And there is poverty worse than the Neapolitan farther south, in Calabria and Sicily. Those fly-blown, hungry and dirty little towns; the stare of misery in the eyes. The sun appears to redeem, but Italy has a changeable climate. The rain comes down in sheets; the cold can be harsh. When I was in Sicily recently, the wind was cold, the rain clouds boiled up black and purple over the grandiose mountains of Palermo. One might have been in Kerry; the stone walls, the poor soil, the few sheep and the bent trees evoked Ireland.
The little plane I flew down in was packed with wooden-looking men who, one imagined, belonged to the Mafia. At the airport we were held up by one of those wild Sicilian family meetings. An aunt, large and jeweled, had arrived from Chicago. She charged across the tarmac; a large collection of relatives charged to meet her. They collided and became a howling human knot, weeping, shouting, embracing, clinging. Officials stood by appreciatively. Half an hour later, the family were still at it, in twos and threes. One had seen the Family in all its generations, complete and unrestrained.
In Sicily one sees all that is Italian magnified and exaggerated—all except one thing. The Sicilian is a dour man. He is often violent, morose, harsh and melancholic. He has the art of utterly avoiding the law. The spirit of the Mafia is in the blood. Sicily is Italy’s Ireland, a country at odds with the national government. Italian-made law is made to be broken. And then the people are a Mediterranean mixture of Greek, North African, Spanish, Norman French and all the pirates. There is a primitive regard for the presence of death. The mother of Giuliano, the bandit, kneeled down and licked her son’s blood in the courtyard where he lay shot dead. Aeschylus wrote in Syracuse: one would say that he might still be at home in Sicily. The mourning notices on the wall are common in Italy and Spain; in Sicily these notices are everywhere. They bring home a fact that northerners shy away from—that the southerner is asserting family status: you have standing, you belong, you know who you are; there is no question of your not having identity.
Palermo astonished me. I remembered it as a small eighteenth-century city, with youths serenading with mandolins in the streets at night, and the pretty, paneled carts painted with scenes of the wars of Charlemagne and the struggles between Christian and Moor. A new and much larger modern city of apartment blocks has now grown up beside the old one.
I had tea with a university professor—he was from the north—in Palermo. He lived in one of these brand-new modern apartments. How prosperous (I said) it looked. “Pure façade,” he said. “It is built on the Keynesian principle; if you want to be rich you must first of all appear to be rich. Sicilians— like all Italians—are expert in appearances.” Palermo is famous for being the headquarters of the Mafia, and everyone had told me its power had gone. “Not at all,” he said. “It is permanent. It rules and rigs everything. Not one of these buildings could have been put up without paying the Mafia. If a builder refused, his scaffolding would mysteriously collapse. The hand of the Mafia lies on everything you touch.”
“On the university?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “There’s no money in education.” Nevertheless, one is told, one would never dare fail a Mafia man’s son in his exams.
Naturally the foreigner sees no sign of this. The interesting thing is that the Mafia is powerful only in western Sicily, in the region of feudal estates, where there has been little industry and no middle-class movement. In eastern Sicily, with its long history of prosperous commerce and manufacture in Catania, the Mafia is said not to exist. Indeed that pleasant, modern and hospitable city—so absurdly despised by the guidebooks—has nothing but contempt for “aristocratic” Palermo. And in Palermo they do not call the Mafia by its name: they call it “the honored society,” “the friends,” and refer to its members—in sinister voice—as “qualified” men or “specialists.”
It was Easter time in Catania. The cars streamed out to the seaside or north to Victorian Taormina, where the motor bicycles deafen one on the steep cliffside, where cameras click endlessly in the Greek theater; or to the little town of Aci Castello, to see the three sharp rocks that are said to be the rocks that Polyphemus, the Cyclops, threw into the sea. One fascination of the story of Odysseus is its topographical accuracy: Polyphemus, the one-eyed, was clearly Etna; that single eye is the crater, and those rocks were hurled by Etna in eruption.
