Sicilian Odyssey

by Francine Prose

  In the weeks before Easter, the Chiesa del Purgatorio, where the Misteri are kept, stays open long hours. The church smells of flowers—baskets of bright blooms surround each of the Misteri, whose bases are already covered in skirts of purplec satin—and of varnish. A member of the fishmongers guild is stretched out, much as he would be if he were fixing a car, beneath “The Denial”; above the fishmonger repairing and retouching the base of the statue, Peter is caught forever in the act of denying Christ, while Jesus’ face expresses only the sweetest and most untroubled comprehension and forgiveness.

  The statues are so detailed, so realistic, so moving—and, finally, so intense—that the cumulative effect is much like that of any of the great masterpieces of Christian art; that is, they succeed in making the story of Christ’s life and death new; it’s as if you never heard it before, as if you were experiencing it for the very first time. Each of the groupings succeeds in reimagining the episode it represents and, even as it emphasizes Christ’s divinity, confronts you with the tragedy that marks the violent end of any human life.

  You feel the immensity of the distance that Jesus travels, the gravity of the suffering that changes the innocent young man taking leave of his mother and St. John in “The Separation” into the hunched, agonized victim of “The Flagellation.” Even the minor players in the drama have character and personality. Their helmets decorated with bright feathery plumes, the Romans jamming the crown of thorns on Christ’s head look pleased with the results of their efforts. As Christ has his moment of sorrow and doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane, his three companions slumber soundly, unaware of the significant event transpiring just above them. As you move from the scenes preceding the Crucifixion to the Deposition from the Cross, you can watch the color of Christ’s flesh change from pink to gray; it’s almost as if you’re watching a living being at the very moment of crossing the border between life and death.

  In front of each statue, a placard explains the meaning of each scene, gives a brief history of the sculpture (several were heavily damaged in the bombing of Trapani during World War II and have since been restored, one was dropped by its bearers), and identifies the guild responsible for its upkeep and for carrying it in the procession. Yet another sign explains that the bearers of the Misteri will be hooded and will move to the music of funeral marches, in a traditional pattern: Step forward, step backward, side step—presumably designed to evoke the stumbling of Jesus beneath the weight of the Cross.

  “On Good Friday,” the explanation continues, “when the procession passes through the narrow streets of the old center at night, all the atmosphere of gaiety and amusement vanishes, and their place is taken by a profound sense of faith and the truth, and the old city comes to life.”

  Easter is still weeks away, but the intensity has already begun to build. A small boy enters the church; his father takes his hand and leads him over to their friend, the fishmonger who is working on “The Denial.” The man comes out from under the statue. The two friends chat, the little boy watches them, moving even closer to his father, looking up, straining to hear, because—though there’s almost no one in the church, no service is in progress—the men are talking in whispers.

  In Sciacca, all the hotels are undergoing restoration or closed for the winter season. The only one that’s open, a short distance out of town, is a gated complex with several buildings, manicured lawns, paths, palm trees…it looks like a cross between a Club Med and a luxury spa you might find in Palm Springs or Tucson. Actually, it is a spa, but it’s not exactly luxurious. Busloads of working-class Italians, most of them old, some of them infirm, have come to take the sulfur waters that bubble up from underground springs. (Not too far away is Monte Kronio, where Daedalus is said to have found a way to turn the steamy vapors emanating from the earth into a primitive hydroelectric plant.) For some reason, we’re slow to figure out why the hotel smells like rotten eggs, why we’re the youngest guests by decades and the only ones not walking around in bathrobes.

  No matter. Despite the smell, which mercifully diminishes as you move away from the treatment facilities on the ground floor, the place is comfortable enough, and the elderly Italians are good company—raucous, happy to be retired or on vacation, curious about how we got there and what we’re doing.

