July 29, 2010
I pick up Signor Giovanni at the beach, on the golden shores of the Ionian.
Take a picture, he commands, seeing my camera.
I oblige.
He draws a tattered poem from a pocket. Per te, for you, he says, already addressing me with the familiar form. The poem has lines like this: You’re a beautiful table, so bountiful I barely know where to begin.
I thank him and return to my caffè-shack “office.” He follows and pulls from his breast pocket a chapbook of poems.
“Mine,” he says. “I wrote them all.”
Opposite each love poem is a black and white photo of his younger self in various poses: flexing biceps on some long-ago beach, posing in a smart sailor outfit next to some long-gone naval vessel; rowing an antique wooden boat. “Look at those addominali, he says, pointing to his youthful six-pack.
I scan the poems, charmed that this man—who says he’s had a hard life farming tomatoes and only four years of school—has produced this work.
He says his poetry has opened doors, including to the nearby Club Med, where he’s met oh so many foreign women.
He writes down his phone number and asks about a husband.
C’è ne uno,” I say. There is one.
He shrugs. “Non importa.” And hands me another poem—this one called Paradise For Us.
 Signor Giovanni reciting his poetry Have you met Don Juan in Sicily or elsewhere?
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July 24, 2010
Everyone’s doin’ it. Wearing viola, that is.
Someone up North in Milano must have recently decreed that the masses wear purple. Or perhaps they issued the edict last year and the news took a while to filter down to Sicily. Whatever. The color is everywhere and stepping into the piazza on a warm summer night feels like stepping into a fieldful of blooming violets.
    
Are you wearing it, too?
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Here’s Lucy (below right). She’s a reader from Toronto (see her comment on this post) and wanted to be included as a Sicilian in purple. Happy to oblige!
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July 19, 2010
Sicilians love their mare in summer. There’s been a mass exodus from the inland baroque towns; everyone’s hit the beach. The odd thing is that when Sicilians “go on vacation,” they travel en bloc, with all their friends and neighbors. So Ragusani move 15 kilometers away to the summer village of Marina di Ragusa for July and August; Modicani move to Marina di Modica; people from Noto go to Marina di Noto—you get the picture.
“Why would you want to go on holiday to a place where you don’t know anybody?” asks a Ragusan friend when I express surprise at this herd behavior.
Those who can’t afford a second home in Marina pitch tents on the beach and mingle with extended families from sunup to sundown, gobbling up gelato and platefuls of pasta alla Norma. Just before the Festival of San Giovanni Battista on August 29, everyone migrates back to Ragusa, as if a mighty shepherd is herding them all back at once.
    
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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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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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