by John Keahey
The bronze statue of Leonardo Sciascia, frozen in midstride, stands alone on the sidewalk, his cigarette dangling as it did in life, between the first and middle fingers of his right hand. No one is here to affectionately touch that hand as they pass. The massive gray iron doors to the cathedral just ahead are closed. The last real sound I hear is from the bells ringing out the noon hour.
I came into town for a midday espresso. But the door to the bar just across the street from the smiling Sciascia is shuttered behind the long strings of beads that usually serve as a doorway. Nothing to do here, I think to myself. I bid farewell to my friend Leonardo, affectionately rub the patina a tiny bit brighter on his right hand, and head for the car. Pergusa, about an hour away and just down the slope from the imposing city of Enna in Sicily’s center, is in need of a visit.
That small town is intriguing simply because it sits near the shore of a tiny lake that figures heavily in the pantheon of Greek mythology. Before I knew much about Sicily, or even knew that its recorded history began with the arrival of Greek colonists nearly three thousand years ago, I assumed the Greek myths I had read all took place in Greece.
The same was true of the Greek plays I read in college and saw performed on the university campus in my home city. Weren’t they all written in Greece? Some were, of course; others were conceived and created by Greek playwrights in Sicily. Some of those writers were born here, some were merely passing through, and others were born elsewhere and died in Sicily after becoming Greek-Sicilian.
Many of the better known plays were performed at the giant stone theater in Siracusa. The Persians by Aeschylus was performed there; born in Greece, he died around 455 B.C. in Gela, on Sicily’s south coast. Sophocles and Euripides had plays presented here, as did the Greek-Sicilian comedy writer Epicharmus.
That Greek myths didn’t all occur in Greece began to sink in during readings of The Odyssey and a literary guidebook I used to make sense of early Mediterranean geography. Both made allusions to the episode of Odysseus’s battle with the cyclops taking place along Sicily’s east coast.
Over the years, other travel narratives described a Sicily shrouded in Greek myths. The one about Persephone and her kidnapping and descent into the underworld caught my attention. This reputedly took place in central Sicily, around a small spring-fed lake just off the south slope of the Enna plateau. The idea that it all occurred near modern-day Pergusa seems older than time itself. People on this island have always been aware of the myth and nod knowingly when it is mentioned.
In Pergusa, in a small park with a clear view of the lake—now shrinking in size, I am told, as the springs that feed it are commandeered for drinking water—sits a modern statue that looks like a representation of Persephone being gathered up and kidnapped by her uncle, the nether god Hades, in preparation for his golden-chariot ride into the underworld.
The lake, surrounded by a track where locals race cars, is difficult to get to. There are conflicting campaigns: one to remove the track and create a wildflower-filled park along the shoreline; the other to turn it into a Formula One venue. The track, for the time being at least, seems to be winning.
The next best thing is to find a bar where I can get an espresso, a sandwich, and blood-orange juice. I return to the park with my lunch, sit on a bench, and consider the statue, the lake, and the impact the story of Persephone had on this once magical island.
The origins of the myth are unclear. Marguerite Rigoglioso suggests that there are indigenous Sicilian versions of the story “that far predated the arrival of Greeks in Sicily.… The idea that the myth of the grain mother and her maiden daughter originated in Sicily is rendered not so farfetched. Perhaps it is only later, with the arrival of the Greeks, that they came to be known as Demeter and Persephone.”
By the way, it is important to note that these gods and demigods have many names. Persephone is the Greek name that the Romans changed to Proserpina; Hades, Zeus’s brother, becomes Pluto under the Romans; and Demeter, Persephone’s mother and Zeus’s sister, becomes Cerere or Ceres. Zeus, the maiden’s father and king of the gods on Mount Olympus, becomes the Romans’ Jupiter. Yes, all are of the same family. Zeus and his sister Demeter conceive Persephone, and Zeus conspires to have his daughter become the bride of his brother, her uncle. Incest happened among the gods and the ancient Greeks. To understand why the gods acted as they did, one need only look at the culture of the ancient Greeks—daughters often were married off to uncles to preserve a family’s fortune, for example—who endowed their myths with their own standards of behavior.
