by Matthew Fort
So, properly fortified, it’s into the saddle once more, and off we set, Nicoletta and I.
I arrive in Caltanissetta, a large town almost slap bang in the middle of Sicily, in a state of despair. As I approached the city, I discovered that the notebook covering the last six weeks of travel had fallen from my back pocket somewhere between Canicatti some thirty or so kilometres back, and, well – where? The enormity of the loss is overwhelming, far worse than the earlier one on the ferry to Naples. The chances of recovery are zero. I’ve no one to blame but myself. Once again I’m torn between exasperation at my own incompetence, fury at the Fates, and the wretchedness of loss. I’m in a sombre mood as I set out to wander around neighbourhoods familiar from when I’d last passed through Caltanissetta almost ten years ago.
Almost immediately I come across a scene that would’ve been unimaginable then.The main square, the Corso Umberto, is full of kids playing table tennis, table football, chess, fencing, doing archery, weight lifting and chucking around a rugby ball – yes, a rugby ball, in central Sicily. They’re kick boxing in the Municipio, the town hall, and there’re gymnastics and football shooting practice in a sidestreet.
When I first visited, Caltanissetta was very depressed. Once it’d been the richest and most magnificent city in Central Sicily, built on the wealth of the sulphur mines. They’d long gone, the last mine closing in 1980, and the grand town houses, those monuments to capitalist greed and good taste, were crumbling away. There were no new industries to provide work, and a general air of gloom and despondency hung about the town. The only notable event in Caltanissetta’s recent history had been the trial of Toto Riina, the murderous capo di tutti capi who declared war on the Italian state in 1995.
I don’t know what’s happened recently, but I get the distinct impression that Caltanissetta, if not exactly thriving, is definitely on the up. The market in the Via Consultore Benintende, that I remember with such affection, may be a shadow of its former bustling, thriving self, but perhaps that’s because it’s a Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, many of the town houses have been restored, the streets colonised by some major brands, and people walk around as if life means something rather than just being a burden. More than just a sprinkling of Muslims have obviously made their home here, which seems not inappropriate as the original Arab name of Caltanissetta was Qal’at al Nisa, meaning Fort of the Women. The cycles of history.
I go into one of my favourite buildings in Sicily, the Cathedral of Santa Maria Nova. It’s handsome enough from the outside, if plumed here and there by shrubs growing at random in its upper reaches. But inside it’s an intoxicating whirligig of baroque and rococo, cherubs and cherubims, swirls and twirls, flowers and leaves, mouldings and trompe l’oeil in gold leaf and ice-cream colours – strawberry pink, chocolate brown, fior di latte cream, pistachio green. And there, in a side chapel, is the bust of Johannis Jacono, Bishop of Ragusa and Caltanissetta, his arm flung out, his mouth agape, his mitre as firmly on his head as the helmet of a knight about to go into battle, his chins flowing down over the collar of his vestments, the very embodiment of the Church Militant and the Church Gourmand. He makes me laugh as he did before, remarkable as I’m still grieving the loss of the notebook.
The following morning, having been sunk in gloom for twelve hours, I decide I have to make at least some effort to find the vanished notebook, and I set about retracing my route of the day before. It’s a very, very, very long shot, but I can’t just let it go. So back down the Agrigento–Catania highway I go to Canicattì, about thirty kilometres, and start searching. I scan the sides of roads, gutters, verges as I go by as slowly as I can manage, trying to be philosophical, but in reality my spirits sinking lower and lower. Unlike previous losses, where the search areas had been clearly defined, the notebook with its brown leather cover could be anywhere along kilometres of both highways and by-ways. The probability of being reunited with it is slim to the point of impossible. This doesn’t stop every scrap of litter, every gleam in the roadside scrub producing a surge of hope, and then a relapse to gloom. The verges become a blur. All shreds of optimism fade.
And then, blow me down, bowl me over, unbelievably there it is, lying on the verge beside a very minor road between Canicattì and Serradifalco, forlorn and a little scuffed, but otherwise none the worse for its adventure. At first I can’t trust my senses. It isn’t until I pick it up that I breathe out and say a word of thanks to all the powers that be. What’s that bit in the Bible about the father rejoicing about the son who was lost and is found? I know just how the father felt. It’s enough to suggest that the Age of Miracles is still with us.
