by John Keahey
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Francesca Corrao shines more light into the Sicilian character. In her quiet, cool Rome apartment in Trastevere, a neighborhood sprinkled with Catholic convents, she lays out, through precise words and examples, the uniqueness of Sicilians and why they are a people apart from mainland Italians.
She opens the subject by offering up a seemingly conflicting comment about “the two faces of Sicily.” Sicilians, she says, are very open and, at the same time, are much closed. For centuries, invader after invader swept across the island, first overwhelming and then subsuming cultural identities with their own—a process that stunts any hope of identity building, generation after generation.
“There was not even this feeling we have now of the word ‘identity,’” Corrao says. The peculiarity of being an island is that you cannot run away; you are stuck to the site. [Conversely] the invasions make you rich, in a sense, because you can take the best from the outsiders, but it makes you enclose yourself because you have to struggle to preserve your identity. To do that, you have to be very much attached to your core, and your real core is your heart.
“If you are able to touch this humanity, you become a great person. Otherwise you become aggressive and violent.”
Through these statements by a woman who knew Sciascia most of her life and who was in close collaboration with him in adulthood, the nature of the writer begins to show through. By delving into the character of his people and understanding their history and its impact on the vanquished, generation after generation, he got very much in touch with his heart.
“Because you are surrounded by the water,” Corrao continues, “it deeply and psychologically means that you must talk to your humanity, so no matter who comes and goes, you have nowhere to run away. The moment you are there, you have to look within yourself, and that’s why you’re closed and you’re open. You are closed the moment the invader is coming to deprive, but you are open because when he is here, you have to deal with him, and you do it in order to survive.”
This clearly illustrates why Sicily is unique when compared with mainland Italy—or even other island nations. History shows that while Japan, for example, is an island, the Japanese were able to hold on to their core for centuries because they were never successfully invaded—neither by Genghis Kahn, nor the Chinese, nor the Russians, nor anyone else. That is the difference.
The entrapment of Sicilians and the whipsawing of cultures gradually brought generations to an identity born out of the insecurity that Sciascia described in his writings: arrogance, distrust, pessimism. In many ways, this identity becomes a virtue, and, says Corrao, “this virtue becomes pride, and it becomes attached to our way of being.”
“The people,” she says, “are like the island itself, like our volcano [Etna]. It is so beautiful, the soil is so rich and it produces a wonderful bounty, but it can destroy you in an instant. You always have to find a middle way in these two opposite faces of Sicily. It is so dry and yet it is so full of flowers; so kind and gentle and yet so violent. The greatness of Sciascia is that he says in words what is impossible for me now to explain how these opposites can coexist.
“The violent and sweet; the sweet and sour. You find it all throughout his books.”
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For his part, Sciascia acknowledges that each of his books is a retelling of the same themes, over and over again. In Salt in the Wound, he says that he is “one of those authors who writes one book and then stops…” Then he explains. “All my books taken together form one: a Sicilian book which probes the wounds of the past and present and develops as the history of the continuous defeat of reason and of those who have been personally overcome and annihilated in that defeat.”
His targets are constant throughout his oeuvre: politicians, the Mafia, the church hierarchy, the police. Sometimes he has respect for a particular policeman—the northern Italian Carabinieri officer Captain Bellodi in The Day of the Owl is one—but he showers disdain on most others, along with priests, politicians and, of course, mafiosi.
One excruciatingly hot July afternoon, I met his youngest daughter, Anna Maria Sciascia, at the family home, Noce, outside of Racalmuto. With interpreting help from her daughter-in-law, Anna Maria told me about what she believed was the most personal of his books and stories. It is a novella, his final work, which he wrote while undergoing kidney dialysis in Milan—A Straightforward Tale.
Most of the characters in this story—various police officers, a priest, political figures—are up to no good. There is a professor undergoing kidney dialysis who has insights into what was behind a recent murder. And there is a salesman passing through the area who tells authorities something he saw. He is immediately slapped into jail because, in the mentality of the local police, he is now a suspect—or they want to keep him quiet. When he is eventually released, this salesman on his way out of town inadvertently learns information that tells the readers who the murderers are. But because of what happened to him when he told “authorities” what he saw, he says nothing and leaves.
