Bella Tuscany (6 page)

Imagine Sicily without the Mafia, imagine the spirits of the people lifting. . . .

 

I'm glad I don't have to take a test on Agrigento. For an American used to a comparatively straightforward history, all the Italian past seems hopelessly convoluted. The saga of the Greek ruins multiplies this complexity. Agrigento, since its Greek founding in the sixth century
B.C.
, has been tossed among Carthaginians, Romans, Swabians, Arabians, Bourbons, and Spaniards. Subjected to a name change during Mussolini's zeal to Italianize all things, the old name Akragas became Agrigento. I've seen the same zeal on the plaque outside where John Keats lived in Rome, cut off from his love and dying from tuberculosis. He's called Giovanni Keats, which somehow makes him seem more vulnerable than ever.

Akragas/Agrigento was Luigi Pirandello's birthplace. Travelling in Sicily casts his plays and stories, with their quirky sense of reality, in quite a natural light. The coexistence of the Greek ruins, the contemporary ruins, the tentacles of the Mafia, and the mundane day-to-day would skew my sense of character and place, too. The sun, Pirandello wrote, can break stones. Even in March, we feel the driving force on our heads as we walk in the Valley of the Temples.

All over a valley of almond trees and wildflowers stands a mind-boggling array of remains from an ancient town, from temples to sewer pipes. You could stay for days and not see everything. Unlike other sites, this one is quite populated with visitors. The Temple of Concordia is the best-preserved temple we've seen. Patch up the roof and the populace could commune with Castor and Pollux, to whom it probably was dedicated.

Five days ago I knew almost nothing about these ruins. Now the ancient dust covers my feet through my sandals; I have seen the unlikely survival of these buildings through rolls and rolls of time. The temples, men selling woven palm fronds for Palm Sunday, schoolchildren hiding among the columns, awed travellers like us with dripping
gelato
—all under the intense Sicilian sky. I'm thrilled. Just as I think that, Ed says, “This is the thrill of a lifetime.”

Still, at dinner, we find that one temple is beginning to fade into another. Maybe we've seen enough of Agrigento this time.

By the time we're back at the hotel, I've begun to descend into what I've come to call traveller's melancholy, a profound displacement that occasionally seizes me for a few hours when I am in a foreign country. The pleasure of being the observer suddenly flips over into a disembodied anxiety. During its grip, I go silent. I dwell on the fact that most of those I love have no idea where I am and my absence among them is unremarkable; they continue their days indifferent to the lack of my presence. Then an immense longing for home comes over me. I imagine my bed with a stack of books—probably travel books—on the table, the combed afternoon sunlight coming through the curved windows, my cat Sister leaping up with her claws catching the yellow blanket. Why am I here where I don't belong? What is this alien place? I feel I'm in a strange afterlife, a haint blowing with the winds. I suspect the subtext to this displacement is the dread of death. Who and where are you when you are no one?

Downstairs in the hotel courtyard, a wedding dinner is in progress. The shouts, bawdy toasts, and slightly disheveled bride intensify my state. Usually I would savor the position of the almost invisible observer at the window, but tonight I am nothing to them. They belong. I'm a free radical. As the band starts up after a break, two small girls in frilly, silly dresses began to dance together. I could be anywhere on the planet, or not on the planet, and they would dance and dance.
With or without
. The groom would turn over his chair. The grandparents in their stiff country clothes would look as startled.
With or without
. The moon would shed its ancient light on the singular columns scattered over the valley, as it has and will.

Ed already is sleeping. I walk downstairs and watch the party break up. Kisses and embraces. I go in the bar and order a glass of
limoncello,
concentrate hard on the lively citrus taste, conjure to my mind the lovely face of my daughter seven thousand miles from here.

 

We drive on in the morning, passing some dire ugliness along the way. Petrochemical—what a hideous word. Poor Gela—I see that it has interesting remains somewhere in this labyrinth but it is so intensely ugly that we speed through. Ed remembers that Aeschylus died here when an eagle flying above him dropped a tortoise on his head. Fate, as in a foretold prediction. A mythic way to go. I'm sure Pirandello as a child was influenced by this story.

