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February 22, 2010 … … of a house in deepest Sicily? … of clouds and earth and stone?
Of lying under a fig tree with days wide as an ocean? … Dream away… There are so many broken-down homes in Southeast Sicily waiting to be tamed. Waiting and waiting for you. February 16, 2010
Starting in February, Sicilians take to the hills and valleys to hunt for wild spring asparagus. The first time I stalked asparagi was with a party of friends in a wildflower-strewn valley just beyond Ragusa Ibla. We were led into battle by my friend Gio’s father, Signor Battaglia, a tailor with a zeal for women and wild edibles. Though the skinny spears grew waist-high, they weren’t easy to spot. They lurked in brambles and behind stone drystone walls. For several hours we rambled through the golden freshness playing a kind of Where’s Waldo with asparagus. “Look! There are five right ahead of me,” Signor Battaglia would say. He’d stop dead in his tracks to let our eyes focus. But the flora was tangled and we were asparagus-blind. He’d scowl with mock impatience, then inch forward to tap each tender green shoot with the tip of his cane. We’d erupt in surprise, and someone would clamber over a rock wall or wade deep into the brush to pluck the tall spears with a satisfying snap. When we’d collected enough wild food to feed a village, we headed back to the house to prepare lunch with our dewy ingredients. I’ve written elsewhere about this meal and special man, Signor Battaglia, who for me is the incarnation of Sicilian joie de vivre. I thought about him yesterday and started craving asparagus. Since I’m not in Sicily at the moment, I had to settle for stalking spears in the vegetable aisle at Trader Joe’s. I found some good organic skinny spears. I love asparagus best roasted, so here’s what I did: 1. Snap off woody ends. 2. Wash well (store-bought variety can be gritty). 3. Put in baking dish and drizzle with olive oil. 4. Roast at 350 for about 15 minutes. 5. Grind coarse salt and pepper and add a little spritz of lemon if desired. 6. Serve at room temperature as an antipasto or hot as a side dish.
Asparagus has health benefits galore: it clears urine (yup!); contains fiber that encourages digestion; and supports heart health thanks to folate, vitamin B, and the master antioxidant glutathione. Do you forage for wild edibles? What do you do with asparagi? .*** Here’s a link to a blogger in Italy doing a series on wild edibles.
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. December 7, 2009
Sicilian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s new autobiographical epic, Baarìa, has been out here for a few months. I haven’t seen it yet but love the poster, which looks great in the context of Sicily. Below are shots of Teatro Garibaldi in Piazza Armerina and a wall in Modica.
An American friend saw the film first in Bologna and then in Palermo. She said there was much more laughter in Palermo—the audience was apparently picking up on the director’s “in” jokes. Baarìa, by the way, is dialect for Bagherìa—a town on the coast just east of Palermo where Tornatore grew up. Here’s a short review of the film in the Guardian. November 2, 2009 A few years ago, I wanted to buy a ruin of a house on a solitary road out beyond the Ragusa cemetery. Sicilian friends (perfectly rational, well-educated ones) said I was matta, insane, that I’d be visited at night by dead souls. “What do you mean?” I hollered. “I live two blocks from a cemetery in the US and I’ve never seen a ghost!” They looked at me mournfully and insisted that the danger was real. They themselves would absolutely never pay me a visit there! So I gave up the idea of that house with its faded pink walls, shocked at how alive the dead are in Sicily. Sicilian cemeteries are always set well outside of town behind imposing walls. Below is the Scicli cemetery, full of mausoleums, magnificent pines and tall cypress.
Cemeteries here are well-tended, with custodians and on-site florists. They seem to be open most of the day, even during the long lunch break.
Many of the tombs show pictures of the dead.
Streets have names, just like in a real town.
Today is il Giorno dei Morti, Day of the Dead. Sicilian families flock to cemeteries—arms overflowing with lilies, mums, roses, and daisies—to spend time with their dearly departed.
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