Sciascia’s attitude toward these various “authorities” is a reflection of his Sicilitudine, as is the salesman’s refusal to get involved after, unjustifiably, being “burned.” The author, in nearly all of his writing, clearly demonstrates the supreme skepticism about all authority, secular and religious, that he and his fellow Sicilians share.
This expression of Sicilitudine, reflected in A Straightforward Tale as well as in Sciascia’s other works, draws from his life in Racalmuto and his tender descriptions of his fellow villagers. In later life, after a career as a teacher, he typically spent winters in Palermo doing research at his apartment there. Then, in the spring and summer, he would retreat to Noce, where he would launch into serious writing based on his winter’s research. After writing in the morning, he would come into the village and spend summer afternoons with his male friends, walking arm in arm in that wonderful Sicilian-Italian way that older men do, their suit or sport jackets flung over their shoulders like capes, their heads tilted toward each other as they quietly speak into each other’s ear.
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My visit to Noce during July 2009 allowed me to meet Anna Maria Sciascia’s family: husband Nino Catalano, their son, Vito, his wife, Anna Kowalska, and their daughter—Leonardo Sciascia’s great-granddaughter—Sofia Catalano.
Noce, the Italian word for walnut or, simply, nut, refers to the contrada, or neighborhood, not just the house. It is a few miles north out of the back entrance to Racalmuto, just off the Agrigento-Caltanissetta highway. A small wooden sign is tacked onto a tree with Noce hand painted in black and an arrow pointing the way.
After a short drive along a narrow, unpaved road, a gate appears on the left, and a tiny lane leads up to the main house between olive and walnut trees that, to the right, nearly hide the outline of an older, shuttered house built toward the end of the nineteenth century. This is where the Sciascia family lived before the present house was built in 1974.
The family is warm and welcoming. Anna Kowalska, a delightful, young Polish woman fluent in Italian and who speaks good English, offers to interpret. With Anna Maria Sciascia, we talk about her father, and it is now that the daughter talks about the final story Leonardo wrote. Three months earlier, her older sister, Laura, had told me that she thought the novel Candido was the story that is more revealing of Sciascia’s life. It tells the story of a young boy, born just as the Americans invaded Sicily in World War II, who is raised by relatives because his parents are not often present. Sciascia, although born in 1921, had been raised by his aunts. His mother was often not available. Laura sees the parallels; so does Anna Maria. But Anna Maria says A Straightforward Tale was written specifically as a denouement to her father’s life’s work—the concluding “chapter.” The two sisters’ choices each fit to a certain degree.
Grandson Vito leads me on a tour of the house, built fifteen years before Sciascia’s untimely 1989 death of kidney failure, and I am most struck by the author’s stud
y on the south side with a great window overlooking a giant, ancient pine tree. Vito tells me that his grandfather’s only instruction to the architect was to position the house so that his study overlooked that tree. Beyond the tree and far beyond the rolling countryside are Agrigento and the sea.
The room, perhaps eight feet by fourteen, is dominated by a large, wooden table holding a single Victorian-style lamp and Sciascia’s manual typewriter. Books are neatly placed on shelves. In a corner is a tall pot full of walking sticks and canes. The walls are covered by etchings, posters, and prints showing various figures, historic and literary. The eighteenth-century republican Count Di Blasi, who figures prominently in Sciascia’s great novel The Council of Egypt, is one of them. Others are of the nineteenth-century French writer Stendhal and the late nineteenth-century Brazilian novelist, poet, playwright, and short-story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.
On a wall to the right of the window are portraits of Sciascia’s three great predecessors: Verga, Pirandello, and Voltaire. Next to the door is that large color photograph of Leonardo himself, perched on the back of a gaily decorated donkey clambering up the steep stone steps of a church in Racalmuto during the Festa della Madonna del Monte.
