All over the island, it’s easy to find evidence of the nobility’s predilection for, indeed their insistence on, surrounding themselves with beauty, a desire that often manifested as a febrile enthusiasm for collecting. In small towns and large cities are house-museums that attest to this or that baron’s taste, this or that prince’s eye for kitschy figurines, or ancient coins, or (more rarely) great art. The Casa Museo di Antonino Uccello in Palazzolo Acreide possesses one of the island’s foremost collections of traditional and folk art—tastefully chosen and aesthetically displayed objects that include kitchen and farming equipment, cheese molds and infant cradles, dolls and stage sets for the puppet theater, votive objects, charms against the evil eye, reverse paintings on glass, and hand-tinted photographs of long-dead men and women.
Sciacca’s Palazzo Scaglione contains ceramics, bronze statuettes, an eighteenth-century crucifix carved from ivory and mother-of-pearl, and a huge selection of paintings by anonymous Sicilian artists, arrayed in yet another palace furnished with divans whose stuffing is beginning to poke through the figured upholstery, yet another grand piano on which framed photos of the house’s former inhabitants stare gloomily at the passing strangers who represent the diminished state to which their glory has been reduced. When I ask the guard at the Palazzo Scaglione about the museum’s founder, he replies that he was some kind a rich landowner, some sort of baron—an answer which provokes a long and heated discussion with the woman washing the tile floors, about what rank of the nobility, precisely, Francesco Scaglione held.
In Cefalù’s Museo Mandralisca, an institution founded by a nineteenth-century aristocrat, the Baron Enrico Piraino di Mandralisca, are a series of family portraits that could serve as illustrations for Lampedusa’s novel, a collection of Greek and Roman coins, the splendid fourth-century B.C. vase depicting the tuna salesman that so resembles the fishmongers at Catania, and (as a sort of grand finale) a roomful of taxidermy that looks decidedly the worse for wear, sadly unimproved by the decades that have passed since the baron acquired these hapless stuffed creatures. There is also a group of partially restored baroque paintings; little squares of canvas have been cleaned, while other areas have been sectioned off and marked for restoration but left uncompleted. I’ve never seen anything like it in a museum before, and when I ask a young curator about it, she shrugs resignedly—what can you do?—and says, “The money ran out.”
In considerably better shape is Antonello da Messina’s “Portrait of an Unknown Man,” a work that—like his more famous “Annunciation” in Palermo’s Galleria Regionale di Sicilia—displays the ways in which he combined the lapidary pictorial techniques of the Flemish painters (Vasari claimed, probably erroneously, that da Messina studied with van Eyck) with the sensibility and the sensitivity of Italian Renaissance portraiture to create works whose magnificence comes partly from the paradox they present: How could something so painstakingly, so exquisitely crafted—how could a painting that must have taken so much time—nonetheless capture an expression that seems so fleeting, so personal, so revealing and mysterious?
Something about the interface between great art and funky taxidermy, between having the money and power to acquire a portrait by da Messina and using that fortune to endow a museum that would eventually lack the funds to finish restoring its own collection, suggests a vision of the nobility much like the one we get from Lampedusa. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly at all, it’s also similar to the atmosphere that suffuses Gli Ultimi Gattopardi (The Last Leopards), a book of photographs of contemporary Sicilian aristocrats by Shobha, a photojournalist based in Palermo, and the daughter of the great Sicilian anti-Mafia photographer, Letizia Battaglia.
What’s most immediately striking about Shobha’s subjects is their theatricality. Nearly every one of the men, women, and children she portrays is acutely aware of—and actively performing for—the camera. Many seem to be playing roles borrowed from the ennui-and-angst-ridden early films of Antonioni, and to be using their wealth, their physicality, and their sexuality as raw material for some ironic, self-mocking private drama. So few of the pictures capture people doing what you imagine they’d be doing without the photographer present that it becomes hard to imagine what they would be doing alone, unobserved, in a room.
