The stories you hear about rural Sicily, about the country villages in which, as in certain vintage Westerns, a stranger’s arrival is greeted by the shuttering of windows, the slamming of doors, and the ominous, sudden disappearance of the entire population, all of that comes back to you as you walk through Noto. But whatever fears and suspicions those stories represent don’t seem to apply here, exactly. What you mostly fear, in Noto, is that a chunk of elegant baroque masonry will finally dislodge itself, fall, and land on your head.
And yet, and yet…to truly appreciate the beauty and brilliance of Noto, its originality and inventiveness and optimism, to see it anew as if each gargoyle and fillip of scrollwork were still bright, pristine, and freshly minted, you need only spend an hour (or as much as you can bear) in Noto’s modern equivalent: Gibellina Nuova.
In January 1968 a violent earthquake destroyed a major section of south-central Sicily. The farming town of Gibellina—not far from Salemi and Castelvetrano—was leveled; the only thing that survived, more or less intact, was its cemetery. Inspired perhaps by the example of Noto, the town decided to rebuild a few kilometers away, in a less perilous spot. And that’s where the resemblance to Noto ends.
Gibellina Nuova is one of the creepier and more disturbing places in Sicily, and (at least in terms of architecture and urban planning) possibly anywhere I know. Artists from all over the island were enlisted to help with the project, but you can’t help wondering how much control or influence they actually had. Throughout the modern town, examples of dated and sadly misdirected 1970s public sculpture pop up from the lunar landscape in varying states of neglect and disrepair. Yet their condition is shipshape compared to that of the city itself.
The marble sidewalks of the deserted main square are chipped and broken, metal reinforcement rods poke through the surface of half-poured concrete, everywhere are unfinished building projects, though often it’s hard to tell what’s still being constructed and what’s already falling apart; much of Gibellina Nuova seems to have met—and got stuck—somewhere in the middle. The streets are depopulated and bare, like those of certain California suburbs; you can drive through them easily enough, but you wouldn’t want to walk.
Perhaps what makes Gibellina so alarming—and so notably un-Sicilian—is that the past seems to have been wholly obliterated, swallowed and erased along with the original town. For though Sicily is thoroughly modern, in some ways more so than the mainland—tiny country inns and rural agroturismo farms all seem to have their own Web sites, a surprising number of restaurants and public spaces practice a strict no-smoking policy, you actually see people jogging—the past is always imminent, and the centuries have, by necessity, learned to coexist.
It’s more than just a matter of architecture, of the church built on top of the Greek temple, the baroque palazzo standing beside the Bauhaus-inspired office complex. The interaction of past and present affects, for better and worse, the way people live their lives, from the large institutions (the church and the family still exert enormous influence over the culture) to the minutiae of daily existence, so that it’s not uncommon, in the countryside, to see drivers chatting on their cell phones as they wait for herds of sheep to cross the road. Especially in rural Sicily, the average citizen’s ability to get a job, to find housing, to arrange for the simplest necessities, depends on history, on connections—on who your family is and was, on what transpired generations ago between your ancestors and the ancestors of the boss you are asking for employment.
But in Gibellina, there is no visible sign of the past, or perhaps the problem is that there is no progress, no viable present, no future, and so everything has remained locked in the past—frozen in some deranged version of the 1970s. Judged by the standards of a more typical Sicilian town, everything seems severely dysfunctional; no one gathers to chat in the piazza, and the market suggests those bleak, transient Gypsy encampments on the edges of housing blocks in northern Italian industrial cities.
To be fair, few towns are recognizable from their descriptions in tourist brochures, but the language of the pamphlet I get from the helpful but understandably suspicious fellow (what, he obviously wonders, are we doing here, taking pictures?) in the underfurnished information office seems particularly inapplicable: “The New Gibellina…shows an urban structure characterized by the alternation of pedestrian precincts and carriageways, each with a small garden. Sculptures of great contemporary artists have been located, little by little, in the wide spaces of urban territory.”
