Segesta
In their ongoing battle with their rivals in Selinunte, the Egestans repeatedly switched sides, allying themselves with the various factions and city-states warring for control of the island. In one famous story, the Egestans—hoping to convince the Athenian envoys that they would be wealthy and useful allies—rounded up all the gold and silver vessels from neighboring towns (including Eryx) and moved them around to each of the houses that the Athenians visited.
Lonely, moody, surrounded by mountains, overlooking the patchwork fields in the valley below and (from the theater, a brief bus ride uphill from the temple) a vista that extends all the way to the Gulf of Castellammare, Segesta is one of those places where the sky itself seems to expand (as it does, say, above the Grand Canyon) as if in response to the heroic scale of what lies beneath it. For centuries it has been the sort of popular tourist destination that has inspired romantic voyagers and travel writers to contemplate the sublimity and transience of earthly existence, the vast scope of eternity. And, indeed, Segesta makes you see why their musings might have led them in those reverent, transcendent, and gloomy directions.
When Goethe visited Segesta the site had not yet been restored and, tired from the effort of “clambering about among the unimpressive ruins of a theater,” he cut his visit short. And yet his description of the temple’s setting still seems fresh, accurate and recognizable: “The site of the temple is remarkable. Standing on an isolated hill at the head of a long, wide valley and surrounded by cliffs, it towers over a vast landscape… The countryside broods in a melancholy fertility; it is cultivated but with scarcely a sign of human habitation… The wind howled around the columns as though they were a forest, and birds of prey wheeled, screaming, above the empty shell.”
When we arrive in Erice after the brief but dramatic drive from Trapani—a series of hairpin turns providing vertiginously seductive vistas of the sea and the cliffs below and taking us up almost 2,500 feet in less than half an hour—the town seems as deserted, as lonely as Segesta. It’s midafternoon, on an unusually bright (Erice is famous for the mists and fog in which it is often shrouded) and chilly Saturday in February. Too narrow for cars, the cobblestone alleys of the medieval town are so quiet that we can hear our footsteps. Strangely, it reminds me of walking, late at night, along the quietest canals and through the emptiest, most wintry piazzas of Venice. The sense of solitude is so eerie that my heart speeds up when we turn a corner and see other people: a couple of expensively dressed Italian tourists ascending the steep street. What are they doing here—and why is she carrying that Fendi shopping bag?
It’s the perfect time to visit Erice. You want to be here when no one else is, very early in the morning, in the quiet of an off-season afternoon, or late at night. For to be in Erice is to indulge your fantasies of time travel, of what it would be like to live in the fourteenth century, to see its ghosts come alive, to lose all contact with modern life. Gazing out from the parapets of the fortress and the twelfth-century castle, looking down across the sea (supposedly on especially clear days you can see all the way to Africa) you feel as if you’ve left the world behind, down below, and that the only way to rejoin it is to let go and plummet straight down. For many reasons, Erice is not the first place I’d recommend to the acrophobic.
It’s hard to imagine what this place would be like on a summer day, when the narrow streets and tiny piazzas are choked with pedestrian traffic. I’d been oddly resistant to coming here, partly for fear of finding a crowded souvenir bazaar. Yesterday, at our hotel in Trapani, I heard an American businessman say he was planning to “buzz” up to Erice—he pronounced it “Aero-shade,” so that at first I thought he meant some trendy Italian design firm—to buy some “trinkets” before his flight home the next day. I’d also feared that it might turn out to be just another pretty hill town, like dozens of other towns we’d visited in Italy and France. I’ve always loved those towns—but now I worry that the attractions of Erice might seem a little thin after the glory and monumentality of Segesta.
But Erice, as it turns out, is not just another hill town. The height, the view, the sweep of ocean and hills below—it seems almost laughable that any place could be so lovely. But the town itself is sobering, so austere that it makes cities like Gubbio or the most melancholy Provençal mountain village seem as cozy as a New England hamlet, as sensual as a Polynesian island. Erice is so severe and frosty that being here feels like how it must feel to be inside a diamond; its perfection is almost physically painful, as if its edges were as sharp—and as cutting—as a diamond’s.