In one image, a young woman points a rifle at the ceiling while a man monitors her watchfully and an older man stares at the camera, as if checking for its reaction. A woman poses in a bubble bath, wearing only a bracelet and a wristwatch, smoking a cigarette and talking on her cell phone, while the mirror beside her delivers the reverse image of her studied faux-relaxation. Three women surround a swimming pool; grandma lounges nonchalantly on the deck, her middle-aged daughter stands tensely, braced against the base of the diving board, while her daughter, naked but for a thong, dives into the water, her arms and legs spread, grinning at the viewer. Details of dress and gesture—a ring, a fur collar, an evening gown—seem calculated and selected entirely for effect, chosen to telegraph their wearer’s simultaneously larger-than-life and anxious personality.
A warm, vibrant woman in her forties, with an electric energy so intense that even her thick blond hair seems independently animated, Shobha—who has written about the connection between the church and the Mafia and who has reported for European magazines and newspapers from as far afield as Cuba, Eastern Europe, Central America, and the United States—lives with her boyfriend, Paolo Falcone, in a light-filled, rambling apartment not far from the Piazza San Domenico. Their place is crammed with art books (Paolo is the founder and curator of the Micromuseum, an alternative exhibition space for artists), plants, computer equipment, African drums (at university, Shobha studied to be a musician), statues of the Buddha, small shrines, votive candles, bright shawls, and curios brought back from Shobha’s many visits to India, where she converted to Hinduism more than twenty years ago.
“I never tell the people I photograph what to do,” she tells me, “where to stand, how to act. It took a while for the people you see in the book to trust me. But after awhile they did. And as soon as I’d arrive, they’d say, ‘Oh, let’s do this, let’s do that.’ The most dramatic shots were always their idea. They were always performing, acting, but that’s what they do. So much of their lives is theater.” She laughs. “It’s almost like their jobs.”
One of the more flattering photos in the book is of a handsome young couple; the man sits at a table, holding a glass of red wine, while his barefoot wife, tanned and sinewy in a perfect little black dress, walks confidently across a tile floor with a wine glass of her own. They are, Paolo and Shobha explain, Alessio and Francesca Planeta, who have turned their ancestral estate near Sciacca into a thriving vineyard that produces some of Sicily’s best wine.
Later, at lunch at a restaurant not far from their apartment, Paolo orders a bottle of Planeta’s La Segreta; it’s not even Planeta’s best or costliest vintage, he tells us, it’s their middle-level white. Even so, it’s terrific—dry, complicated, delicious. And with every mouthful it becomes clearer that the history of the Sicilian aristocracy is not merely one of steady decline, of defensiveness, boredom, decadence, and conservatism. If the desire, the talent, and the inspiration are there, they can write a great novel, found a great restaurant, acquire a great painting—and even make a fabulous bottle of white wine.
CHAPTER TEN
Palermo
Walking through the streets of Palermo with Letizia Battaglia, I’ve temporarily stopped worrying that I’m missing something important, that I’m only seeing the surface, the deceptively obvious. And in fact the city she’s showing me is more layered and complicated than what we’ve seen during our last few days here—that is, before we arranged to meet and walk around with Letizia, whose photographs I have long admired, and whose show I saw last fall at a gallery in Manhattan.
In the days since we’ve arrived, we’ve visited all the art sites and tourist spots, seen the mosaics at the Palatine Chapel and La Martorana, the tombs of the Norman kings at t
he monumental cathedral, admired the baroque exuberance of the Chiesa del Gesù, made a sort of Serpotta pilgrimage to the churches and oratories that the sculptor encrusted with plump naked cherubs and dense depictions of biblical and historical scenes. We’ve heard the hubbub of the city (Palermo is very noisy, even by Italian-city standards) muted the minute we entered the cloister of San Giovanni degli Eremiti, a garden that makes you feel as if you’ve been magically transported across the Mediterranean to North Africa, or westward to southern Spain.