  One morning, I hear a group of them saying that they’re planning an expedition to some place called Il Castello Incantato—The Enchanted Castle. It’s a kind of folk art monument, one of those proto-environmental sculptures that reflects the urgency with which the desire to create can enter into a farmer in Georgia, an immigrant in Los Angeles, a mailman in rural France. In this case, the Enchanted Castle is the work of one Filippo Bentivegna, better known as “Filippu di li testi,” Philip of the heads, after the hundreds, maybe thousands, of heads that he carved and painted, and with which he covered his small farm on the outskirts of Sciacca.

  Like that of many outsider artists, Filippo’s creativity was unleashed by a brush with heartbreak, humiliation, and failure. The son of a large, impecunious family, he enlisted in the navy and later emigrated to America in search of the work that he was unable to find in Sciacca. I’ll let the charming brochure available at the site tell the next part of the story:

  “In America he was ill at case (sic) with those racist people and he was immediately marginalized. During this period he fell in love with an American girl and in consequence of this, he was violently knocked over by his love rival. He was very shocked by this episode and his nature deeply changed.”

  He returned home and, with the modest savings he’d accumulated in America, bought a farm on which he began to carve stones and trees into heads, some of which resembled people he knew. He created a magical kingdom and became its ruler; on his forays into town, he expressed his wish to be known as “His Excellency.” Eventually, he fell ill and was obliged to move into Sciacca, but he kept his farm, which he visited and tended until his death in 1967.

  Though we drove and they walked, the old folks from the hotel have beaten us to the Enchanted Castle. They’re already strolling along its brick paths and marveling at the rows of carved heads lined up along the top of low walls, hiding in the crevices of tree trunks, buried deep inside carved grottoes, grouped along the embankments, peering at you (their faces at once full of character and curiously unexpressive) from every inch of the property.

  It’s art done for the pure love of art, out of the pure need to create, and without any expectation of money, fame, career. Humorous, grotesque, weirdly thrilling, Filippu di li testi’s work goes well beyond the merely intense and crosses into the territory of the obsessive. And again, it demonstrates that Sicilian determination to make something memorable and enduring out of the experience of violence and loss.

  At the Enchanted Castle, Sciacca

  In the middle of the farm—which now, thanks to the work of the Bentivegna Foundation and perhaps also to the proceeds from selling some of the heads to various outsider-art museums, including Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, seems more like a park—is the cottage in which the artist lived. Its walls are painted with a mural of a cityscape featuring tall buildings, skyscrapers, churches, and apartment houses. In the moat that surrounds this imaginary city swim fish that, following some Darwinian imperative, appear to have consumed entire bellyfuls of smaller fish.

  I can’t stop looking. The elderly hotel guests pop in and out of the cottage, exclaiming over the naive, whimsical, heartfelt rendering of a memory of New York, a city which the artist so clearly loved and which—like the nameless American girl—rejected and refused to embrace him. It takes me a minute to figure out why I find the image so upsetting: It’s as if I’m seeing a vision of my future, of my real life, of what awaits me when I wake from this idyll, this Sicilian dream world, and reenter the chaotic, problematic, troubled city in which I actually live.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Departures

  Goethe hated Messina, at least at first. He complained bitterly about the �
�accursed” city that had been leveled by an earthquake four years before his visit and blamed its total devastation on shoddy construction; wishing their homes to resemble the palazzi of the rich, people had concealed their old houses behind grand, new facades that collapsed—bringing the entire structures down with them—during the quake. “Messina,” he wrote, “is a very disagreeable sight and reminded me of that primitive age when Sicels and Siculians quitted this unquiet soil to settle on the west coast of the island.”

  In the centuries that followed Goethe’s Italian journey, Messina’s luck got, if possible, even worse. A cholera epidemic devastated the population in 1854. Forty years later, there was another earthquake and, in 1908, yet another, which killed 84,000 people. More recently, in 1943, the city was firebombed by the Allies, reversing, in just a few hours, the city’s long and tortuous efforts to rebuild itself.

  Though Messina is often a traveler’s first experience of Sicily—trains and regular ferries connect it to the mainland—few would claim it as their favorite spot on the island. Little remains of the old town except for a few houses that have survived in the gaps between characterless modern buildings. The mazelike streets of the medieval town have been replaced by a grid of wide avenues that seems to encourage the most reckless and suicidal aspects of Sicilian driving technique. It’s been said that parts of Trapani, also bombed during the war, resemble a de Chirico painting, but in fact it’s Messina that seems most truly surreal.

