July 15, 2010
A working kitchen has finally emerged from the rubble like a phoenix rising. After two nail-biting years. No longer do I boil up boxed soup on a hot plate, despair, mix paint around with a carrot stick, despair, write on a plaster-encrusted sawhorse lit by a bare bulb. I have a real table, lights, a working stovetop. Not just any stovetop, amici, but a Renzo Piano one. (Renzo Piano is the Italian architect who designed the Pompidou Center, the new wing of the Chicago Art Institute, etc.) The stovetop is a piece of impeccable Italian design, though tricky to light and hard to clean (makes perfect sense as form usually trumps function in Italy).
Flies buzz in tight circles. The Iblean light beats in every morning, shining off the mirror-like floor.
The centerpiece of the kitchen is the cathedral dome out the window, and the soundtrack to my life are the bells, scaring me out of bed at 7am, marking the passing of each quarter hour, ringing for the dead, for weddings, for evening vespers, for morning mass, and for festa—four crazy-making days straight.
I love my Sicilian kitchen, and I’m grateful for each day I spend there. (What are you grateful for? Come on, tell us.)
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July 12, 2010
The street sweepers here wear suits bright as orange rind and dance with twig brooms.
I see them in the early morning as I stumble across the piazza in the direction of a latte macchiato. They clear the streets of bougainvillea petals and the debris of summer weddings: hearts of confetti, bottles of Asti, handfuls of rice.
And every morning I pray, “Please Signor Sweeper, hold tight! Hold fast to those twigs. Don’t go all plasticky on me.”
I want to weep when I see the changes sweeping Sicily, her Americanization: the new shopping malls plunked down among the olives, the SUVs, the McDonald’s in Upper Ragusa (though grazie a Dio the one in nearby Modica went belly-up).
So I savor the twigs. Because someday soon they’ll disappear, never to return.
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June 29, 2010
Assai megghiu addivintirai si a la morti pinsirai, goes an old Sicilian saying. You’ll be a better person if you think about death.
The walls in Sicily are bulletin boards of death, so there’s ample opportunity here to think about it.
The black-bordered papers called necrologie are everywhere. Ciao Nonno Salvatore one reads. Bye Grandpa Salvatore.
A guy with a brush and a pot of glue rides around on his motorino plastering necrologie around town.
My Sicilian-American friend Mary, who has lived here for twenty-some years, says she was “freaked out” by the “morbid things” when she first arrived, but I find them endearing. They celebrate you all over the neighborhood for months, even years, while all we Americans get is a tiny newspaper blurb for a day.
Li morti aprinu l’occhi a li vivi, say the Sicilians.
The dead open the eyes of the living.
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June 19, 2010
Sicily’s shutters:
Defenders against the brash sun.
Mysterious louvered eyelids.
Guardians of secret lives.
Shutters here are called persiane (Persians).
The hot ghibli winds have blown in from the Sahara, along with sand. Come mid-afternoon, you close the shutters tight and lie down in a dark room on cool sheets. Guilt-free. Everyone else is doing it, too.
Later as the sun begins to drops, the village wakes and, one by one, le persiane creak open.
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June 15, 2010
We make up a long list—masking tape, towel racks, electric drill, olive tree, hooks—and drive through the scabby detritus of Upper Ragusa’s industrial zone to Brico, a do-it-yourself Sicilian version of Home Depot.
The smell of the sea fills our nostrils as we pull into the blazing parking lot. I don’t approve of big-box stores or the mall-ification of Sicily, but my hardware-hungry husband has landed on the island, we have a rental car, and I’m a hypocrite.
Kim tries to get in the exit doors, but they remain stubbornly shut.
 We finally escape the hot fingers of the sun into cool Brico-dom. Kim marvels at the dainty shopping baskets, wondering where all the flatbed carts are.
We’re a little frustrated that we can’t decode what’s in all the pots and the tubes.
 Floor space at Brico is devoted to garbage cans no bigger than my purse, and to jars for canning marmalade. We buy an olive tree for the tiny balcony and a rug made in Iran. Matinee idols deliver service with a smile (where are the Home Depot employees when you need them?).
At Home Depot you get boring batteries and drill bits at check-out. Here you get great pots of basil and fragrant mint.
We agree that the best thing about Brico is the aromatic do-it-yourself coffee bar with mod Italian tables and chairs.
For forty cents you can get not only a delicious caffè espresso, but a caffè lungo, caffè macchiato, cappuccino, caffè corto decaffeinato, caffè macchiato decaffeinato, mocaccino, cappciocc (what’s that?) cappuccino decaffeinato, cioccolato forte, cioccolata al latte, latte, latte macchiato, latte al cacao, and te al limone. Plus at the press of a button you decide if you want the above dolce or amaro. It’s Starbucks (but much better) in a machine the size of a jukebox.
Can you beat that, Home Depot?
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All photos and text on BaroqueSicily are Copyright of Jann Huizenga ©2009-2015, unless otherwise noted. Material may not be copied or re-published without written permission. All rights reserved.
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