Vito says that when I go to Palermo to meet his father and tour the inquisitor’s prison, he and Anna will give me a similar tour of Sciascia’s home there. Unoccupied since the death of Sciascia’s wife, Maria Andronico, in January 2009, it is preserved exactly as when the couple lived there.
We meet a few days later, and before heading to the former prison where Vito’s father is waiting to show us around, the couple takes me to the Sciascia home in a residential area on Palermo’s outskirts, just off Via della Libertà. The writer’s study resembles the one at Noce; dozens of etchings and prints nearly covering the walls, a desk with another manual typewriter identical to the one at Noce, and a small desk calendar, the kind with tiny cubes in a tray showing month, day, year. It is set to Nov. 20, 1989—the day Sciascia died. “Grandmother kept it set on that day; she never changed it or moved it,” Vito says.
This apartment is a repository of thousands of books jammed into bulging bookshelves in rooms and hallways and crammed into closets. I mention a title, and Vito, ever the knowledgeable guardian of his grandfather’s property, walks over to a crowded shelf, runs his finger across a few titles, and pulls out the one I mention.
Just as in Noce, Vito knows where everything is. The family donated several hundred of Leonardo’s books to the Sciascia Foundation in Racalmuto; these remain. Perhaps they, too, will end up at the foundation, which has employed a librarian to care for the collection there. Vito says there is still discussion within the family about how to use this apartment; perhaps it will become a literary center for writers and scholars.
* * *
Much of Sciascia’s writings used Racalmuto as a backdrop, either under its real name or as the fictional Regalpetra. He seldom, if ever, wrote about modern Palermo. His focus there was on its medieval or eighteenth-century past. He derived most of his subject matter in Racalmuto and in the villages around it in this closed-in world of south-central Sicily. His descriptions of this world and the people I met there kept me coming back: during the warmth of early spring; through the blistering, soul-sucking heat of midsummer; to the subtle chill of late fall; and again, a year later, around Easter.
Many of the people walking the streets of Racalmuto during my visits were the same people Sciascia loved and returned to year after year, decade after decade. Reading his books and spending time there was the best guide I found in my attempt, however fleetingly as an outsider, to better understand Sicilian life and culture.
It is all there, on the narrow cobblestoned streets and in the eyes and bearing of the men and women who live in the restored medieval houses of the village center. But most particularly for those of us who reside in other worlds far, far away, this Sicilitudine is found between the covers of Leonardo Sciascia’s books.
EIGHT
Never in Control
The island in ancient times was called, after its shape, Trinacria [three capes], then Sicania after the Sicani who made their home there, and finally it has been given the name Sicily after the Siceli who crossed over in a body to it from Italy.
—Diodorus Siculus, Greek-Sicilian historian born in Agyrium (Agira), Sicily, during Roman domination (ca. 80–20 B.C.)
ON A clear day the view from near the top of Mount Etna, up where clouds begin and black hills seem to roll over one another, offers a staggering look across millennia. If you are on this subtly alive mountain that the Greeks called Aetna early enough in the day and look below the climbing sun, you can see, through the haze and across a wedge of light blue sea, the toe of the Italian boot. And if you are there during the Sicilian winter, you can look while being slapped in the face by the gregale, a strong, cold wind that travels southward from central or southern Europe toward Libya.
But in the searing heat of late summer, hot and sweaty from a stumbling climb up a slope of crumbling lava, you can comfortably stand at this cooler, higher altitude on Europe’s biggest and most active volcano. Look farther east, beyond the close-by headlands of the Aspromonte range of mainland Italy’s Calabria region. Beyond human vision is Basilicata and Apulia, and still farther along, the narrow mouth of the Adriatic. There, on the eastern shore of that tubular sea is Greece, from where the recorded history of Sicily began.
It was while standing here, near Etna’s summit in July 2009, that I looked eastward and felt for the first time the full sweep of Sicily’s history. For it was from various cities on mainland Greece, their populations outstripping arable land seven or eight centuries before the Christian era, that ships sailed, filled with colonists looking for new worlds and new opportunities. They headed west and forever changed the face of the Mediterranean world.