To the south, on the way to Syracuse, the Easter crowds were out in their thousands; families were picnicking among the flowers and under the trees, and in Syracuse itself there were scarcely any foreigners in the Greek theater. Any small Italian car built to hold four or five people will always carry ten: in a poor country you have to pack everyone in. The driving is terrible. A pile-up of half a dozen cars on these gay holidays is common. The accidents are not usually serious, but to crunch and be crunched appears to be the aim of Sicilian motoring. The number of children that can be hung about a small motor bicycle is remarkable.
I was in Palermo, too, during the Easter season, and there the scene in the back streets was dark, primitive and forbidding. In the butcher shop an Easter lamb was standing on its hind legs and looking over the low door, bleating into the street. Flayed cows’ heads stared down. The intricately decorated bars were crowded with men drinking strong wine. Others sat playing cards in the street, always surrounded by a tense small crowd. In the innumerable cakeshops, huge Easter cakes were being made, each shopkeeper’s family struggling with the dough and the decorations. Lighting was dim: electricity is too expensive. The lines of washing across the alleys were wretched: the washing of Naples is far superior.
In old Palermo there is a darkness and the dereliction of the last war. Before the war there used to be dozens of puppet theaters where the story of Roland and Oliver was endlessly re-enacted, in squalid dockside show houses where one sat in a sea of peanut shells. Now I saw only one puppet theater. And to see a decent paneled cart you have to go to the museum. Very sad—but there was no clean, modern Palermo then. There were no little planes, full of business people, flipping about from town to town over the enormous mountains and the poverty-stricken wilderness of the interior. The evening view of this splendid mountain island from the sky is momentous and alarming.
Aeschylus wrote in Sicily; but so did Theocritus. People still swear they see Greek-like goatherds on the mountains. The sensation that Sicily is a country blackened by the ferocity of the sun, by the gloom of the rock of Etna’s lava towns, and by the darkness of poverty and primitivism is only a part of the story. The flowers wave by the roadside in the spring, the grasses are fresh, the leaves of the olives glitter in silver, and the orange groves are dense in the narrow lucky valleys and coastal strips. The mimosa seems to roll like yellow smoke mile after mile.
There is a fine university in Catania. It is extraordinary to think first of this modern, industrialized region, with its clean, well-housed industry and well-housed workers (it calls itself the “Milan of the south”), and then of the wretched stone villages and towns on the big estates in the harsh heat and bitter cold of the mountains, and of the misery and violence on the side of the island that faces Africa.
The Mediterranean genius is intellectual, realistic and sensual, but before all these things it is individual, and most individual in Italy. And in the matter of cities, it has created one that resembles no other in the world, a place that—however often one goes there—blooms in the water like some miraculous flower: Venice. It is an estuary island or collection of islands—despite the modern causeway that joins it to the mainland now—lying in shallow seas on the edge of malarial marshes, by which it was protected from attack. Its trade and naval power dominated the Mediterranean for centuries. The Venetians were the best gunners in the world. The place was a republic of merchants. It was at the Mediterranean end of the great overland trade route that ran over the Alps and down the Rhine to the marshes of that northern estuary where stands also the only city that can be compared with Venice as a work of engineering: Amsterdam, whose canals echo the canals
of Venice, and whose solemn seamen and burghers, in their way, have something in common with the long-headed shippers of Venice. Both cities were founded by refugees driven out to the marshes by northern tyrannies. But in Venice the effect is Oriental; it evokes Istanbul in its extravagance. Yet it also evokes the Gothic north.
Seamen, colonists, carriers, an island people protected by the sea, hard bargainers who put trade first, the Venetians have been compared by some with the English rather than with the Dutch. It is true that the Venetians are not exactly Continentals: they are cut off, self-regarding, self-interested islanders, and it has been held against them sometimes, as it has against the English and other island peoples, that they think they are always right. It is said that even in the museum life the city leads today, the Venetian puts on a morose and withdrawn face behind which lies his conceit in his rightness. He has a certain subtle, malicious wit. Venice was never feudal. Its people were always united, and the sense of equality is strong. Throughout history it has been expensive to deal with the Venetian; invisible subclauses and exceptions have notoriously emerged in his contracts from the days of the Crusades onward. He has, as a citizen of a once great power, become quite indifferent to his old unpopularity, and is complacent in his isolation. The theatricality of Naples is alien to him.
