the peasants and the fishermen, had to count on was family. This is why the power of family is so deeply ingrained in Sicilians.

  * * *

  The appeal of this place for tourists goes beyond its connection to Visconti’s film. People here also capitalize on a Greek myth that led to the naming of these places with the appellation “Aci.” There is Acireale, the largest of the three coastal fishing communities, and, a bit inland, Aci Santa Lucia and Aci Catena. In all, I counted nine villages in the area with names preceded by Aci.

  What they have in common is the tiny Acis River, laden with rusty-colored, mineral-infused water that trickles down Etna to the sea at Capo Mulini, between Aci Trezza and Acireale. The river is usually dry during the summer months, as are many of Sicily’s rivers. This name is tied to Greek mythology of a time when only gods and half-humans/half-gods roamed the fruitful land.

  The story is a charming one, and it is worth mentioning because one of the characters in this drama is the one-eyed cyclops, Polyphemus, who figures in The Odyssey, Homer’s tale of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home following the Trojan War.

  But before Odysseus and his fellow warriors showed up, the giant Polyphemus, who tended his sheep and worked in Hephaestus’s forge in the volcano Etna, was in love with the nymph Galatea, who cavorted with her fellow nymphs on the beaches that ring the harbor of today’s Aci Trezza/Aci Castello. Unfortunately, Galatea had fallen in love with the shepherd Acis, son of the Greek god Pan. This enraged Polyphemus, who crushed Acis with a large boulder. Galatea was distraught, and Zeus, the most important god in the Greek pantheon, took pity on her grief. Using her tears, he transformed Acis into that river that flowed through Galatea’s realm to the sea. Eventually she recovered from her grief, married Polyphemus, and bore him three sons. Ah, the fickleness of it all.

  Odysseus and his men, during their long journey home, land near the mouth of the Acis River, where they encounter Polyphemus. A monster with cannibalistic tendencies, he captures and imprisons them in his cave on the slopes of Etna, where he keeps his flock of sheep. There he begins eating the hapless crew two at a time, day by day, promising Odysseus that he will eat him last.

  Of course, wise Odysseus conjures up a plan of escape. The warrior takes the cyclops’s olivewood club, sharpens an end, and makes the point hard by charring it in the giant’s fire.

  Waiting until Polyphemus falls asleep, Odysseus and four of his men pick up the huge club and jam the point into the monster’s single eye and “bored it home/as a shipwright bores his beam with a shipwright’s drill … till blood came boiling up around that smoking shaft … and the broiling eyeball burst.” The men hid from the now blind, enraged cyclops who was suffering excruciating pain. Later, the men escaped from the cave by grabbing hold of the undersides of the sheep as the monster let the animals out of the cave to graze. As they escaped to their ship and set sail, Odysseus badgered the giant, and the enraged Polyphemus ripped off “the peak of a towering crag [and] heaved it so hard the boulder landed just in front of our dark prow.…” The monster threw other massive rocks as the warriors rowed out to sea, rocks that still rear up out of the dark water just off the harbor of Aci Trezza. Tourists now swim and scuba dive among these massive boulders, some more than a hundred feet high.

  Of course it’s all myth, conjured up by deep-thinking Greeks trying to explain the mysteries of the world. My Sicilian-American friend Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero has a different take on the story. Over coffee one morning in a shop near his Utah home, he told me that he believes the tale of Polyphemus the cyclops is an “allegory for the Greek takeover of the island. It is my observation, my reading of Mediterranean culture, that this is true.

  “In one dialect, the word ciclopu means ‘man of the woods,’” he told me. “And cyclops means ‘round eye,’ not ‘one eye’ but ‘round eye.’” Alex is convinced that the “cyclops” represented the indigenous peoples of Sicily—the people who were on the island when the Greeks arrived in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. They had built their own villages, which the Greeks overtook and destroyed en route to building their own magnificent cities.

  “The Greeks crushed these earliest peoples, these cyclopi, and erased them, hence the story of Odysseus outsmarting the giant.”

  * * *

  This is a lot to think about and impossible to prove. Many theories abound of the origins and meanings of myths. But it makes good fodder for the imagination as I sit on a bright, hot Sunday morning on the terrace of an Aci Trezza pasticceria sipping lemon granita, looking out over the harbor and its dozens of small fishing boats tied up or hauled onto dry land. Bikini-clad women and Speedo-adorned men carrying coolers and towels, and some with scuba gear, are lining up on a long, narrow stone pier jutting into the harbor. Dozens of small boats oared by local men picking up a few euros are hauling these sun-worshipping tourists to the rocky outcrops cast there millennia ago by an enraged, newly blinded giant. I am distracted by thoughts of myths and of poverty-struck families of late nineteenth-century fishermen struggling to survive in a land once populated by gods, demigods, and nymphs.

  I was brought back to reality when I found a parking ticket on my rental car’s windshield. It took standing in line for nearly two hours the next morning at the Trecastagni post office to pay a €38 fine, plus €1 postal tax, to bring me back into the modern world.