Even the paving stones are aesthetically satisfying. The grass that grows up through the crevices between the polished stones arranged in regular geometric patterns is such a pleasing shade of green it could have been chosen from a catalog. It looks more like set design than like an organic, living town. Except for the televisions tuned to the sports-and-racing channels in the few cafés that are open, except for an occasional car braving the capillary-thin streets to deliver luggage to one of the town’s hotels, there is nothing to spoil the illusion that we have left our own century and moved back into another.
Erice’s beauty—and the fact that we know so little about the town’s history and origins—has created a sort of vacuum into which people have, for thousands of years, been moved to throw myths and legends, like propitiatory offerings. Something so perfect—and so undocumented, so unaccounted for—must surely have its roots in divinity. And so we hear that the Temple of Aphrodite-Venus was founded by Aeneas, who landed here to perform the funeral rites for his father, whom he had rescued on his shoulders from the sack of Troy; because a fire had destroyed some of Aeneas’s ships, he was obliged to leave behind several of his men, who became the town’s first residents. Daedalus is said to have worked on the Temple of Aphrodite; it was here that he designed, as a gift for the goddess, a honeycomb made entirely of gold. And, according to legend, the goddess herself came here to live with her lover, the Argonaut Butes, whom she rescued from the sea after the Sirens’ song enticed him to jump into the ocean. Heracles, too, is supposed to have stopped by on his way home from carrying off the cattle of Geryon—and, during his stay, killed the Elymian king who tried to steal them.
Yet these stories seem too vital, too full of life and health and ingenuity and sex to have much to do with Erice. Because the strange thing is that what’s most beautiful about the place is how dead it is, how unchanged and unchanging, how perfectly preserved, like an exquisite corpse embalmed by some alchemical formula of altitude, wind, fog, and water.
Suddenly, I know what Erice reminds me of: Les Baux-de-Provence, the ruined medieval town that sits on a hilltop in the south of France, rising out of the living town beneath it. There’s that same sense of seeing something that will never change, or change much, that will remain untouched by the forces that keep shaping and refashioning whatever is alive—that is, by life itself. To walk the streets of Erice and then drive back down to Trapani is almost like being Persephone—like being permitted to enter the realm of the dead and then return to the noisy, disorderly, and precious province of the living.
From the start, the prospect of going to Mozia makes me a little edgy—the idea of sailing across a lagoon to an island on which no one lives, an island that was once the outpost of a highly developed and cruel civilization, but where there are now only its ruins and a small museum in the former home of Joseph Whitaker, one of the Englishmen who came to Sicily and sensibly intuited that a fortune could be made by exporting Marsala wine.
In winter, the museum (and, by extension, the island) closes at one in the afternoon. I can’t help thinking that, unlikely as it seems…what if the fisherman who ferries us out there gets distracted and forgets about us, and we’re stuck out there all night? What if we’re stranded, exposed to the elements, alone with the spirits of the Phoenician traders who first came to Mozia in the eighth century B.C. and who lived in harmony with their Greek neighbors until the Carthaginian wa
rs, when Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, using catapults, missiles, and battering rams—state-of-the-art tools of fourth-century warfare—destroyed the settlement and much of its population?
I phone ahead from Trapani and the woman who answers at the museum gives me directions for finding the ferry port, roughly halfway between Trapani and Marsala. The signs directing us to Mozia and the port—just a parking lot, really, beside a small building, with a solitary fishing boat waiting at the dock—are reassuring. It’s not exactly unexplored wilderness, uncharted territory. Going to Mozia—and back—is something people do. All the time.