Ragusa—we'll spend the night. This hilltown feels like Sicily as I imagined it—provincial, and so privately itself. Like several other towns in the environs, Ragusa was rebuilt in the Baroque style after the terrible earthquake of 1693. There's an old town and an older town, Ragusa Ibla. By now we just expect to get lost and we do. We hit Ibla at a moment of celebration. How this many cars can squeeze into streets hardly wider than an arm's length, is hilarious. We crawl, turning a dozen times, trying to get out. We glimpse the church of San Giorgio, more fanciful than a wedding cake, which seems to be the focal point of whatever is going on. Is the Saturday before Palm Sunday a special day? Finally, we escape Ibla and find our way to a pleasant hotel in the upper town, which is newer but looks old to us. It's drizzling. We sit in the bar with espresso, looking at books and maps.
Americani
are a novelty here. Two men in suits come up and speak to us, obviously intrigued when we say we're from San Francisco. They want to know if we like Sicily, if we like Ragusa.
“Sì,”
we both answer. They insist on buying the coffee.

Walking in the rain, we admire iron balconies and watch the locals dashing into the cathedral for Saturday mass. Surrounding the great carved door are displays of intricately woven palm fronds for sale by boys. Everyone buys one so we do, too. Ed sticks it behind the mirror in our room. Because today is my birthday, we set out for a special restaurant ten or so miles away. Soon we're lost on unmarked roads. The restaurant seems to be an illusion. We turn back and have dinner in a fluorescent-lit pizza place with orange plastic chairs.

 

Meandering, we stop at a cypress-guarded cemetery near Modica. Extravagant tombs are elaborately carved miniature houses laid along miniature streets. Here's the exuberance of Modica's art of the Baroque in microcosm. Through the grates or gates, little chapels open to linen-draped altars with framed portraits of the dead and potted plants or vases of flowers. At thresholds, a few cats sun themselves on the warmed marble. A woman is scrubbing, as she would her own stoop. With a corner of her apron, she polishes the round photo of a World War I soldier. A girl weeds the hump of earth over a recent grave in the plain old ground. These dead cool off slowly; someone still tends flowers on plots where the inhabitants have lain for fifty years.

Cortona's cemetery, too, reflects the town, although not as grandly. A walled city of the dead situated just below the live city, it glows at night from the votive lights on each grave. Looking down from the Piazza del Duomo, it's hard not to imagine the dead up and about, visiting each other as their relatives still do right up the hill. The dead here probably would want more elaborate theatrical entertainments.

Next on our route, Avola retains some charm. One-room-wide Baroque houses line the streets. Could we take home at least a dozen of the gorgeous children in their white smocks? On the corners men with handheld scales scoop cockles from a mound on the sidewalk. Open trucks selling vegetables attract crowds of women with baskets. We keep turning down tiny roads to the sea. We can't find the beaches we expect—the unspoiled littoral dream of the island's limpid waters—only bleak beach towns, closed and depressing out of season.

It's only in Siracusa that I finally fall in love. In my Greek phase in college, I took Greek and Roman History, Greek and Roman Drama, Greek Etymology. At that point, my grandfather, who was sending me to college, drew a line. “I am not paying for you to stick your head in the clouds. You should get a certificate for teaching so you have something to fall back on.” The message being, if your husband—whom you have gone to college to acquire, and no Yankees, please—dies or runs off. Meanwhile, I was loving Aeschylus, the severe consequences of passion, pure-as-milk marble sculptures, the explorative spirit of the Greeks. Siracusa, therefore, is tremendously exciting to visit. Mighty Siracusa, ancient of ancients. Second to Athens in the classical world. We opt for a super-luxurious hotel on the connecting island of Ortigia, with a room surrounded by views of the water. We're suddenly not tired exactly, but saturated. We spend the afternoon in the huge bed, order coffee sent up, pull back the curtains and watch the fishing boats nosing—isn't that a Greek blue—into the harbor.

After siesta, we find Ortigia in high gear for Easter. Bars display chocolate eggs two feet tall, wrapped in purple cellophane and ribbons. Some are open on one side to reveal a marzipan Christ on the cross. Others have a surprise inside. I'd love to buy marzipan doves, lambs in baskets, chocolate hens. The lambs are like stuffed animals, large, decorated from nose to tail with fanciful marzipan curls. At the Antica Dolceria, they've gone into marzipan frenzy: Noah's ark complete with animals, the Greek temples, olives, pencils. Marzipan—called
pasta reale
—we realize is a serious folk art form. For me, three bites will suffice; maybe you have to have been born in Sicily to be able to eat more.

