March 10, 2010
xx
My husband, newly arrived on the scene, has clawed his way down to stone. I phone the project manager with the news.
The crew turns up the next day with hammers and chisels. Now that Kim is here, the garrulous workers completely ignore me, peppering him with questions and concerns—never mind that he doesn’t speak one iota of Italian.
Something about a manly presence in the house has lit a fire under the crew. They really get cracking. Chink chink chink. Chunks of plaster fall like overripe fruit, unveiling enormous blocks of tawny stone.
Madonna! They look pretty freakin’ old. I’m prone to wild mood swings in Sicily, and now I’m on the upswing.
“Stones from the old Norman castello!” say nosey neighbors who wander in the house through the open front door, wondering what all the racket is.
They tell me the entire neighborhood scavenged rubble from the castle that once stood on this site before it crumbled in Ragusa Ibla’s great earthquake of 1693.
 Norman castle in Ragusa Ibla before 1693 earthquake, copyright S. Tumino Finding the ancient Norman rocks is a delicious surprise.
There are more surprises to come in the near future, though none nearly so pleasant.
***
xxx
Win this book!!!!!
I love this tiny up-to-date (2009) guidebook. It packs in information in the form of many top 10 lists. It includes charming out-of-the-way places—the author knows the hidden nooks and crannies of Sicily—and a few fold-out maps.
HOW? Between now and March 26, write a comment on any of my blogposts. The best comment wins. (“Best” could be funniest, most enlightening, most touching…)
March 7, 2010
xxx
Run, don’t walk, amici, as fast as your little legs can carry you, to Caffè Sicilia. It’s in the magical town of Noto in southeast Sicily, home to Captain Mimo.
Caffè Sicilia is a humble place, old-fashioned and perfect. (Please, dear owners, resist the urge to Tuscanize.) It’s basically a sweet shop, blooming with cakes and puddings and ices.
Live with abandon. One, two, three cakes—who’s counting?
Marian Burros, in a 2005 New York Times article, called Caffè Sicilia’s Corrado Assenza a “mad genius” and the “most daring experimenter with the strong sweet and savory elements in Sicilian cooking.” His ingredients are—among other things—bergamot, basil, saffron, fennel, honey, orange, jasmine, wild berries, citron, all of which he harmonizes in ways that delight and surprise.
We were a group of four. Among us, we’d ordered twelve cakes. After cramming our mouths, we sat back stunned and red-faced.
The next thing we know our server, a woman with a thick braid snakimg down her back like an old honeysuckle vine, trots out with a tray bearing 16 spoonfuls of marmalade.
“Guess the ingredients,” she says, “and you win a gelato.”
We lick the pure dabs of goodness from each spoon, carrying on a hot debate. Bergamot? Citron-tobacco? Pistachio -fennel? Turns out we all fail miserably at this game. But we’re rewarded with ice cream anyway, “for playing with passion.”
After an experience like this, Sicily will take hold of you and never let you go.
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February 19, 2010
I scale the scaffolding to inspect the newly-patched roof tiles. Resentment tugs at me—a feeling that my husband should be the one crawling up these monkey bars, not accident-prone me. Why is he 7,000 miles away, on terra firma, while I’m alone in this strange land? The truth is, the foolhardy idea to renovate a house in Sicily was all mine. But couldn’t he feign a little more interest?
I keep climbing. Anaïs Nin’s words run through my head: Life expands or contracts in proportion to your courage.
It’s cold up here. The house—at the summit of Ragusa Ibla— takes the full brunt of the cutting tramontana blowing south from snowy Mount Etna. The rocks at the edges of the roof are meant to keep the old terracotta tiles from flying away in the wind like a cloud of pigeons.
The finished roof, excruciatingly slow as it has been, looks gorgeous in the amber glow of late afternoon. But what do I know. Will it keep the rivers of rain outside? Will the damp house one day be a dry house?
Earlier in the day I’d rushed down in a panic from Rome because a neighbor had told me my scaffolding permit was about to expire. A denuncia against me—an official denouncement to the police—was under discussion by neighbors. None of my brushes with officialdom in Italy have been good; I’m especially nervous about being on the wrong side of the law in a country where even a bounced check can land you in the slammer.