Gods and goddesses were not bound by the conventions of humans, with whom they interacted and even shared offspring. But they were still gods, ruled by Zeus, and they could leap from land to land with ease and cause great calamities or events of great fortune, depending upon their moods at any given time. The goddess of the grain, Demeter, who taught humans the secret of agriculture, wanted to protect Persephone from lesser gods who were pursuing the beautiful girl.
Then, one beautiful, sunny day on this most fertile of Mediterranean islands, Persephone sat picking wildflowers along the shore of this lake.
Hades—did his brother Zeus direct him to Persephone’s location?—was clambering about aboveground. He saw her and, charmed by her beauty, gathered her up, placed her in his golden chariot pulled by a brace of black horses, and rode off toward Siracusa to the southeast. There, he and she disappeared into the bowels of the earth. A nymph, Cyane, tried to stop him, but Hades turned the nymph into a spring that feeds the short, beautiful river—the Ciane—that to this day runs into the harbor at Siracusa.
Demeter heard only that her daughter was missing. She did not know her brother Hades was behind the disappearance or where the maiden had been taken. She raced to the lake’s shore but found she was too late. In her anguish, she wandered all of Sicily for nine days and nine nights looking for Persephone, swinging her scythe to cut pathways through the lush green of the island. During the night, she carried torches lighted by the fires of Mount Etna. Her grief-fed anger was so intense that everything on the island began to die; the soil became infertile, starvation began to take hold, and the human race was in danger of extinction. Demeter lost her scythe along the way; some say the scythe-shaped promontory of the western Sicilian city of Trapani is where it landed.
Zeus, as was usual in these kinds of stories, eventually heard the pleas of the starving populace. He intervened and sent a messenger to the underworld to confront Hades and urge him to release Persephone. But the young woman had grown attached to her captor. Secretly, Hades had fed her a couple of seeds of the pomegranate, a fruit that inspires love. And once you eat in the underworld you can never return to the surface.
However, Hades yielded to Zeus and agreed to let her come to the surface part of the year; for the remaining months, she was to return to join him in the underworld, where she sat on the throne as his queen.
Rigoglioso points out that in Sicily, there are really only “three main seasons, not four—autumn/winter, spring, and summer.” Grain is planted in the late fall and harvested in late June, so “[s]ummer is the time when the land lies barren and fallow under the fierce sun.…”
Thus, according to Rigoglioso, Persephone returns to the underworld at the beginning of summer, “the time in Sicily associated with barrenness and death.” Ancient festivals honoring Persephone were held not in the springtime, but just before the goddess was to retreat belowground to sit on her throne as queen of the underworld.
In ancient times, Greek-Sicilians held a flower festival known as anthesphoria during the advent of spring. Celebrants would gather flowers and twine them into garlands, which is what Persephone was supposed to have been doing when Hades kidnapped her. Women wore these flowery crowns in their hair during the festival; the Romans called it floralia. Variants of this practice often can be seen in a variety of cultures across Europe. Some believe it does not have anything to do with honoring Persephone, but it marked a time w
hen ears of corn were carried to the temple.
Sicilian-American folklorist and storyteller Gioia Timpanelli uses the Roman names of the gods and goddesses when she refers to this myth in her novella “Knot of Tears,” which is contained in her scintillating book Sometimes the Soul. Her character Costanza, a young woman living at the turn of the twentieth century who isolates herself in a large house in Palermo—“the dark, cool house, the quiet study where sometimes she worked until dawn”—would imagine ancient times and places.
… [S]he might see a large migration of eagles flying overhead or travel to the luxuriant meadows of wildflowers outside of Enna, the fields of her ancestors where it was said that Ceres’ daughter had been stolen: Proserpina fell from the fields of Enna / Fields where purple convolvulus grow / Down to the folds of the dark / Underworld.
Gioia, in a telephone conversation after my March 2009 visit to Lago di Pergusa, told me that she first heard the Demeter and Persephone story from her grandmother when she was only five years old.