If Noto Antica is a romantic spot containing a few stones and relics mostly covered over by greenery, moss and creeping vines, nature has been effectively prevented from reclaiming the site of the original Gibellina by Alberto Burri, a well-known and otherwise gifted artist, who has been covering the remains (the ruderi) of the medieval town with a layer of poured concrete—120,000 square meters scored with crevasses to mark where the streets used to be. Up close and from a distance, the piece, entitled “Il Cretto,” suggests a giant concrete bandage applied to a wound that will never be allowed to heal, or at least not until the earthwork/memorial follows the road to ruin that Gibellina Nuova seems to be taking.
Rumor has it that the funds allocated for the rebuilding of Gibellina attracted a considerable amount of Mafia attention, and that Mafia-related graft and corner-cutting is responsible for the shoddy quality of the construction and its consequent decay. The Mafia’s passionate interest in the building trades is the partial subject of The Day of the Owl, one of Leonardo Sciascia’s most well-known novels. And many Sicilians say that while the Mafia’s bloodlust—the killings and assassinations—has declined in recent years, its enthusiasm for lucrative, shoddy, and bogus public-works projects has grown even more intense. It’s hard, otherwise, to explain this second tragedy to have afflicted Gibellina except to blame it on the (one assumes) highly unusual and definitely infelicitous marriage between Mafia corruption and hideous ’70s art. The result makes the loneliest, most haunted de Chirico painting look like one of those cheerful small-town dreamscapes painted by Norman Rockwell.
CHAPTER FOUR
Entertainments
In Acireale, some of the baroque palazzi are also under scaffolding, but here, in contrast to Noto, you feel that the rebuilding and reconstruction might actually be completed some day. It also seems possible that the remodeling might be cosmetic rather than structural—just a bit of last-minute sprucing up to get Acireale ready for “Sicily’s most beautiful Carnival.” During the ten days or so that the Carnival celebrations have been in progress—days we’ve spent in Syracuse and Noto—no one’s energy seems to have diminished in the slightest. On this sunny late afternoon, as costumed kids and grown-ups trickle into town for the daily parade of the “gruppi mascherati e folkloristi,” it’s obvious—in case it was ever in doubt—that Sicilians know how to party.
The stars of the afternoon’s event are O Revotapopolo, a band composed of musicians of all ages, dressed in maroon and-yellow outfits and comical hats, led by a curly-haired, middle-aged maestro in a top hat and tails, brandishing a staff and displaying an air of madcap insouciance thinly overlying a no-nonsense determination that emerges when he wants to get his players off their cell phones—their telefonini—and in formation, out on the street.
Carnival, Acireale
The music starts up, a tarantella that segues into a zippy version of the Macarena, the Habanera, the Guantanamera, and back to a series of Sicilian folk tunes that the crowd seems to know. Soon everybody is bouncing in place and swaying back and forth; three grandmothers in fur coats begin to dance, bending their knees and shaking their arms in a sort of samba they’re inventing on the spot.
The band’s got a strange instrumentation. In addition to the saxophones, trumpets, and trombones, one young man plays rhythm on a contraption made from a mouthpiece and a long pipe attached to a chamber pot, while others mark time with clappers in the shape of scissors and brightly painted wooden violins that turn out to be percussi
on instruments. Everybody’s having a fabulous time, and it’s all hilarious—especially since several band members play no music at all but have been assigned the task of clowning, running around among the rows of musicians with animated gadgets strapped to their backs.
One of these mechanisms features a girl doll and a boy doll attached to a string that makes the boy doll appear to periodically hike up the girl doll’s skirt. My favorite performer is a kid of maybe fourteen or fifteen, wearing glasses and, attached to his back, a toilet with a sign that says OCCUPATO. At regular intervals—in time to the music, in fact—the lids on the bowl and the tank lift simultaneously, and two costumed dolls pop out. The kid—you’ve seen his type before, he’s the class clown, the joker, the funny kid from a Fellini movie—is having such a marvelous time he’s nearly demented with joy. The other musicians and the spectators love him; whatever he’s doing is working, he and his animated toilet are a huge success.