Boatman, Mozia
But not, as it happens, today. The fisherman working on his nets at the back of his boat seems delighted that the morning has brought him at least a little business. He couldn’t be friendlier as he points out the postcard-pretty view from his boat of the windmills and the salt pans for which the western coast of Sicily is famous; he shows me where to sit for shelter from the brisk wind. The ride isn’t long—about ten, maybe fifteen minutes. The water is so shallow and still that we could probably swim if we had to. And the boatman is very clear about the fact that he’ll be back to pick us up in two hours. Still, as he lets us off at the dock that serves as the island’s small harbor, I feel a sharp, irrational stab of panic and abandonment.
Fortunately, my anxiety dissipates as we head toward the museum up the walkway, lined on both sides with plants sending up shoots topped with giant scarlet flowers. Stopping in the tidy villa-museum to orient ourselves, and to reassure ourselves that there is indeed another living human on the island, I find myself grinning with loony gratitude at the young man who takes our money and gives us tickets.
He suggests that we tour the museum before we explore the island, and as we walk into the first of the few small rooms that compose the Museo Whitaker, we stop short in front of the “Ephebus of Mozia,” the fifth-century B.C. statue so arresting and shockingly beautiful that it occurs to me that, two hours from now, the ferry could return and find us still standing here, staring at the sculpture.
The marble statue of the young man, the ephebus, was discovered in the northern part of the island, near the temple area. It had been buried, lying on its back, covered with stones—hidden, it is thought, during the ghastly siege of Dionysius, in the hopes that someone would remember to dig it up after the war was over. But no one was left, or anyway no one who knew or remembered, and the “Young Man of Mozia” remained in his untimely grave until the late nineteenth century, when he was exhumed, first his torso, and then, years later, his head.
For weeks, we have been looking at Greek statuary. In fact it’s often seemed as if Sicily has as many archaeological museums as it has orange groves, that every small town has its own brown (denoting a cultural attraction) sign featuring the logo of a temple and an arrow pointing to the local repository of coins and pottery sherds. What’s surprising is how many of these modest, unpromising museums contain a minor masterpiece. Less surprisingly, the larger and richer institutions are fascinating. To browse among their collections of vases figured with masked actors, flute players, dancing girls, centaurs and satyrs, maenads and Amazons is the closest we can hope to come to watching an animated film of the daily existence and imaginative lives of the Greek colonists in Sicily. Always, there are funerary artifacts—a basket of figs carved from stone to insure that the dead would eat well in their afterlife—and sculptures of young men with exquisitely rendered musculature and shapely bodies
In Syracuse’s Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi is a magnificent headless kouros—a statue of a nude young man; in the archaeological museum at Agrigento is the celebrated “Ephebus of Agrigento,” the figure of a young male athlete believed to have been a star of the Olympic Games. But compared to the “Young Man of Mozia,” those other pieces now seem lifeless, abstract, devoid of personality and spirit. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the “Young Man of Mozia” and the “Ephebus of Agrigento” could have been sculpted in the same century.
There is nothing anywhere like the “Young Man of Mozia.” For not until Michelangelo would a sculptor again prove able to breathe so much life into marble, to make stone so exactly mimic flesh, and to celebrate the sensuality of the young male body with such control and such impassioned admiration. The “Ephebus of Mozia” is at once fully male and completely androgynous, like some representative of an earlier, mythic race—before humans were divided into males and females. Clothed in a tight-fitting tunic that closely follows the lines of his thighs and buttocks, his head turned to one side, his features caught in an expression partway between strength and submission, his hand resting lightly on his outthrust hip, the “Young Man” is so frankly sensual, the effect of the work is so unmistakably erotic that I’m glad there’s no one else in the museum, no other tourists on the island. It would be…embarrassing to look at the statue with strangers around; it’s something you want to do in private.