  ELEVEN

  The Language

  Un populu

  diventa poviru e servu

  quannu ci arrubbanu a lingua

  addutata di patri:

  è persu pi sempri.

  (A people

  becomes poor and servile

  when the language inherited from their forefathers

  is stolen from them:

  they are lost forever.)

  —Ignazio Buttitta (1899–1997), Sicilian dialectal poet

  translation by Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero

  THE HERD of cows, showing patches of white, brown, and black, their udders nearly touching the asphalt of the narrow Sicilian road, moseyed into view over the crest of the hill just ahead. I stopped as this swarm of bovines, perhaps twenty or so, broke around the car. On this trip, with photographer Steve McCurdy, the encounter was our second with herds or flocks deep in the remote western Sicilian countryside. Earlier that March day, around Piana degli Albanesi, a flock of scrawny sheep, bells tinkling and on legs that seemed too fragile for walking, likewise had surrounded us. A clutch of sheepdogs, moving constantly, had kept the woolly creatures in a tight pack as two herders, one in front and the other behind, controlled the dogs with shouts and whistles.

  Now, a few hours later and on the outskirts of the tiny village of Montelepre—I wanted to see the birthplace of the infamous twentieth-century bandit Salvatore Giuliano—it was the cows’ turn to envelop us and to remind us that we were traveling far from any urban influence or main highways.

  A young man, perhaps in his early twenties, followed behind the herd, giving our vehicle only a brief glance. Steve grabbed his camera and jumped out of the car to follow the herd for a few hundred feet. He speaks near-fluent Italian, and I saw him engage in conversation briefly with the young herder.

  “I couldn’t understand a word
he said,” Steve said, climbing back into the passenger seat. “And he didn’t seem to understand a word I said. Italian is certainly not his language.”

  It’s likely the young man was speaking a local dialect of Sicilian, a language separate from Italian and one that some authorities believe was the first Romance language. And the reason that the herder didn’t acknowledge any understanding of Steve’s Italian.

  If he had spoken Italian, it likely wouldn’t have been the formal language Steve speaks, but a broken Italian-Sicilian combination you often hear older Sicilians speak in villages far away from the larger urban areas of Palermo, Catania, or Messina.

  This is the view of folklorist, poet, and university professor Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero, a Sicilian by birth, a U.S. citizen since age eight. Alex is fluent in both Italian and Sicilian and has spent most of his adult life studying the vernacular of his Mediterranean birthplace. He has translated documents and compiled his own Grammar of the Sicilian Language; a language that he believes is dying.

  When this happens to a language, he says, “The first thing you lose is how to write it. Then, you lose how to read it. Third, you lose how to speak it, and, fourth, you lose how to understand it. Perhaps twenty-five years from now, hardly anyone will understand Sicilian. The young man you described likely understands Sicilian but probably doesn’t write it or read it.”

  The area where we encountered the young herdsman was deep on the south flank of the mountains that surround Palermo. The capital may have been less than an hour’s drive once the main highway was reached, but this particular area is deep in those mountains and considered remote. Such areas, Alex said, are among the Sicilian language’s last bastions.

  The film La terra trema, Visconti’s 1948 movie of life in the eastern Sicilian fishing village of Aci Trezza, is one of the last records of the original language.

  “The only time you hear even a bit of Italian in that film is near the end when the boss man comes around,” Alex says.

  When I visited Aci Trezza some sixty-two years after the movie was released and met retired fisherman Salvatore Vicari, a child actor in the film, many of its older residents certainly could carry on conversations in Italian, but during the evening passeggiata, when I would sit on a bench in the town square and overhear the spirited banter of the older, retired fishermen sitting or strolling arm-in-arm nearby, their words were unrecognizable. Among one another, they were speaking the language they grew up with—a Catanesi dialect of Sicilian and a subdialect spoken only in the village. I remembered that the first, unrestored version of the film I had watched had subtitles—in both English and Italian!

  Nowadays, educated Sicilians in the more urban areas primarily speak the language imposed on them in the late 1800s by their new national government. They speak a form of mainland Italian, particularly to visitors and, perhaps, in their business dealings. Among themselves, Alex says, they might speak a vernacular that is dialectic, with localized combinations of Sicilian and Italian words—a sort of new form of “proto-Sicilian” that has developed since the early 1900s.

  He notes that Sicilians who fully embrace Italian—he referred specifically to his cousins who live in Rome—will occasionally slip into Sicilian phrases when they want to make an intimate statement or a particularly strong point about something that affects them deeply.

  “You defer to Sicilian in moments of anger or of real tenderness. For those moments, there is an appropriate Sicilian phrase that is ingrained in us, that we heard since childhood, and that we fall back on at the appropriate moment.”

  * * *

  One of Italy’s most prominent authors—and one of the world’s bestselling who is still writing in the twenty-first century—is the Sicilian Andrea Camilleri. Raised in the area around Agrigento on Sicily’s south coast, Camilleri, now in his eighties, lives in Rome. Incredibly prolific, he has written, along with a few dozen other tracts, nearly twenty mysteries rife with subtle humor and featuring the laconic, skeptical, nearly burned-out detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano, whose only joys in life are found in the food he eats, his friendship with a few close comrades, and his often fractious relationship with his longtime, long-distance girlfriend, Livia.