  A few days before we’re scheduled to fly from Catania to Rome, we drive up to Messina to see the Caravaggios in the Museo Regionale. We decide to arrive on a Sunday, when the city will be quiet, easier to navigate. And though that’s certainly true—the traffic is relatively civilized and relaxed—we realize at once that we’ve made a mistake. Of all the cities that we’ve seen go dormant or dead on Sundays, Messina is the most desolate. Everything is shut, the streets have a spooky, slightly dangerous feel—as if it were the middle of the night instead of a sunny Sunday morning. Our hotel insists on taking a credit card imprint before they’ll let us check in; it’s the only place where this has happened in Sicily. Our room is comfortable, but slightly forlorn, as if it’s absorbed the collective loneliness of too many traveling businessmen.

  And the Caravaggios turn out to be a major disappointment. The museum is airy and well designed, but the Caravaggios could hardly be more infelicitously displayed. The space is cramped, the lighting poor, the restoration peculiar. The composition of “The Raising of Lazarus” is much like that of “The Burial of St. Lucy”—here, too, the figures are pressed into the bottom section of painting, beneath a simultaneously soaring and oppressive expanse of darkness—but the effect that the work produces (at least in its present surroundings) is nowhere near as powerful. Puzzled, we look at it for awhile, then move on to contemplate “The Adoration of the Shepherds.” And then we just stand there, as if we’re waiting for something to change, for the light to come up, for the partitions to move back, for the restorers’ handiwork to undo itself. Of course, none of that happens, and we leave the museum, vaguely depressed.

  But why should we have expected anything else? Though he was generously paid for “The Adoration,” Caravaggio had a tough time in Messina. While he worked on “The Raising of Lazarus,” he insisted that he be given as a studio a room in the local hospital and a fresh corpse to serve as a model for the dead Lazarus. It was here that he assaulted his living models, local workmen, when they complained about the cadaver’s smell. It was also in Messina that he slashed his first version of the painting after it was criticized by some prominent citizens, provincials who were merely overeager to have an opinion, to seem au courant and informed. And it was here—according to Francesco Susinno’s 1724 Lives of the Messinese Painters—that, on holy days, Caravaggio would follow a teacher named Don Carlo Pepe to watch Don Carlo’s male students at play in the city arsenal, observing them with such transfixed attention that the teacher became suspicious enough to inquire what, precisely, the painter thought he was doing. Insulted, Caravaggio struck Don Carlo on the head and wounded him—and was consequently obliged to leave Messina. “In short,” concludes Susinno, “wherever he went he would leave the mark of his madness.”

  After our trip to the museum, we have lunch in the only open restaurant we can find. I spend the rest of the afternoon in our hotel room, rereading guidebooks to see if there’s anything we might be missing, something in Messina that might be open, or worth doing, on a chilly, drizzly Sunday. There isn’t. And the banks of fog that keep rolling in discourage us from driving up to catch the scenic view of the city from the Via Panoramica.

  On Monday morning, we’re glad to leave, to head back down the coast to warm, sunny Acireale, where we’ll stay until our flight to Rome. But soon it turns out that perhaps we should have taken a lesson from Goethe, whose opinion of Messina was reversed when he met the city’s governor and the German consul, with whom he had such an agreeable time that he wished he had ignored his unfavorable first impression of Messina and decided to stay longer.

  One afternoon—in fact the afternoon before we’re scheduled to leave Sicily—I’m watching CNN in our hotel room in Acireale. They’re featuring a disturbing report from the Afghan war, a press conference in which government officials announce the deaths of several American servicemen, as well as Afghan soldiers and civilians, and describe the powerful new weapons being used to blow up the enemy fighters still hiding in caves. Meanwhile, beneath the image of the military commander and the press secretary, the “crawl” bannering across the screen announces that, in the Sicilian city of Messina, a bronze statue of Padre Pio is reported to have begun weeping tears of blood.

