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January 15, 2010
Baroque Sicily is
stone the color of fresh-baked bread;
scary souls in spectacles;
Sirens and
saints;
seraphim and
spirals and squiggles and
Ah, Sicily. See-chee-lya. Sikelia. *** Please Subscribe. It’s Free! January 12, 2009
A reader emailed to ask me about Arab influences in southeast Sicily—in addition to the majolica mentioned in my last post. There are so many leftover traces! I want to share a personal story. Do you see the man on the left, in the baseball cap? That’s Emanuele, assistant to my beloved (new) stonemason, Giorgio, the cap-less fellow, who warbles Sicilian love songs as he works, though that’s beside the point.
Here is a typical exchange between Emanuele and me: Me, shaking his hand: A domani! See you tomorrow! Him: Se Dio lo vuole, if God wills it. Me: I think you’ll be able to finish tiling around the bidet. Him: Se e la voglia di Dio, if it is the will of God. When I first met Emanuele, I’d just returned from Morocco, where Inshallah, God willing, is a constant refrain. The fact that he used the same refrain astonished me. Curiosity got the better of me and I asked if he was Muslim. His eyes bulged from their sockets at this suggestion, and his head jerked back on his thick neck (an Arab gesture for no.). Gianna, no! Ma che dici! Sono cattolico! Sono proprio, cento percento, cattolico!”
Scratch a Sicilian, I heard somewhere, and you’ll find a Saracen. Never mind that the two-plus centuries of Arab domination of the island ended more than a millennium ago. ***** NOTE: There’s a new book written by Alfonso Campisi, Ifriqiyya and Sicily: A Mediterranean Twinning, that retraces Sicily’s Arab history, but I haven’t been able to find it online. For a good summary on Arabs in Sicily click this link to Best of Sicily Magazine. Won’t you please subscribe to this blog? It’s free! January 10, 2010 In my new incarnation as a siciliana, I look around wide-eyed. Then I mimic copy follow ape echo.
Above is my version of the famous staircase at Caltagirone. The 25 tiled steps are disturbingly steep and narrow, a sheer cliff that I scale like a mountaineer. The real deal in baroque Caltagirone is wide and grand—142 steps high and the size of a two-lane highway.
The old scala—tiled in the 1950s—bears motifs from as far back as the 10th century and bursts with vivid Caltagirone colors: sunny citrus, shiny indigo, acid green. There are mythic birds and beasts, nobles, flowers, and geometric designs. Sicilians learned majolica production from the Arabs, who had a “monumental influence” on Sicily, and many of the Escher-like designs of North African zellij found their way here. My tumbledown staircase turned into an ordeal, the way these things do. The work dragged on for a year and a half, longer than it took to tile the entire grand staircase at Caltagirone. Come è possibile, you ask? Well, I measured only one step before placing the entire order for 100 hand-painted tiles, assuming the steps were of equal size. Oh, you naïve straniera you. My stonemason shook his head sadly and managed to grind down some of the tiles without spoiling the designs too much—and even chink-chinked away at some of the too-small steps. But for the too-big steps I measured again, ordered again, waited again, dashed back and forth to Caltagirone, waited some more. Not only that: I had to sack the mason for an unrelated disaster in the middle of things (a blog topic for later if I dare). In the end, though, my pesky staircase has gotten hold of my heart. It’s sweet. “Nun si mancia meli senza muschi,” as Sicilians say. You can’t eat honey without flies.
Won’t you please subscribe to my blog? It’s free! January 3, 2010
In early 2008 I met an American engineer at a moving sale he and his wife were hosting at their posh apartment in Rome. He’d been twiddling his thumbs for two years in Italy, waiting around to start work on the suspension bridge to Sicily. Prodi was in, Berlusconi was out, and Berlusconi’s plans for the bridge had been scrapped. I bought some throw pillows from the engineer and wished him well. I was glad to see him give up and go home. Well, Berlusconi is in again—with what seems like a vice grip on Italy—and the bridge project is very much back. In fact, there was some shoving around of dirt at the construction site near Reggio Calabria on December 23, sort of a faux inauguration, and I’m sad. They’ll ravage the fragile Straits of Messina—home to the mythic Scylla and Charybdis—with tons of concrete and sludge, pillars tall as the Empire State Building, and the greed of developers and mafia bosses. Sicily should retain her mystique as an island, remain physically and culturally discrete. OK, it’s true that I’m a reactionary here. I want to give the local populace a good shake and say, Stop, amici! Dust off your accordions. Don your native costumes. Bring back the public baths. Make Sicilian the official language. Return to the puppet theater of your vanished world. But most of my Sicilian friends agree with me about the bridge. Yes, we know it’s a royal pain to wait in those lines for the ferry. Yes, Messina’s a mess to drive through. But doesn’t Italy have more worthy projects? Like finishing the A3 highway between Reggio and Naples? Saving L’Acquila? Improving rail service in Sicily and the rest of southern Italy? Solving the perennial water crisis of inland Sicily? Preserving Sicily’s endangered antiquities? Preventing landslides in Messina? Is this bridge a monument to ego? Something like the Foro Mussolini or the Vittoriano (“chopped,” as Peter Davy wrote, “with terrible brutality into the…hill”)? Ach! Spare Sicily, per carità, from mass tourism, environmental brutality, and what D.H. Lawrence called “hateful homogeneous world-oneness.”
What do you think? I’d love to hear from you. Buon anno a tutti. For more on the subject click here or here. |
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