You suppose this is the only silent city on earth simply because it has no road traffic. The silence of Venice is in this sense blessed, a gift from heaven. To wander in the tangle of clean, narrow streets, alleys, lanes and passages, crossing the little bridges that span the scores of little canals—there are 177 of them and their total length is 128 miles, which accounts for your sudden feeling that you are tired out—is an astonishing rest to the mind. The senses awaken, and in the soft, humid air you feel the famous sensuousness of the city, its mysterious gentleness. You have been taken clean out of clock time, into time that is measured by mood and by the trailing, evanescent motions of desire. But when you confide this to a Venetian, his long-nosed face and his malicious eye light up. His liverish look becomes gay. Venice, he says, is built out of water and the purest light of the Mediterranean—and noise! One grants him at once the noise of the vaporetti and motorboats of the Grand Canal. In the daytime you can sit outside the Accademia, drinking a Campari, and not hear a word that is being said to you. The Venetian will curse that noise with you, and even more the smell of petrol and diesel fumes, and the smog blowing over the water. The fact is that, like all Italians, he likes noise and that Venice makes you aware of noises you had forgotten: the vague cloudy rumeur of cities, the continual slapping of water, the bumping of gondolas, croaking all night long, violently at the turn of the tide; the extraordinary whispering tap and scrape of footsteps—the real surprise of Venice—the words of a conversation a hundred yards away, the shouts and singing of people going home at night, the thumpings and fiddlings of the rival café orchestras in Saint Mark’s piazza, the church bells, the hooting of the large ships, the shout of a gondolier. Half the night, if you are sleepless in Venice, and are in some inner street, you will be kept awake by the loud Italian voice, the endless arguments of waiting gondoliers, the straining of ropes against piers. Even the clatter of the pigeons in Saint Mark’s is deafening. The voices of four men playing cards in a café late at night, the last customers, can be heard streets away.
Some have found Venice slimy and stinking. In the early morning, a journey through the narrow ways, where the filthy water is eating away the rotting brick, where one glides appalled through orange and potato peelings and broccoli stumps and other garbage, spotting the rats run into the warehouses, is hard to bear. The rubbish barges do not elevate the soul. One thinks of miasma and prays that the tide will be strong and swill the city out; and one concentrates on the skill of the gondolier as he steers to within an inch of the mossy wall on a blind corner and skims you faultlessly around.
Nevertheless, you pass out of the dark and miasmal into the glitter of the sun and the soft blue air, and everything is changed. You live in gold, pearl and enamel. The Doge’s Palace and Saint Mark’s dazzle you, and if Saint Mark’s Square is no longer “the drawing room of Europe,” it is still lordly in its stone and princely in its fantasy. It is only you and thousands like you who have deteriorated and are unworthy—one of the terrible punishments to self-esteem that tourism has brought us—and you try, as you go to look at church after church, at Tintorettos and Bellinis, Titians, Guardis and Carpaccios, to redeem the squalid condition of your soul.
What is going to happen to Venice? It is not as fashionable as it was in the nineteenth century. It is no longer a place for the Wagners, the Brownings, the Henry Jameses and Ruskins or the Thomas Manns. It has its Biennale, of course, its many conferences; there was an international conference of lighthouse experts when I was there last, which is, on reflection, fitting. The Venetian channels are tricky. Most of its shipping trade goes to the docks and huge industrial complex of Mestre, on the mainland end of the causeway, but some of it and the passenger lines come to Venice itself. This is, after all, an important port. The business people in Venice complain that it is an empty shell and important businesses and their workers have moved, leaving the innumerable small craftsmen behind—the picture-frame makers, the glassmakers, who work in their dark little shops. Some monsters want to fill in the canals and get cars into the city: they are sick of being dependent on tourism and show transport.