Over the loudspeaker, the voice of the master of ceremonies redirects our attention to a different part of the square, where another brass band strikes up still more folk tunes. These musicians, all wearing bright wigs and clown costumes, follow somewhat dutifully behind a group of high school girls dancing in formation and waving pom-poms. The girls’ short, striped satin costumes—outfits that seem modeled on some murky memory or fantasy of Carmen Miranda—gleam in the afternoon sun. The announcer explains that the dancers have adopted a Brazilian theme in honor of Carnival and in solidarity with the Brazilian group that has been invited to perform for the festival and that will soon be appearing in the square.
But the girls don’t look Brazilian at all, they look like Sicilian high school kids, modest and excruciatingly self-conscious, alternately shaking their hips and stopping to pull their blouses down over the gaps that reveal bare midriffs and rolls of baby fat. When they’re obliged to cede the spotlight to another band, the girls seem relieved, though later in the evening, when I again see them performing, they’ve gotten looser, more relaxed. Perhaps the gathering darkness has given them some cover under which they feel freer to express the Brazilian abandon that seems at once expected of and forbidden them.
Meanwhile, other bands of masked revelers have begun moving slowly down the corso. Harry Potter and his student wizards are back, waving their straw brooms and twirling in their heavy academic robes and pointed witches’ hats. The Norman knights engage in casual, balletic sword fights with little boys in the crowd, who are also wearing medieval costumes and brandishing swords of their own. An old man dressed as Geppetto the shoemaker performs a strange mini-drama of adoration and heartbreak in front of a human-size marionette of Pinocchio.
Yet another group acts out the story of Acis and Galatea, with the title roles played by two costumed teens who appear to be lovers in real life; I saw them kissing before the parade began. The ill-starred shepherd and his nymph are followed by a hulking cave man with a club and a single eye in the middle of his forehead, clearly meant to represent the jealous, vengeful Cyclops but looking more like Fred Flintstone on steroids. Ahead of this goofy trio march some girls dressed in blue, rippling streamers of azure satin symbolizing the sea, and behind them some boys in kelly green, whose symbolic function is less clear (are they earth spirits, maybe?) and who, in any case, are less interested in getting with the mythological program than they are in bopping along to the music and punching each other in the back.
Suddenly, the mood of the crowd shifts; you can feel it in the air. And the announcer introduces the real Brazilians, a samba group from Rio who have been performing at Carnivals up and down the Ionian coast and are now appearing in our own Acireale. A brace of drummers play a thrumming African beat that cuts like a knife through the bouncy rhythms of the Sicilian folk tunes, and the brass bands fall silent.
A hush falls over the crowd as twenty or so dancers appear. Their skin ranges in color from ebony to coffee to white, and they’re showing a lot of it. In fact, most are nearly naked, wearing only sequined bras, G-strings, and feathered headdresses.
The troupe from Rio includes a few men, but the majority of the dancers are female—or are they? Some look like women, others appear to be transsexuals in various stages of the sex change process, some further along than the rest. Anyway, they’re all convincing enough so that it takes me a while to sort out their gender identities, or—more accurately—to admit that I’ll never be able to sort them out. And I can’t help wondering how much (or any) of this the Sicilian grandmas are getting.
Certainly the question occurs to the people who have chosen to watch the parade, broadcast live, on a large-screen television in a pizzeria a block or so off the corso. They watch in silence, forgetting their steaming slices of fresh porcini pizza, as the camera zooms in on the faces of the dancers and splices live performance footage from the piazza with recorded studio interviews that the Brazilians gave earlier, “conversations” that mostly involve the dancers advancing menacingly on the cameras and shouting out their names.
