November 18, 2010
People ask: Do you, uh, have a trust fund or something? How can you afford a house in Italy?
Answer: We’re just a couple of free-lance artist-teacher types, wondering from which tree the next job will drop. I acquired the house in Sicily on a shoestring budget by sheer force of will. (Prices in Sicily are, certo, a fraction of those in Tuscany.)
We practice frugality. We schmear paint on the walls ourselves with big sponges, sand plaster from raw stone, putty every crack and crevice.
Our coffee table is a weathered old skid scavenged from the street. We extracted the rusty nails and polished the brittle wood to a shine.
We eat from mismatched china scavenged from Sunday-morning flea markets.
 Old mixing bowl from the Modica flea market, €5  Glasses from the Modica flea market, €1 each We decorate with “trash” that Sicilians have tossed.
 Sicilian chandelier, circa 1950, from the Modica flea market, €10  "Found" antique chair, gratis  Bath door made of found wood (and flea-market knobs, €2)  Flea-market chair, €30 We shop the sales at Upim.
 Flatware purchased on sale at Upim (Italian version of K-Mart), €1 each We frequent church bazaars, jam-packed with cheap new or vintage homemade goodies.
 Potholders crocheted by a local woman and sold at a church bazaar, €2 And did you know that in Sicily you can bargain for new beds and couches (like for cars in the US)?
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April 26, 2010
Tragedy in the bathroom.
Remember those beastly expensive Italian glass tiles I naively ordered?
These are them, installed.
When I sprayed glass cleaner over my new sea-blue walls, wiping away the obscuring film of white plaster the mason had left, I could not believe my eyes. Not a single straight line! As if an ill-tempered four-year old had been hard at work.
How could I have allowed this to happen, you ask?
Well, early in the day, curiosity kept prompting me to run down two flights of stairs and check on the work. After 30 minutes of this, the mason said I made him nervous, and would I please go away and cease to bother him? The work is molto delicato, he said, and it is necessario to concentrate and be left solo.
And so away I went, full of cockeyed hope that I’d soon have a useable bathroom.
I returned to the house after two days, descended into the winery-cum-guest quarters and beheld anarchia. Thousands of tiny mosaic tiles stuck willy-nilly onto the wall. I felt like I’d been gored.
But I refused to face reality. Don’t panic, I told myself. It’s rustic. Rustic is good. It fits the theme of the wine cantina. Molto rustico! Charming in its own way. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?????
I called over a few friends to have a look. Horrid, they said, daring to utter the bald truth. Really horrid.
It doesn’t look bad from afar, though, does it? If you kind of … squint at it?
Now what do I do.
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April 12, 2010
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Into the cramped space under this arch—hardly big enough for a closet—I plan to stuff an entire bathroom: sink, toilet, shower, heat rack, mirror, towel racks. The project manager is insisting on a bidet (he says no Italian can live without one), but you’d have to put your foot in the bidet to squeeze into the shower.
This is part of the cantina, the old wine cellar that is slowly morphing into guest quarters.
I plan to expose as much stone as possible inside and above the arch. The back wall, which needs to be waterproof, will be a sea of tiny tiles. Tiles the blue of a storm-tossed Ionian Sea.
Beastly expensive tiles.
I knew nothing about the cost when I ordered. I didn’t bother to ask the price. I figured: they’re just tiles made right here in Italy, not some expensive import. How much could a few little tiles cost?
The boxes finally arrived from Milan, along with the bill. My eyes popped. I had to read it over and over. I could feel my face on fire.
“Well, you ordered glass tiles,” the project manager says. What did you expect?”
I did notice how lustrous they were, but I had no idea they were glass.
I thumb through the instruction manual that comes with the tiles. The installation looks complicated. “Are you sure the mason is up to this?” I ask the project manager. The mason seems to have perfected the art of banging and pounding, but I’ve never seen him do anything delicate with his thick, calloused hands. Do I trust him with my treasures? Has he ever installed anything of the sort?