  Messina! We were just there! We left too early, just as Goethe left too early, just as we’re leaving Sicily entirely too early! Why are we going to Rome when we should be driving back up north to witness a miracle?

  All over Sicily—by the cash registers in tobacco stores, under the blaring televisions in family trattorie, on the dashboards of taxis and buses—we’ve seen images of Padre Pio, the simple farmer’s son from southern Italy who became a Capuchin monk and, in 1918, first exhibited the stigmata, the five wounds of Jesus, on his frail body. After performing many miracles and healings and becoming the center of a large, devoted following, Padre Pio died in 1968. Fifteen years after his death, the beatification process began; in 1999, he was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II.

  And now, in the late winter of 2002, his statue has begun to weep. The tears have been sent to police laboratories for analysis, but the masses of people arriving daily at the site of the miracle aren’t waiting for the results, nor is the girl who reported touching the foot of the statue and feeling a great heat, nor is the wheelchair-bound woman in Sant’ Agata di Militello, who, it is said, has been cured of multiple sclerosis.

  In fact, we can’t stay any longer, we can’t return to Messina. We have obligations, commitments, we have to get on to Rome. And yet the reports from Messina make me feel suddenly, unreasonably happy—not merely consoled, but optimistic. Perhaps what cheers me so much is the fact that, at lunch this afternoon in the port of Aci Trezza, I listened to a group of sleek Catanians discuss some computer-related business opportunity in language so technical I could hardly understand a word. And then, after my fritto misto, my tiramisù, and coffee, I have come back to my hotel room to read the news from Messina: A statue of Padre Pio is weeping even as the technocrats are buying and selling their state-of-the-art electronics.

  It all seems exquisitely Sicilian: the seamlessness and grace with which the present layers itself over past, with which the ancient coincides with the modern, with which the stigmatist coexists with the scientist. The news about Padre Pio does not erase or obliterate or lie about the dispatches from the war in Asia. But it does makes you wonder what, exactly, is causing the saint to weep—to shed tears in a country, on an island that has seen countless cycles of violence and peace, of poverty and prosperity, of horror and beauty
.

  Perhaps I should end where I began, with Odysseus’s accidental, adventurous, and ultimately pleasurable sojourn in Sicily. After Nausicaa saved the half-drowned sailor and brought him to her father’s court, after Odysseus enthralled the Phaeacians with the stories of his exploits—his escape from the Cyclops and from Circe’s island, his journey to the underworld, his voyage past the Sirens and though the Straits of Scylla and Charybdis—King Alcinous announced that he was sending his honored guest off with a boatload of treasure: beaten gold and bronze, food and wine, clothing, rugs and sheets to sleep on. And so, after all his perils, after the twenty years of wandering, Odysseus—with his memories of the Island of the Sun, with his hard-won wisdom, his hard and glorious experience, his precious and priceless gifts—at long last set sail for home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gifts

  What, then, have I brought home with me? The gifts range from modest to large. A kitschy scrolled painting on velvet that features the word ‘Sicilia’ in glittery letters surrounded by representations of the cathedrals of Palermo and Monreale, a peasant cart, a palm tree, the ruins at Agrigento. A tinted vintage postcard of the smoldering cone of Mount Etna. Recipes, some new ideas about food; the inspiration and the will to keep searching for a fish store in which they will slice the swordfish thin enough for pesce spada alla palermitana.

  And then there are the intangibles. Not long after my return, I was talking on the phone with a friend about the world situation, which, of course, had gotten no less perilous and alarming in the time since I’d left for Italy. We were discussing the folly and absolute necessity of conducting business as usual in the face of uncertainty and fear. On the surface, we focused on my friend’s pressing need to call the exterminator (water bugs!) even though she was nearly paralyzed with worry about the conflict in the Middle East, and between India and Pakistan. Beneath the surface, we were really discussing the folly and absolute necessity of continuing to write (my friend is also a writer) and of trying to make art despite our concerns about the continuing survival of the planet and of civilization.