“I remember she had tears in her eyes as she told me that story,” Gioia said. The fact remains that this great Greek myth fosters great intensity among Sicilians. They all, from small children to the aged, know it. Hotel and B and B rooms across the island have the names of these gods on the doors as names for the rooms. As I write this, I am sitting in a room in an Enna B and B with KORE on the door. Kore is still another name for Persephone meaning “young maiden.”
Just a kilometer or so up the street is the Rocca di Cerere, site of a former temple dedicated to Demeter. She is powerful on this island; there are numerous such sites around Sicily where ancient Greek-Sicilians practiced animal sacrifices. Today, visitors stand on the rock to savor magnificent views of the countryside of central Sicily and of snowcapped Mount Etna to the east. A prominent church here is built on the foundation of a temple to Persephone.
I sense from all this that myths developed, in the eighth century B.C. and earlier, as a way for early people with no knowledge of astronomy or physics or chemistry to explain the mysteries of nature: Helios drove a golden chariot to push the sun across the sky before the blazing globe eventually disappears into the west. It then returns to the east after twilight by sailing across the ocean. And it was the ancient Greeks who imagined how a god’s sword can cleave a human in two, flinging the feminine half in one direction and the masculine in another, each side doomed to wander the earth looking for its perfect other half.
But there is one thing about these ancient gods that we must never forget: The gods—Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Hades, all of them—did not care much for humans. They wanted humans around only to offer sacrifices. So when Demeter, in her anguish over her lost daughter, caused the great famine and humans were in danger of extinction, Zeus was forced to relent and demand that Hades return his bride to the surface of the world. To let humans die out would mean the end of sacrifices to the gods.
And humans, in order to understand their world, relied on the gods to explain why good things as well as bad things happen. As Homer tells us in The Iliad, “All men have need of the gods.” And the gods need us to offer sacrifices to them.
Most of us lost those particular gods long ago during the rise of the world’s great religions. But maybe, deep down inside, we haven’t. That bonfire, the falò, I attended in Racalmuto likely originated as a pagan rite of nature, as did the decorated pine tree early peoples worshipped near the winter solstice of late December. The understanding of the origins of these rites may have been lost generations ago, but they are still part of the very soul of this island.
* * *
For the return to Racalmuto at the end of this pleasant day communing with Demeter and Persephone, I choose to stay off the autostrada and instead follow the tiny lines on my map that represent narrow two-lane roads. This allows me to pass through, at a leisurely pace, one small village after another: Masseria Scioltabino, Pietraperzia, Borgo Braemi, Sommatino, Canicattì, Castrofilippo.
There are many ways to get from one place to another in Sicily. The narrow roads, like spiderwebs, plow across land that is waking up in March; wildflowers in fallow fields are blooming, heat is building under acres and acres of white plastic sheeting that covers factory-operated fields, and the green of the rolling hills of south-central Sicily—still light-years away, one hopes, from being overwhelmed by American-style subdivisions—rise in clear, tangy air through which an observant traveler can easily imagine the past, feel the present, and wonder about the future.
TEN
Aci Trezza and the Cyclops
A grim loner, dead set in his own lawless ways.
Here was a piece of work, by god, a monster
built like no mortal who ever supped on bread,
no, like a shaggy peak, I’d say—a man-mountain
rearing head and shoulders over the world.
—Homer, The Odyssey
I HEARD a story about the folks who climbed Etna each day and carried the large blocks of ice wrapped in protective green ferns down its steep, rich slopes so they could preserve the early morning catch of fish. The ice, made from snow packed by peasants and preserved for summer use deep in lava tunnels on Etna’s slope, was stored some distance from the coastal fishing villages that stretch out north and south from cluttered, overcrowded Catania.
I thought about this daily ordeal one bright July Sunday when I dropped down along the narrow, confusing mountain roads from Trecastagni to a little village on the Ionian Sea, Aci Trezza. This is the village made famous by a Giovanni Verga novel, I Malavoglia, the name of the family in the story. The English translation carries the additional title The House by the Medlar Tree. It tells the tragic story of a fishing family that lived out their lives in that tiny village in the late 1800s.