What all the Brazilians appear to share in common is an unusually high level of sexual confidence and (despite, or because of, their gender ambiguity) a hearty dose of aggression about their sexuality. In that way, they remind me of the bands of eunuchs I’ve seen in India: Begging, dancing, singing in the streets, the eunuchs are absolutely and unabashedly in your face with their sexual outlaw status. And in Acireale’s Piazza del Duomo, the Brazilians make you realize, by contrast, how traditional and old-fashioned gender roles still remain, for the most part, in provincial Sicily. Except for one female trumpet player in a sequined bowler hat, all the Sicilian musicians are male, while the pom-pom girls and majorettes are working overtime to seem coquettish and demonstrably nubile.
As the drums get louder, the Brazilians dance up a storm. Though they smile and playfully interact with their audience, no one runs around this little group with noisemaking chamber pots and animated toilet bowls. There’s nothing relaxed, ironic, or self-mocking here, their brand of sex is serious business.
Unlike the other musical groups, the Brazilians are surrounded by uniformed representatives of the city’s Carnival committee, hustling alongside the performers, running interference between them and the crowd, and barking into their walkie-talkies; on their faces are the grimaces of tension, concentration, and responsibility you see on Secret Service agents protecting government officials. And in fact the guards’ presence seems necessary. The Brazilians are putting out a strange vibe, it’s as if they’re tempting, taunting the crowd to rush them, to come and touch their bare skins, to see if they are real. The force field surrounding them could hardly be more unlike that which emanates from the goofy, good-humored brass bands.
At the Carnival, Acireale
I’m so enthralled by the Brazilians that I’m startled when I turn and notice that the gigantic illuminated floats for which the Carnival in Acireale is famous have been lit up and have begun to drift down the street. Rainbow-colored, grotesque, tall enough (and ingeniously designed) so that the figures on them can bend to fit under the telephone and electrical wires, most of the floats are, essentially, enormous political cartoons. One portrays Prime Minister Berlusconi riding on “the rooster that laid a golden egg.” Another features the Italian cultural heroes whose faces used to appear on lire notes and who have now been rendered “homeless” by the adoption of the euro. Yet another, “Homage to the 20th Century,” is covered by cartoon versions of “geniuses”: Picasso, Mahatma Gandhi, Chairman Mao, Laurel and Hardy, Einstein, Lenin, Charlie Chaplin, and Yasir Arafat.
But it’s the last float—the smallest, the only one covered by flowers, by maroon and yellow carnations—that’s the most amazing.
Rearing up from the center of the float is a dragon with wild, rolling eyes, a jaw that clamps open and shut revealing curved pointed teeth, and huge claws with curved pointed nails. In front of the monster is a heart in which a young girl perches, dressed in white and wearing a spiked crown. She’s meant to represent Lady Liberty
, but she looks more as if she’s taking her first Communion or playing the Virgin in a grade-school Christmas pageant.
On either side of the dragon is a demon, with a rocket engine on its back, wearing an old-fashioned aviator’s helmet, and with its dark pink tongue protruding. And behind the monster are the giant, unmistakable representations of the World Trade towers, tilted at giddy angles, like the antic, anthropomorphic, loony-tune structures with which Red Grooms used to decorate his installations, his homages to New York.
Two airplanes, fuchsia-colored, plow into the towers. Lights shine from the skyscrapers’ windows, and, at intervals, the top of one of the buildings collapses down onto itself, reducing the structure to half its size. Between the towers, also covered in yellow flowers, is a gigantic representation of the head of the Statue of Liberty. The dove of peace flies off to one side, while, near the front of the float, an American flag hangs from a beam until it becomes so covered in the shaving cream and party foam the onlookers are spraying that someone thoughtfully takes it down. Meanwhile, two young women dressed as New York City firefighters (in helmets and protective gear, dark heavy jackets and trousers banded with stripes of glow-in-the-dark yellow) dance distractedly to the loud, repetitive techno music that blares from the speakers.
Sicilian Odyssey Page 4