Fernand Braudel, author of The Mediterranean in the Ancient World, writes this about these westbound Greeks:
At the outset, the sea favored their ventures towards Italy and Sicily. There is a coastal current running northward along the Balkan coastline. Leaving this current behind in the region of Corfu, and if one was prepared to make a direct crossing, it was possible to sail in a day to the Italian coast, there to pick up another current flowing southward. A virtual salt-water river, driving along the coast, it carried ships to the Gulf of Taranto and past the shores of Calabria. From there it was no distance to the Sicilian coast across the [Strait] of Messina, which [was] not an insuperable obstacle.
We know little about these earliest Greek colonists. Franco De Angelis of the University of British Columbia states simply, in the first line of his introduction to Megara Hyblaia and Selinous: The Development of Two Greek City-States in Archaic Sicily, “Archaic Sicily has no history.”
The only way to learn about this period is through archaeology. It runs from the time the first colonists landed in 735 B.C. and founded Naxos on the east coast, to around 510 B.C. De Angelis writes that this “heart of the archaic period, which contains centuries of development of the island’s communities barely known to us, has even less documentation” than the periods following when writers such as Herodotus began their work. “Archaic Sicily, therefore, is really prehistoric, or at best protohistoric.”
The lands these Greeks settled collectively became known as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece—a landmass much larger than Greece itself. It became, in essence, what America, nearly three thousand years later, represented to the European immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Still more expeditions of this great ancient diaspora, or “scattering,” also sponsored by the various Greek city-states, looked even farther to the west than Italy’s boot and latched upon Sicily’s east coast: Following Naxos’s founding, Siracusa was established a year later, in 734; Zancle, where modern Messina now sits, was founded within the next decade.
In those early, pre-Roman years, the Greek-Sicilian cities remained closely aligned with
their mother cities on mainland Greece, sharing the same conflicts among one another. Eventually they became more Sicilian than Greek, and cities such as Siracusa grew in power greater than that of their mother cities. Many visitors considered it to be the most beautiful city in the Mediterranean.
Greece, in ancient times, was never a nation or an empire. Its cities had in common language and culture. Brutal conflicts between and among them were frequent. For example, during the fifth-century B.C. Peloponnesian War, which pitted Sparta and its allies, including Corinth, against Athens, Athens launched a major, ill-advised assault on Siracusa, which had been founded by loyal Corinthian colonists.
The entire Athenian fleet was wiped out in Siracusa’s harbor; the Athenians never recovered and, eventually, lost the war on the Greek mainland. The giant rock quarry at Siracusa, now frequented by tourists and overgrown with lush greenery, held hundreds of Athenian prisoners who wasted away in brutal captivity. It is told that the aristocratic women from Siracusa, hearing that Athenian men were among the most handsome in all of Greece, observed them from the quarry’s rim as the prisoners starved.
The Siracusa quarry is one of my favorite spots in the area for finding solitude. No matter how many tourists might congregate, there is room enough to find peace and relaxation.
There are meandering walking trails, benches to rest on, and, around every turn, beautiful views to record in memory or capture in photographs or on a painter’s canvas. I had seen Frenchman Jean-Pierre Houël’s eighteenth-century paintings and etchings of this place, showing it to be the kind of Garden of Eden that I found more than three hundred years later.
Trails lead up to a massive opening, either natural or carved by humans deep into a limestone wall. It is known, because of its earlike shape and extraordinary acoustics, as the Ear of Dionysius, named after a Siracusan ruler.
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Of course, the various groups of Greek colonists did not come to an unpopulated island. It is thought that humans were there perhaps ten thousand years ago. Sicily, once attached to the Italian mainland, provided prehistoric people a land bridge across what today is the Strait of Messina. Cave drawings dated to around 6000 B.C. in part attest to the presence of these earlier prehistoric peoples.