The good folks in Aci Trezza depend on tourism these days as well as fishing, and they capitalize on the fame of this book and the 1948 Luchino Visconti film, La terra trema, based on the story, which Visconti set not in the late eighteen hundreds, but in the mid-1940s. Visconti used only local people, nonactors, who spoke only their local dialect. The result was a tribute to his abilities as a director.
I learned that only two of the townspeople appearing in the film were still alive. I met one during my usual stroll around the town’s main square overlooking the port. He is a retired fisherman, Salvatore Vicari, now seventy-two. At around age ten, he was “Alfio the boat boy,” the brother of the film’s hapless hero, ’Ntoni.
Salvatore revels as the town star; he loves meeting people who have seen the film and who remember the Visconti character despairing as he watched his family disintegrate within the grinding poverty of the fisherman’s life. The final scenes are particularly touching as he goes, hand in hand, with his brother to find work on a fleet of new boats, enduring the brutal badgering of the bosses as they ridicule the fishermen who tried to defy them.
Today, Salvatore, looking like he could be in his midfifties or early sixties, his face, nut-brown from a life at sea, has a winning smile and an easy manner as he greets visitors eager to shake his hand. Men of his generation never went to school. The host of my bed-and-breakfast tells me, “Most of the older men can’t read. A man from the north reads news and documents to them.”
Looking at the young people of Aci Trezza today and their easy interactions, they seem no different than American teenagers. This easy socialization was much different in the 1940s when La terra trema was filmed. No unmarried young girl among the townsfolk could be found who was willing to be kissed on-screen. It would have been disgraceful; the shame would have been too much to bear. No man would have married her if she had done that.
So Visconti, for the kissing scene down on the windblown beach on a pile of rocks battered by crashing waves, found a minor professional actress in Catania. That clip was memorialized in the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso as one of the scenes the censoring priest ordered removed, ringing his little bell as a signal to the projectionist.
For book and film love
rs, Aci Trezza offers a stone house by a medlar tree, a shrublike plant that produces a fruit similar to crab apple. The house is in the heart of the village that is set in a small, natural bay immediately north of Catania’s sprawl and near the community’s church. The house features three rooms that in the 1800s would have served three separate families.
One room, full of black-and-white movie stills and an original poster, is dedicated to the making of the film. Another, just across a tiny courtyard, is simply outfitted with a single bed and assortment of fishing nets, net-making gear, and domestic implements. The bed, I was told, was the very one used in the movie where a dying grandfather lay before he was carried off to an old-folks home in Catania.
All the room’s furnishings occupied the same spots as they did in the film.
“Everyone else would sleep on the floor,” the museum guide said, pointing to the small area around the bed.
But one domestic implement that caught my attention was a solid-metal cylinder, roughly the size of a bar canister for mixing drinks. This was used, our guide told us, “to pack in a bit of the ice from Etna” to make what is still known today as granita, that supremely refreshing repast for hot July and August days. Today, this refreshing dessert is available in all kinds of flavors: melon and rose, black currant, watermelon—the list goes on.
But back then, it involved filling the container with shaved ice, popping in a bit of sugar, and mixing in the juice of Etna’s lemons: a thrilling but certainly infrequent treat for incredibly poor fishing families of the late nineteenth century.
Ice and lemons from Etna—the story of how difficult it was then to make and haul ice great distances in a premechanical era, while a small story, underscores the rigors of life in this land even just a century or so ago.
* * *
Tales of these rigors—the extremely brutal life of families drawn so closely together for survival, whose livelihoods depended on the vagaries of the dangerous sea before them, the tremors of the massive volcano above them, and, elsewhere in Sicily, the fickleness of the seasons that either produced an abundance of crops or burned them up for lack of moisture—are what make the works of Verga and Pirandello so unrelentingly powerful. The rich landowners stayed rich, the peasants suffered continually, and the only people they could really trust were members of their own families.