Greatly cheered, I make my way to Agira, along some of the dodgiest roads I’ve yet come across. Some great beast appears to have bitten chunks of tarmac out of some. Earth has casually slipped away from underneath others, causing alarming dips and sags in the smooth tarmac. I pass through some countryside so remote and primitive it feels raw and brutal, a throwback to a different time. It’s almost impossible to think of humans in such a space it’s so elemental, and yet everywhere there are the signs of agriculture, sheep and cattle grazing furiously, stubble and tilled earth. As I pass a dark, low barn; a man emerges and watches me with stony-faced suspicion.
Agira is clamped to the top of one of the pinnacles that erupt from time to time from the Sicilian central plain. Around it spreads a vast undulating panorama. John Irving had told me that the local sport of Agira consists of throwing stone pins at stone balls on a hillside. He swore that he’d once seen men in flat caps playing it, around 1980. It seems entirely probable.
Agira was the birthplace of the historian Diodorus Siculus sometime in the first century BC. Not many people remember Diodorus Siculus but he wrote a universal history generally referred to as ‘monumental’, and was the first man to use the Olympic Games to date historical events. This might not seem much in itself, but bearing in mind the stop-start nature of our ability to measure time, it’s not unimportant. The town prospered under the Arabs, and in the thirteenth century the Hohenstaufens rebuilt an earlier Arab/Byzantine castle, the fractured remains of which are silhouetted against the sky as I look up. Since then, Agira seems to have dozed in a gentle agricultural torpor.
My resting place, Case Al Borgo, is on the Via di Gesù, somewhere near the castle. That much I know from studying the map. The road leads up and up and up, and round and round, and up and round and then back on itself, but it doesn’t lead where I need to go. The narrow, cobbled Arab/medieval streets weave in and out of each other with baffling complexity, like a ball of wool. I stop to ask various folk for the Via di Gesù. Men shake their heads. Women purse their lips. No matter how far up I get or how many times I go round, I can’t get any closer. I’m getting desperate. I stop a man who’s getting out of his car.
‘I’m just back from work and need a shower,’ he says. ‘Hang on for half an hour and I’ll lead you there.’ I wait for half an hour, and then, to my surprise and relief, he returns. I follow his car through the streets around and around and up and up again until suddenly we come out at the back of Agira, near the remains of the medieval castle and there’s the Case Al Borgo. My guide checks that there’s someone in reception to look after me before driving off. I’m so overwhelmed I forget to ask his name. It’s a poor reward for such graciousness, kindness, thoughtfulness.
My room is an eyrie perched high above the land across which I’ve just travelled. What appears to be the whole of the central plain of Sicily spreads out like an immense billowing bedspread below me, with Etna to my left, and reaching to Siracusa and the sea beyond a hundred kilometres away. The tinkling of sheep bells rises through the still air, sounding remarkably like the ring of a mobile phone. There’s a curious disjunction between the individual, intimate precision of the bells and the immensity of the landscape.
I eat a fine dinner in a canteen below my room including slices of potent pork in an orange sauce with onions agrodolce and a frittata. It seems an
improbable combination, but it’s oddly effective. Or maybe it’s simply the pleasure of eating meat again after weeks of nothing but fish.
After breakfast the next morning, the cheerful and beautiful Viviana manning reception deserts her post to guide me back down the town to the road to Bronte. Selfless generosity seems a common characteristic of the people of Agira. Without the kindness of Viviana and my nameless guide of the day before, I’d probably be going round and round and up and down still.
Wilson, Flynn, Pointe, Gauthier, Parkhurst, Gates, Bouchard, Sabbut run the names on the headstones, each identical but for the inscription below the name and the occasional Star of David among the crosses. The headstones are drawn up precisely aligned in parade-ground order and set in narrow beds cut in the trimmed green turf. Flowers grow in and around them. There are no weeds.