Church facade, Palermo
We’ve been to the archaeological museum with its huge collection of artifacts from western Sicily; in fact it’s my favorite sort of museum: old-fashioned, musty, nothing user-friendly or interactive, the exhibits labeled and identified by little cards lettered in spidery, faded handwriting. We’ve walked through the markets and up the avenues, strolled the fashionable shopping district to the north of town, and gotten lost in the twisted lanes and cul-de-sacs of the medieval quarters.
Most enjoyably, we’ve spent a morning in the Orto Botanico, strolling along the wide avenues lined with palms, peering into the elaborate greenhouses, circling the pond, examining the exotic species of cactus that have been lovingly tended and preserved, marveling over the gargantuan, serpentine banyan trees and the dense groves of bamboo. Goethe called the Botanic Garden “the most wonderful spot on earth,” and it was there that he was inspired to begin rereading The Odyssey and to write the first draft of a play about Nausicaa. In the centuries since Goethe’s visit, the gardens became increasingly neglected and desolate. And it’s partly Letizia Battaglia’s work as a community activist that helped revive the Botanic Garden after its decline, during the 1970s, into a squalid, refuse-strewn, overgrown haven for neighborhood drunks and junkies.
In fact, the city seems in every way less sinister and menacing than it did in 1992, when we first visited—though perhaps what we’re feeling has something to do with our own relief at not having to spend every waking minute rescuing our kids from the lethal onrush of traffic. But it’s not just us. Palermo itself seems changed. It’s claimed that the narcotics trade has declined since its peak in the early ’90s, though, while we’re here, the local paper carries a story about a drug stash discovered inside a statue of the Madonna.
In any case, Palermo seems to be doing its best to make us feel that we have somehow managed to be in the right place at the right moment. We arrive at La Martorana just in time to see the women getting their grocery bags blessed by the priest. As we walk into the twelfth-century chapel of San Cataldo, a group of young French seminary students touring Sicily are so moved by the church’s austere beauty that they burst into song, a Renaissance liturgical hymn they chant in perfect four-part harmony. As we enter the Church of Santa Maria della Pietà, in the Kalsa district, a young man has just begun to practice, on the harpsichord, a transcribed version of Bach’s double violin concerto. Most of the time, these days, the Oratorio di San Domenico is kept closed, but as we approach, a young art restorer is unlocking the door in order to show the place to a young woman he is clearly hoping to impress—and he cheerfully lets us in.
It’s also possible that the difference we feel this time has something to do with the fact that we’re not exactly going out of our way to seek out the city’s dark side. We’ve decided not to return to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, where the dead of Palermo, some of whom have been in these underground passages since the end of the sixteenth century, are arranged by age and profession; many of them still sport the military uniforms, the ruffled caps, the fancy coats and dresses they wore to their graves. One especially ghoulish corpse is nicknamed the “Sleeping Beauty,” a small girl so perfectly preserved by some forgotten, occult embalming technique that, it’s said, she doesn’t look as if she’s dead, but merely sleeping. Or so they say. Frankly, it seemed to me she looked quite dead.
Artist, Palermo
Last time, we went early in the morning. No one was around. As soon as we descended the first few steps that led down into the catacombs, the heavy door slammed shut behind us, plunging us into near total darkness. I was designated to find the light or get help, and as I groped my way back toward the door, I saw, in a small cell off the corridor, a dour, forbidding monk, sitting motionless and silent, his hand outstretched for the offering that persuaded him to switch on the lights. Eventually, the spookiness was ameliorated by the gang of giggly high school kids who used the catacombs as a hangout in which to flirt and grab a last minute smoke before school started.
All in all, the experience had been formidably creepy. Once was definitely enough, and besides…maybe it’s the fact that I’m older, or maybe it has something to do with the horrors of recent history, but death no longer seems like an abstraction that we can admire from a distance—to be precise, the distance between the dead and the living—as we contemplate what death has done to the citizens of Palermo, men and women and children who had once lived and breathed, just like us.