But in true Sicilian fashion, disaster has been averted just in the nick of time. Fifteen minutes before the permit expires, my project manager tracks down a friend in the comune.
“C’e l’abbiamo fatto!” he enthuses, winking and brandishing the new papers. “We did it! It’s been extended. You’ve got to have friends in Sicily.”
Yes, you’ve got to have amici. A truism that becomes clearer to me each day. A friend of a friend—a virtual stranger—has, with astounding Sicilian generosity, donated all the materials for the next phase of the project: the plastering of leaky exterior walls.
But will the wall work drag on forever, like the roof did?
Will I give neighbors another reason to denounce me?
Will my husband ever come to Sicily? Will he ever want to see this old house?
…
xxx
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February 11, 2010
Well, I’ve been blogging on and on about my adopted Sicilian village for several months now, forgetting to give you an overview of the place.
Do you want to see her? Shall I locate her in space?
Do you see why I fell head over heels?
 Ragusa Ibla is a huddle of homes and churches, the kind of place you want to cradle in your hands.
She floats like an island, surrounded by a moat of gorges.
Ragusa lies south of Bizerte, Tunisia in latitude. The soft African air wafts through her piazzas on winter days; rainstorms can deposit Saharan sand.
xxx
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My husband spent a few hours figuring out how to put this Google map on my blog. (Thanks, honey!)
Be sure to check out the satellite view, too.
xxx
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***
If you liked this post, you might also like:
La Zagara, or How I Was Drugged in Sicily
Is My Existence Legitimate?
Pazienza, A Sicilian Mantra
February 3, 2010
She hoped to read Dante in the original, my sister did, to discuss him in his native tongue.
But first she needed to pick up some basics.
So she came all the way from Los Angeles to enroll in ibla!, a tiny Italian language school housed in a palazzo just steps from Ragusa Ibla’s cathedral.
I’d already spoken with the director and head teacher. They’d assured me that their teaching method was “communicative” and “fun” and “modern.” But I wondered. I’d seen language classes in Italy where teachers clung to an approach as antiquated as the Roman Forum itself.
But here’s what Linda has to say about the experience: I spent a week studying Italian at ibla! school in spring 2009 and loved it! The teachers were hip and fun and tailored the classes to our level. They used conversation, games, interesting exercises and homework and really helped us become more skilled in speaking Italian. I made some good friends, loved the comfortable classrooms and also the historic setting (Ragusa Ibla is beautiful). I recommend this school and am looking forward to returning and taking more classes.
The classes at ibla! are very small, especially in off-season—sometimes just two people. This can be a beautiful thing if you like lots of practice and individual attention. But the downside—at least for some people—might be that you don’t get to meet many classmates, and you may be hanging out alone in your free time.
Haven’t you always wanted to speak the language of love? It’s never too late to learn. ibla! runs a special “Over50 Program” that combines Italian with the study of culture, wine and food. Yum. What are you waiting for?
If you’re lucky, you may end up speaking Italian with a baroque accent. Sicilians love exaggeration. Baroque is in their bones. Consider this: no food in Sicily is merely good, buono, it’s always buonissimo, to die for. No human being is just plain ugly, brutto, he’s bruttissimo, hideous. No car or view or cake or shoe in Sicily is ever beautiful, bella, it’s always bellissima, drop-dead gorgeous.
If it’s excitement and glitterati you’re after, study Italian in Florence or Rome. If you’re looking for baroque charm and hospitality in a sweet (and relatively inexpensive) stone village, I recommend ibla!
Here’s ibla!’s website.
If you can’t make it to Sicily to study Italian, if you can’t leave home at all, think about taking advantage of a distance-learning program to polish your language skills. Cyberitalian is a website devoted to teaching Italian and Italian culture. The director, Maura Garau, once headed the Italian program at the United Nations Circolo Culturale Italiano, and she knows what she’s doing when it comes to language instruction.
If you’re already at an intermediate level of Italian and want to speak more idiomatically, enjoy and learn from Dianne Hales’ fun (free) blog Becoming Italian Word by Word.
Follow your own star, as Dante would say, or more precisely, “Se segui tua stella, non fallirai a glorioso porto.”
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Do you have a yen to speak Italian? If you already know Italian, do you have a secret to help the rest of us?
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