“Non preoccuparti,” says the project manager, winking. Don’t worry.
This is the favorite phrase down here. It usually means trouble.
But who am I to argue?
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March 30, 2010
Surprise! The 20th-century layers have been chipped off my walls, and I think we’ve found—in addition to big old blocks of Norman stone—some traces of Arab architecture.
North African Moors ruled Sicily for only a couple of centuries more than a millennium ago, but their influence on the island was, and is, huge.
Before I show you my little discovery, take a good look, if you will, at these keyhole-shaped doorways in North Africa.
OK, now compare those doorways with the one below in my house. The arch shape turned up when we pulled off the modern wooden door frame. Don’t you think it looks vaguely Moorish in design?
 It’s not as beautiful as those North African doors, I know, and the curved thingamajig is way up top rather than in the middle of the arch, but still … it makes me wonder. It’s certainly not a pure Roman or Greek arch (more on that below).
I now have three of these vaguely Moorish arches on the top floor of my casa.
The house is a historical puzzle. The top floor, I’m quite sure, was built sometime soon after the 1693 earthquake that leveled not just Ragusa Ibla, but much of southeast Sicily. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the stone blocks in this doorway and elsewhere in the house were looted from the Norman castle that stood on this site and crumpled in that quake. (I know this only because neighbors have told me.)
So, assuming the above timeline, this means that 700 years after the Moors left Sicily, local Sicilian builders still carried traces of their Arab heritage in their builders’ DNA.
Everything here is so knotted and twisted together; it’s hard to tease out the many strands of history from all the superimposed cultures and styles. Layers upon layers—that’s what Sicily is all about.
The house becomes older the lower you go. The bottom floor used to be a cantina, a place where wine was made and stored (soon to be guest quarters). The arch down there seems Greco-Roman in style, an uninterrupted curve.
When was it constructed? Stay tuned. Maybe someday I’ll figure it out. Perhaps you have an insight?
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For more on the Muslim rule of Sicily, click here.
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March 20, 2010
Chink chink. Whack whack. Hammers bounce off chisels. Lumps of plaster drop like overripe fruit exposing ancient stones, ghosts of centuries past.
I’m giddy, over the moon. And look! A stone arch where an ugly closet used to be! I love going backward in time.
But like the Sicilian saying goes: Quantu cchiù autu è lu munti, tantu cchiù profunna è la valli, the higher the mountain, the deeper the valley.
Neighbors—a stocky elderly couple—knock at the door one day just after I’ve arrived back from Rome. “Signora, there’s a problema.” They seem agitated. “Come see.”
I follow them up a flight of steps into their home. The houses in Ragusa Ibla are fitted together like jigsaw pieces; neighbors live over me, under me, to the right and to the left. The couple waves arms around and jabbers in sync. What in God’s name are they pointing at?
When my eyes adjust to the semi-darkness, I see what must be dozens of cracks like spider legs crawling over the walls. Bad news indeed, but what do these blessed spider legs have to do with me?
“Signora, all the pounding away in your house has ruined our walls.”
For a minute the room lacks oxygen. Are these cracks really new? Sicily is on a fault line. This could have happened years ago. I want to bring up these ideas, but of course I don’t. Instead I say in a voice sharp as a prickly pear, “Let me speak to the project manager. We’ll resolve this.”
Things are getting tangled up. Cu’ havi terra, havi guerra, Sicilians say, owning land is like fighting a war.
What will this cost? I’m hemoragging cash. The dollar is at an all-time low. I consult with Sicilians in the know.
Mason: No way we could we have done that. Impossibile. You’d be a fool to pay a centesimo.
Friend 1: Sicilians see Americans as a giant slot machine. Don’t pay.
Project Manager: It’s possible we did cause the cracks. We’ll never know. Pay up. Keep the peace.
Friend 2: It’s extortion, pure and simple.
Have they typecast me? The lady with the American dollars? Have I destroyed their walls? Do I now have two houses to restore? What to do?
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My Tourist Tips for Southeast Sicily
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