  Identified nearly everywhere as an “Italian” writer, Camilleri remains truly Sicilian; his books reflect the culture of his island of birth, the speech patterns of its residents, and their jaundiced view toward authority, lending authenticity to his characters.

  Stephen Sartarelli, Camilleri’s English translator, points out the translation challenges in Camilleri’s writing. The Montalbano novels “are written in a language that is not ‘just’ Sicilian dialect, but a curious pastiche of the particular Sicilian of his native region (Agrigento province) combined with ‘normal’ Italian, contemporary slang, comic-stage dialogue, lofty literary flourishes, and the sort of manglings of proper Italian made by provincials who have never learned it correctly.”

  This kind of speech is retained in the popular Italian television series based on Camilleri’s books. Actors deliver it rapid-fire; it is almost as if the person writing the subtitles for an English-speaking audience has trouble keeping up. Despite my barely basic knowledge of Italian, I have trouble recognizing most of the words the characters deliver.

  One trait that I caught was the Sicilian way of putting the verb after the noun phrase. For example, whenever Montalbano knocks on a door and announces himself, he will say “Montalbano sono!” (Literally, “Montalbano I am!”) Sartarelli chose “Montalbano here” for his English translations. A Sicilian-American friend, historian Leonard Chiarelli, overheard, while stopped along a Sicilian highway under repair, a classic example of this. Workers had just painted a white stripe along the road and had put up orange cones to keep motorists off the fresh paint. A woman ignored the cones and drove over the line, spreading paint across the asphalt. A worker turned to his colleague, shrugged his shoulders matter-of-factly, and stated, “Fimmina era” (A woman it was)—a typical male Sicilian remark with a typically Sicilian noun-verb construction.

  Camilleri’s style offers a challenge for all his translators: His work is translated into at least nine languages, including Greek and Japanese. Each translator must make different choices about how to render Sicilian speech patterns into the appropriate language so that readers in all of these disparate countries can understand what is going on.

  Emanuela Gutkowski has written a study of the obstacles translators of Camilleri’s novels face. She chose Camilleri’s Montalbano novel L’odore della notte (The Smell of the Night) for her essay Does the Night Smell the Same in Italy and in English Speaking Countries? The reading of this interesting work shows the complexities of translating a Sicilian or a Sicilian-like Italian phrase into English. A classic example from L’odore della notte: “Ho avuto una botta di culo incredibile” becomes, when translated literally into English, “I had a terrible ass-hit,” which means nothing to the English reader. So, in The Smell of the Night, the phrase becomes “I hit the goddamn jackpot,” which is closer to the essential meaning of the Sicilian phrase.

  Camilleri’s work represents not only escapist mystery-novel fare—the novels follow a predictable formula and can be read quickly—but they are enlightening for the insight they show into the Sicilian mind-set: Often people don’t report a crime because they feel it is none of their business or they don’t trust the police not to consider them suspects. Public officials are often involved in dirty work. Sometimes the guilty are never caught, even though the police know who is responsible, because they are ordered by higher-ups to back off. Police are held in low esteem by the general populace, who call policemen sbirro, which, Gutkowski tells us, is an “untranslatable term … used as an insult in a place where the state is perceived as an enemy, often missing if help is required, yet always present if it has to arrest the underdog.” That may be true for Sicilians’ use of the word; in Italian, it simply translates as “cop.”

  Fortunately, Montalbano is a “good” cop w
ho stands up to authority, usually catches murderers and terrorists through Sherlock Holmes–like deduction, and is generally faithful to his girlfriend, Livia, despite a lot of temptations. He also has the respect of his colleagues and many of the citizens of his town, Vigàta, a fictional Sicilian city modeled after Camilleri’s birthplace, the Agrigento suburb Porto Empedocle.

  In one telling passage in The Snack Thief, one of the more emotional reads in the Montalbano series, Camilleri captures a moment that offers a major clue as to how Sicilians view relationships. His trusted associate Fazio, knowing his boss better than anyone else on the small Vigàta police force, takes the initiative to do a task without being told, saying, “So I figured out what you wanted me to do, and I did it.”

  The inspector “felt moved. This was real friendship, Sicilian friendship, the kind based on intuition, on what was left unsaid. With a true friend, one never needs to ask, because the other understands on his own and acts accordingly.”

  City officials in Porto Empedocle, eager to capture the tourist trade of Montalbano fans, commissioned a life-size statue of the fictional detective that, in reality, looks nothing like the actor who plays the television series Montalbano. The statue is similar in style to the statue of Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia in nearby Racalmuto; both were done by the same sculptor, Giuseppe Agnello. It stands on a sidewalk, posed like a plainclothes cop leaning against a light post. Ironically, Montalbano’s gaze is directed across and down the street toward a bigger-than-life statue of Luigi Pirandello, also a son of Porto Empedocle and winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize for literature.