November 1, 2013
Today we celebrate saints. The whole nation is on holiday.
For the first time there’s the faintest whiff of fall in the bright blue air.
Sheets flap from every balcony. (On holidays and Sundays electricity is practically free in Italy. So everyone’s done the washing.)
It was a good morning for bumping into amici. I found Salvatore, a 95-year old friend, in a cafe on the piazza. He told me war stories. How his ship was torpedoed. How he was taken prisoner by the British and marched through the Algerian desert without water. How, in his prison camp in Liverpool, the British girls went wild for him. (“They didn’t care for the Romans, Tuscans, or Neapolitans–only Sicilians.”)
I greeted the furniture restorer, the ice cream maker, the baker. I found my friend Sara at the gardens, and she saw her friend Salvo, an artist who took us to his studio, stuffed with a thousand paintings of the Sicilian countryside.
A perfect morning in Sicily.
Tomorrow, November 2, we celebrate departed souls (All Soul’s Day). Children will hunt around the house for gifts left by dead relatives, the cemeteries will be full, and we’ll devour cookies called Bones of the Dead.
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October 24, 2013
Her name is Joy (Gioia in Italian, pronounced Joy-ah). You’ll find her serving up gioia in the form of happy smiles and cocoa flowers in the corner bar on the main piazza of Santa Croce Camerina.
Not only that, the lone pensioner on the bar stool–an ancient farmer with a single tooth–wanted to buy my coffee.*
Can you see what I love about Sicily?
*Couldn’t let him, though.
***
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October 14, 2013
Ponies a-prancin’; olives a-dancin’.
That’s how it is this time of year in Sicily.
 Throw down that net and let’s get busy. There’s a bumper crop. The limbs surge with bounty.
You can do it by hand.
Or use a big red comb.
Or a motorized gadget, sort of like a fan on a heavy long pole.
Olives bounce everywhere, along with an avalanche of twigs and leaves.
“Could we do this?” I ask the olive pickers, pointing to Diana (whose trees these are) and myself.
They laugh at the idea. “You have to be strong, signora.” They flex their muscles, just in case we don’t get it.
The men wrestle the whole back-breaking mess into the tractor and hurry to the olive press, which is heavy with the scent of hot sun and bitter soil. Total haul: 570 kilos of olives.
Nearly three hours later, after the olives are washed and thrashed and mashed and milled, out gushes the good stuff, a thick ribbon of green velvet.
We sip it from paper cups and taste all of Sicily: it’s like fresh-cut country grass still wet with morning dew, squeezed with sweet lemons and spattered with peppercorns.
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October 7, 2013
I love Sicily’s wrinkled old tin-clad doors.
Sicilians are giving them the heave-ho. They rip ’em out, heartlessly, and put in sleek white ones with blank-eyed glass in the center.
I know, I know. I’m probably the only one on the island to treasure these things. It’s just ugly old junk to Sicilians. Out with the old! In with the new! We’re not some kind of backward old island!!! Give us the new!!! Sleek modern designs! Give us shiny chic doors from Milan! Dump these onto the rubbish pile. Out! Out! Out! There was a time, not so long ago, when we were poor. Imagine. So poor that our wooden doors, rotted by a chafing sun, had to be tinned instead of replaced.
After they’ve torn them all out, they’ll ache for them. Just wait.
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September 28, 2013
How is it that Roman women look so chic and carefree, no matter what they’re doing? Hauling babies, schlepping bags, riding bikes–all at the same time.
I guess it’s that Italian thing called sprezzatura, defined by Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it”.
***
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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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