A Canadian War Cemetery set back from the road between Agira and Bronte, formal, neat, tidy, an orderly memorial in a disorderly landscape, shaded with pines, tranquil and beautiful and utterly quiet but for the sound of the wind in the trees, birdsong and the distant sound of a dog barking. How odd it must have been, for these young men to have come from Alberta, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and fought their way across this extraordinary island. How sad that they died here rather than seeing it as I’m seeing it.
I sign the visitors’ book and head for Bronte.
Waves of eggy, smoky, boiled milk incense – I smell them before I realise what they are – pistachios.
The road that runs along the valley of the Simeto between Adrano and Bronte is hemmed by pistachio groves, the trunks of the trees leaping at random out of black volcanic rubble, gangling and untidy, branches twisting and curling, as if petrified in the middle of some mad dance. Clusters of nuts, pink teardrops, hang among the dusty, holly-green leaves.
I can hear, and occasionally see, groups of men and women among the trees bringing in the harvest. Some of the picking team bash the branches with bits of wood, causing the nut clusters to cascade onto the ground. Family members, friends and hired hands do the back-breaking business of picking them up.
‘It’s hard work,’ says a young man, one of the pickers. ‘But they are the best pistachios in the world.’
‘What makes them so good?’ I ask.
‘The volcanic soil,’ he says. ‘It’s full of minerals. Just enough water. The sun. And our passion for them.’ It’s an explanation I’ve heard before, but it’s probably true. You need to have a certain passion to attend to the gruelling labour of picking up the fallen nuts. Given the nature of the terrain, it’s impossible to envisage a machine capable of doing the same thing.
The nuts are put into sacks and the sacks transferred to a processing area. I say processing area. There may be splendid, hygienic, computer-controlled modern industrial units around Bronte, but the one I watch is outside a small house beside the road. Two women heft the sacks and pour the freshly picked fruits into an ingenious machine that shakes them all about, separating stalks and leaves from the nuts, and getting rid of the husks. The pistachios begin to look like the familiar nuts to which I’m addicted. They’re spread out on the sheets to dry in the sun. For how long will depend on the sun, the heat, the nature of the harvest and the level of moisture in the kernels. They may be shelled and even skinned after that.
‘Can I chat to you about pistachios?’ I ask a woman raking out nuts on sheets in the sun in front of a house. I want to find out how you rate pistachios, what makes one pistachio superior to another, whether there are differences, how much they fetch, and whether this traditional form of harvest is under threat in any way, like the salt farmers at Trapani.
‘No,’ she snaps. ‘I’m working.’ She turns away and begins raking again.
That’s that.
You couldn’t accuse the Brontesi of not making the most of their famous nuts. They put them into absolutely everything – pastries, ice creams, salamis, cheeses. They’re turned into sauces for pasta and used to make a crust on a piece of pork. Nothing, it seems, can’t be dolled up by pistachios whole, pistachios chopped, pistachio crumbs, creamed pistachios. That mild, curiously penetrating, slightly sweet, perfumed flavour is absolutely inescapable.
The town of Bronte is strung out along a long slope. It’s not beautiful, but it is interesting. In 1860 it was the site of one of the most atrocious episodes of Garibaldi’s liberation campaign. Brigandage and civil unrest had afflicted much of the island in the vacuum after the expulsion of the Bourbons and their functionaries. Encouraged by notions of liberty and more equable distribution of land, there had been an uprising among the peasants of Bronte demanding land rights. Garibaldi sent his trusted lieutenant, Nino Bixio, to deal with it, which he did with great severity, summarily shooting several of the leaders. This act of barbarity is still remembered.
Among the estates the peasants demanded should be handed over was that of Maniace, owned by the Bridport family, descendants of the original owner, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, scourge of the French, hero of the nation, and Duke of Bronte. Nelson had been awarded the title, house, estate and vassalage of the peasants living on it, by a grateful King Ferdinand of Bourbon, after the admiral had deployed the power of the British fleet to help restore him to the throne of Sicily and Southern Italy.