A compact, energetic, smoky-voiced woman who, in her youth, must have been even more of a beauty than she is now, Letizia Battaglia meets us in our hotel lobby, plunks herself down on a couch…allora. Lighting a cigarette, she tells us that we should be talking to other people—that is, to other people besides herself, people who could give us a more positive, hopeful view of what’s happening in Sicily and, for that matter, throughout the rest of Italy. Surely, there must be someone who could put a more optimistic spin on the current right-wing government, on what Letizia sees and laments as the new culture of greed, corruption, and rampant speculation that has essentially replaced the old culture of Mafia violence that she has devoted much of her life to fighting.
“I have no longer much hope,” she says. “People are tired of fighting, we’ve lost the hope that we can win. In a way, it was easier to fight against the old violence—the murders, the assassinations—than the new violence, which is all about money and banking. The Mafia’s smart, they know they don’t have to kill people…well, not much…anymore. Now it’s all about money. If a new road or a school is being built, it’s not because we really need that road or that school, but because the construction is lining the pockets of the Mafia. The Mafia used to think they had to kill us, but now they know they can just buy us, little by little. The government is still infiltrated by the Mafia, but it’s all become so civilized that it’s much harder to identify and to fight. The biggest Mafioso in the government right now is an extremely cultivated man, a collector of antiquarian books….
“It’s so much harder to have hope, to find that possibility of being free….” She sighs. “I can’t find anything to photograph anymore. I used to go out and take pictures wherever I found poetry, wherever I saw that combination of something old and something new. When I took pictures of young girls, I’d see their dreams…. I was taking pictures of that dream. But now I can’t find that dream. Or the dream’s all about money.”
It’s painful to consider the possibility that Letizia Battaglia might have stopped taking photographs. Because she’s an important artist—no one else has her eye, her vision; no one else is doing what she’s doing. To call her Sicily’s greatest photographer seems inaccurate only in that it seems too limited, too provincial. Her lyrical, unflinching, and hugely sympathetic pictures are universal in their resonance and their significance, and have been published and exhibited all over the world. Wholly original, they nonetheless bring together a number of traditions. Like the pictures of Eastern European Gypsies taken by Josef Koudelka (a friend of Letizia’s and a formative influence on her work) they capture moments that suggest complex narratives and provide glimpses of the histories that their subjects share, of whole worlds of experience and of subtle nuances that fascinate and elude us; like Helen Levitt’s street photographs, they catch city people—and especially the poor—in the act of expressing their tough, irrepressibly human selves; like Weegee’s crime-scene shots, they portray the weirdly frozen tableaux arranged by death and violence, th
ough Letizia’s pictures—unlike Weegee’s—have a gritty, grainy quality suggestive of early Italian neorealist films and of the way that time scratches and pits the walls and buildings of Palermo.
Married young, partly to satisfy her family’s expectations and to escape their restrictive control, Letizia had three daughters, and in her thirties left her husband (“I took nothing from him,” she says proudly) and became a journalist for a Palermo newspaper; later she moved to the mainland to work there as a photographer. On her return to Sicily, she began taking the astute and impassioned shots of her Palermo neighbors that compose her early work, and which (together with her later photos) can been seen in her book, Passion, Justice, Freedom.
The grisly realities of daily life in the 1960s and ’70s were such that (Letizia could hardly help noticing) more and more of her street photos were turning out to be images of bloodied corpses, of men and women assassinated by the mob, and of their grieving families. Perhaps the most remarkable—the most unusual—thing about these pictures is how eloquently they convey great ness for the helplessness and the terrible awkwardness of the dead, profound compassion for the agony of the living, combined with a frank curiosity and an almost incandescent outrage about the waste, the cycle of violence, the pointless loss of human life—the reasons why the dead got that way. Eventually, she acquired a police radio, which enabled her to race to the crime scenes before the bodies had been removed and the dark puddles of blood sponged from the streets.
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