At last, we manage to free ourselves from the statue’s spell and head out across the island, along the sandy pathways lined with scrub pines and dwarf palms, the dirt tracks through the vineyards, the fields of poppies and wildflowers that cover much of the flat, open land. We pass the remains of a black-and-white mosaic floor, the so-called domestic quarters, the sacred and “industrial areas” where the Phoenicians tanned leather, dyed textiles, and baked pottery. And finally we reach the necropolis, a collection of tombs—the horrifyingly miniature sarcophagi that were used to bury the children killed in the Phoenician religious rituals and later (when the custom of infant sacrifice was no longer practiced) the small animals that were substituted as sacrificial victims.
Seagulls shriek overhead and dive toward the white beach. We can hear and smell and see the steely ocean. The grape arbors and wildflowers surround us. The prettiness of the scenery contrasts so sharply with the loneliness, the melancholy, and the sheer creepiness of the necropolis that I begin to shiver in the warm morning sun. And, once more, I find myself praying that the boatman will remember we’re out here.
Mozia
Which, of course, he does. At precisely the appointed time, we watch his neat white boat putter up the dock. On the way back to the mainland—a trip that, naturally, seems even shorter than the voyage out—he stops to pick up a friend from another boat, who’s been fixing his nets and baiting traps. Then our boatman turns to me and asks where we’re from. When I tell him we live in New York, he asks (as so many Sicilians do) about the twin towers and (like so many Sicilians) expresses his sympathy and his conviction that life must go on. He tells me that his son lives in the United States, he’s opened five restaurants in Boston and is about to start one in Miami. After a while, I think to ask him what kind of wine is made from the grapes on the island.
Marsala, he says. Always. They still make Marsala.
The next day, in Sciacca, we go into a fancy wine store to buy a bottle of Marsala. We ask the proprietor what’s the best, the driest…and he tells us: This is dry, this is good, the best. But maybe he misunderstood us, or maybe we got something wrong, because in fact it’s not very good. It’s too sweet, cloying, with a harsh after-bite. We think: This can’t be right. It can’t be the wine from Mozia. We’d expected something more, something special and sublime—something finer to have grown up from the bones and dust of the dead Phoenicians.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Conversation
Probably, to be honest, the main reason why I want to be reborn as an Italian in general and a Sicilian man in particular has to do with my envy of a certain kind of conversation. The exchange takes place in a restaurant, it unfolds in its own time, it has an unhurried ritualistic quality, it transpires between the waiter or the restaurant owner and the customer, it begins with the words che consiglia, what do you suggest, or, more coloquially, consigliamo, advise us. Then the conversation starts, the slow, pleasurable recital of the possibilities, the choices to be selected from the day’s menu, the antipasti, the primi and secondi,
the contorni, the consideration and discussion, the back and forth: What’s best, what’s freshest, what’s just come in from the market, the sea, the farm, the woods, how it is prepared, the ingredients, the seasonings—it’s almost as if the meal is being eaten before it is even ordered.
In theory, I could have that conversation. I know enough Italian and, as it happens, my vocabulary is particularly strong on words having to do with food, the kitchen, the menu. There is probable nothing, or very little, I couldn’t understand, none of those slow pleasurable decisions I wouldn’t feel qualified to make. And yet I never have it. I look at the menu, I decide, I order, the food comes. We eat.
In fact, I’ve had something approaching the conversation a few times during our stay in Sicily. In a trattoria in Syracuse, I asked the waiter about the specialties of the house, and what he replied seemed so improbable—fusilli with tiny shrimp and fresh pumpkin—that I ordered it partly to see if he’d said what I thought he’d said. He had, and the dish was improbable—and delicious. In an osteria, also in Syracuse, but one which specializes in the inland cooking of Ragusa, the owner recited the list of what was available (there was no printed menu), then went through it again and again. Each time the list grew shorter, and I knew he was editing as he went along, making the selections for us, based on something he was gathering from our responses, or perhaps he was just telling us what he liked best: an antipasti plate composed of slices of different sorts of tortas—little pies baked with ricotta and vegetables—followed by a risotto with squash blossoms and cream, and tagliatelle with homemade sausage and ricotta.
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