I’m not sure that this was Nelson’s or England’s finest hour. Ferdinand was neither a good king nor a nice man. Nelson behaved with unusual brutality to Caracciolo, the leader of the short-lived Parthenopean Republic that had replaced Ferdinand, neither allowing him a fair trial, nor to be shot as requested when he was found guilty. He was hanged by Ferdinand’s minions within twenty-four hours of the verdict. Nelson went on to hang a number of other supporters of the republic.
More to Nelson’s credit was another, less trumpeted, effect on Sicilian history. After the Battle of the Nile in 1798 the admiral ordered up several hogsheads of Marsala, the fortified wine, from his friend, John Woodhouse. This gave the officers and men of the British fleet such a taste for the stuff that Marsala became the tipple of choice of the British upper classes, and fortunes were made by the Princes under the Volcano, as the Marsala dynasties were known, including that of the Florios, whose tuna canning factory on Favignana I had admired so much.
Although he signed himself Nelson Bronte, the admiral never visited his Sicilian retreat, which is about eight kilometres from the town of Bronte itself. It was inherited by Charlotte, a niece, who married Alexander, Viscount Bridport. The Bridport family continued to live there until 1982, when they sold the house and the estate to the commune of Bronte. Astonishingly, the vassalage of the local peasantry remained, a medieval survival, until the agricultural reforms of the 1950s.
Even here the Nelson estate behaved in a thoroughly reprehensible manner, according to Carlo Levi, whose account of peasant life in a remote corner of Calabria, Christ Stopped at Eboli, is a classic of clear-eyed reportage. In an equally remarkable book, Le parole sono pietre (Words are Stones) published in 1955, he recounts how the Nelson estate was forced to sell off a percentage of the land to tenant farmers under the reforms designed, in part, to break up the latifundia, the frequently gigantic estates owned by ex-patriot landlords, and managed by unscrupulous managers under the iniquitous gabelotto system. The Nelson trustees negotiated a high price for their land, sold it as directed, waited for the tenant farmers who had borrowed heavily to buy it to go bankrupt, and then bought it back at knockdown prices.
Over the years, the Bridports turned the property into a curious hybrid. The exterior is that of a handsome Sicilian country villa overlooking a central yard, while the interior is that of an English country house, with outside English lawns divided up by box hedges in the French style. All this has been lovingly restored by the Bronte Council.
The phrase ‘lovingly restored’ is something of a cliché, but it seems apt as I wander through the rooms that look out on the long, rectangular yard in one direction, and over the garden on the other. It might not be Blenheim, which the grateful Br
itish nation gave John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, but I imagine it was a damn sight easier to live in, and whatever the rights and wrongs of the behaviour of the Nelson estate, the commune of Bronte is clearly determined to make the best of the Nelson connection.
Each room is given a distinctly ornate, Sicilian accent by the floor tiles from Caltagirone, but all the furniture, paintings and pictures, glasses, decanters, knick-knacks, bits and bobs are those I’d expect to find in an English country house of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; a bit stuffy, a bit predictable, and very, well, English. There’s a decanter and two glasses that belonged to Nelson. I wonder if he ever drank Marsala out of them. Our excellent guide can’t say. Even the wallpapers are of the period and have the right feel to them. The only tiny detail I can find with which to take issue are the curtains. The materials are correct, but surely they’d have been interlined, rather than simply left as a single layer. The bathrooms are unusually large for the period, too.
It’s like wandering through a vaguely familiar house in which the members of the family have just popped out for a walk or to change for dinner. I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see copies of The Field or Country Life on a table, or a Labrador lying in front of the fire. There’s even Virginia creeper covering most of the courtyard-side wall of the house facing onto the courtyard.
At the other end of the courtyard is what’s left of the Benedictine Abbazia Maniace, a delightful Gothic-Norman church, austere by Sicilian standards, and made beautiful by its proportions and the light streaming through the plain windows. The nave soars upwards on pillars of dark, volcanic stone to a magnificent hammer-beam roof. The side naves are almost equally high. A fine Byzantine icon, purportedly painted by St Luke, hangs on one wall. I haven’t been aware of his artistic talent hitherto. The simplicity and spirituality of the building and the icon are rather at odds with a life-sized statue of an anguished-looking Jesus in questionable taste inside a kind of presentation case of hideous kitsch.