In the meantime, while this dream hovers, one is captivated by a city that has preserved, especially at night, a look of mystery and enchantment. The place is scarcely vulgarized. Even the swarms of tourists cannot ruin it. The lively sea comes sparkling to the street’s edge. One is lost in the labyrinth, everyone is lost; it is a maze, and at every little bridge one looks up at tall walls and high windows. They are waiting for the Hoffmann story, for music, for Casanova and for the ghost of some Renaissance crime.
We are near the end of our Mediterranean journey. We are of course in the Adriatic, facing eastward, looking across to the Slavs. But there is one more port of call before we come to the end of Western Europe, and it is one that contradicts half of what we have said. We arrive in Trieste.
Trieste is a hybrid, the city of perplexity. What is it—Italian, Austrian, Slavic? Is it a little Vienna by the sea? Once the entrepôt of central Europe, rich in the grand and spacious manner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it has been torn between the Italians and Yugoslavs. It has seen its shipping trade decline—Fiume, now in Yugoslavia, rises at Trieste’s expense—and has attempted an industrial revival. At the moment Trieste has a new interest—atomic power—and with this in mind a new university has been built. The sadness of Trieste springs from the fact that the Italian frontier lies a mile or so outside the city; and the wild mountain country and beautiful Adriatic seaports of Yugoslavia are closed to the Triestinos. For a long time Italy’s relations with Yugoslavia were very bad; in the last few years they have greatly improved. Trieste has a considerable Slav population, mainly in the poorer classes, and the two peoples get along moderately well, though they scarcely meet.
A rich young couple off a yacht, celebrating something with quantities of French brandy, called across from their table asking what I thought of Trieste. I said I found it delightful, and so alive. They said I was talking nonsense. It is, they said, neurotic and dead. It had sunk from eminence to provinciality in a few years. It had lost its style. There is something in this, but the city has not lost its basic character. To the Italian lightness, the Triestinos have added the idiosyncrasy and intelligence of educated Vienna. They are born café people. Half the day one sees them in the large cafés, drinking coffee, reading newspapers and holding long conversations. Their most interesting novelist, Italo Svevo, who had a great vogue in Paris and London in the 1920s and who was quintessentially Triestino, was a café writer in the Viennese manner—the spinner-out of intellectual paradoxes and of inquiries into sentiments. To Italian gaiety there is added the morbid brain of Vienna, the Vienna of the psych
ologists. An elderly lady of Trieste, living in a vast apartment in old Trieste among the grand old-fashioned furniture of another generation, said sternly that when she first went to Florence and Rome, she was shocked by the superficial education of upper-class girls in Italy; from central Europe, Trieste had imbibed serious education. At parties I was at once struck by a neglect of the Italian passion for the bellafigura, and by the amusing and instructed talk of the people. There was nothing provincial about the doctors, lawyers, architects and professors who were there. Trieste, in fact, has that nervous intelligence of a city where several cultures spark off one another.
The total brain power in Trieste must be formidable; and I would guess that Trieste is a good place for writers, whereas the south of France is certainly not—well, if one excepts such experienced ancients as Somerset Maugham. Mascherini, a sculptor of European and New York fame, lives in Trieste. In their eagerness to have foreign friends—and in their houses, too—ones sees not only the comfort of their mercantile life but the uneasiness about their isolation. Italy is a place for dazzling acquaintance, but in Trieste there is the assurance of knowing that people are more likely to mean what they say, and that they like the solace of long friendships. I get most polite and pleasantly worded formal letters from Italy, but from Trieste I get witty letters, invitations to parties a year ahead. The northerner finds a handsome Austrian eighteenth-century city, massive and well-ordered, where he is not an alien, where his interests are understood, and where, alas, he sees a look of desperation in the eyes. This must not be entirely attributed to political fear; it is a look one often sees in frontier people who belong and yet do not belong.
At Home and Abroad Page 15