Ortigia is fantastic. The vague, intuitive sense of oppression I've felt in Sicily entirely lifts. Is the Mafia not in control here? People seem more lighthearted, playful, and swaggering. They look you in the eye, as people do in the rest of Italy. In the late afternoon, we walk all over the small island. It has its own Greek ruins just lying in a grassy plot at an intersection. An inscription carved into steps identifies the site as a temple to Apollo. Dense ficus trees along a walkway bordering the water are home to thousands of birds singing their evening doxology. Views across the water, Baroque iron balconies, Venetian Gothic windows, boarded up
palazzi,
and intricate medieval streets—layers and layers of architecture and time. Suddenly the streets intersect and widen at the Piazza del Duomo. The Baroque facade and entrance of the church in no way prepare you for the stunning surprise inside. Along one wall, the building incorporates a row of twelve majestic columns from the fifth century
B.C.
Tempio di Atene, Temple of Athena. At evening, spikes of sunlight fall across the
piazza,
lighting the faces of those having an
aperitivo
at outdoor tables. Ordinary people, with the sun, like the sheen of gold mosaics, transforming their faces.

 

Unlike the
Lotophagi
—lotus eaters—Homer wrote about, I have not tasted anything that would make me lose the desire for my native land, not even the tomato sauce, which is the best in the world. The food, everywhere we've eaten, is great, the best. The coffee simply exists in a league by itself. Those who love seafood never will get over Sicilian food. Ed researches restaurants thoroughly before we go somewhere, not wanting to waste a precious night. But tonight we're drawn into a
trattoria
simply because it looks like someone's Sicilian aunt's funky dining room, with painted cupboards, bits of old lace, family photos. We're waved to the last available table. No menu arrives. Carafe wine is plunked down on the table. A woman and her daughter are in animated conversation in the slot of a kitchen. The husband tends the dining room. He's holding a glass of wine aloft as he floats from table to table, taking a few sips as his customers order. Soon a plate of
antipasti
appears—little squid, a vegetable tart, olives. We eat everything then wait. And wait. Ed holds up the small carafe. More wine? The husband is flustered; the wine has not been delivered. He scurries around to other tables and scrounges from half-filled carafes. The diners look somewhat astonished. “Soon it will come,” he assures us. Suddenly three men in dark suits arrive and the husband practically bows. They enter the kitchen. The women stand at attention. We can see them from our table, drying their hands on their aprons, rolling their eyes to heaven. Is this a Mafia visit? A demand for payment? But the men open cupboards, bend to the floor, lean over the stove. One takes out a notebook and confers with the others. For a moment they seem to argue. One looks sullen. The wife piles something on plates and hands them around. Everyone goes silent while they eat, then they shake hands with the husband, give him a slip of paper, nod to the women and exit. The dining room is hushed. The husband watches them disappear around the corner then lets out a whoop. A stooped man about four feet tall with a demijohn of wine enters. The husband whoops again, uncorks the bottle and fills the pitchers of all the tables. He lifts his own glass and the women emerge from the kitchen, laughing. The health inspectors have made a surprise visit and everything was O.K. We all toast and more wine is poured. Service after that is chaotic. The vegetables appear ten minutes before the main course. We get someone else's grilled fish but by then we don't care. It's all good anyway.

The next morning when I am out walking alone early, a car whizzes by me and stops. The woman chef from the restaurant jumps out of her car, takes my hand, and tells me how lovely to see me again, that I must come back. She has trailing scarves and stacks of jewelry on her wrists. I definitely would go back.

 

We're ready to put in a full day on foot. In the museum on Ortigia, Caravaggio's painting of the burial of Santa Lucia, a local virgin martyr in 304, who cut out her own eyes when a suitor admired them, occasioned a lecture from the guard worthy of any docent. And where are we from? Ah, he has a cousin in California; we should meet him when we return. Ed loves Annunciation paintings and the peeling one by da Messina enthralls him. Small local museums are my favorite kind. They stay close to the source, usually, and deepen a tourist-level connection with a place.