Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  In correspondence with Camilleri, I asked why Montalbano holds allure for so many readers from so many different cultures. His answer, which he likely has given many times, was simple and illuminating: “I think he owns many characteristics of good relationships. He is the friend I would love to have.”

  * * *

  Most linguists agree that the Romance languages began to evolve in the various provinces of the dying Roman Empire sometime around the fifth century A.D. Joseph F. Privitera, in his slim volume Sicilian: The Oldest Romance Language, writes that “with the disappearance of the Roman administration, the speakers of Romance vernacular from different parts of the former Empire became increasingly unable to understand each other.”

  The Latin of the Romans was being displaced, and “the new Latin-derived languages known as Gallo Romance, Italo-Romance, Hispano-Romance, Rheto-Romance, and Balkan Romance” began to emerge, and peoples who spoke one of these forms could not understand those who spoke another form. Eventually, these languages developed into what we know as Spanish, French, Tuscan, Calabrian, and so forth.

  Here, historian Privitera tosses a bomb into the discussion. He asserts that Sicilian did not come out of this period. It was already there and had been for more than a thousand years.

  “It is clear,” writes Privitera, that by the year 200 B.C., “Proto Sicilian had already emerged and had been cemented as the new Sicilian language.” This position, of course, is not held by some linguists who believe the language came after the Normans took control of the island in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was the time when the new rulers supplemented the once Arab-speaking population with immigrants from mainland Italy—from Tuscany to Calabria.

  Privitera defends his thesis by pointing to the large number of words—about one-seventh of the five thousand offered in a Sicilian dictionary—that come from Greek. So at the third century B.C. in ancient Sicily, during the time of Roman domination, there were four major influences among island speakers: administrative Roman Latin, the people’s Latin found among the general populace, plus Greek, and probably Carthaginian from the pre-Roman, North African colonists.

  Following the Romans were the Byzantines from the east, the Arabs, the Normans and, briefly, the Germans and the French before the longer-lasting Spanish arrived.

  Alex Caldiero says that in the separate Italian language, any words that show Greek, Spanish, or Arabic influence came from Sicilian. As a side note, he points out that while many Sicilians today consider themselves to have evolved from some of the various conquering people—western Sicilians often claim Arabic patrimony, for example—many on the island’s eastern flank consider themselves more Greek than anything else. He mentions his ancestral village of Licodia Eubéa, in the province of Catania, built by Greek colonists on an earlier Sicel site and inhabited prior to 600 B.C.

  “We’ve seen them all,” he says of the original native peoples and the various conquerors who swept across the island over the last three thousand years. And he recalls hearing, during visits as a young man to the place of his birth as recently as the early 1960s, different pronunciations of Sicilian words and phrases from one end of the small village to the other. That’s how intensely local—even neighborhood by neighborhood—dialects could be at that time. Those differences are now disappearing as older generations pass on.

  * * *

  For a quick understanding of how Sicilian differs from Italian, I turned to an article written by Leonardo Vigo sometime in the early 1870s. The piece, which appeared in Raccolta amplissima di canti populari Siciliani, which literally means “very large collection of popular Sicilian songs,” was translated by Caldiero and included in the appendix of his unpublished Grammar. It gives a quick summary of the differences between the two languages, showing how, as certain Sicilian words were incorporated into the Italian language over the centuries, Italian speakers and writers modified them.

  The biggest influence in the language’s development beyond 200 B.C. was Arabic.

  María Rosa Menocal, in The Arab Role in Medieval Literary History, points to evidence of the influence Arabic had on Sicilian writing and even administration. “Arabic was the language of learning as well as the native tongue of Frederick II [the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Sicily based in Palermo] some two hundred years after the Arabs had lost all political power in Sicily and at a time when Frederick was actually carrying out certain repressive measures against Muslims there.”

  Most intriguing is the fact that there is no future tense in Sicilian. This could also come from the Arabic language that, even today, has no future tense. Twentieth-century Sicilians have adopted the Italian, which has a definite future tense as, of course, does the English that immigrant Sicilians embraced in the great diaspora of that century’s earliest years. As Alex points out, those immigrants were suddenly immersed in a culture that believes you can be anything you want, that you have the power to shape your future.

  “This is where grammar reflects the inner life of the people and the way they construct their reality.

  “Remember,” he says, “Sicilians have always been dominated by other cultures; they never had self-determination as a people. Their blood constantly told them that they have no control over their lives, that everything was controlled by the will of God.”

  This attitude is reflected in numerous short stories by Giovanni Verga. His peasants, facing one failed crop after another because of drought or pestilence, of invaders laying waste to the land, bemoan the fact that they must not have prayed hard enough to the Madonna, or that God, not nature, is punishing them; or that when malaria had killed the father, the breadwinner, or the mother, or most of the children, especially the boys who could have helped in the fields, that it is “God’s will.”

  In the story “Malaria,” contained in Verga’s Little Novels of Sicily, neighbor Carmine who lived by a lake where mosquitoes flourished

  had lost all his five children, one after the other … three boys and two girls. But the boys died just when they were getting old enough to earn their bread. So now he was used to it; and as the fever got the last boy under, after having harassed him for two or three years, he didn’t spend another farthing, neither for sulfate or decoctions, but drew off some good wine and set himself to make all the good fish stews he could think of, to provoke the appetite of the sick youth.

  It was all to no avail, of course. The last boy died, and the survivors “bent like a hook with brokenheartedness,” went on, the story continues. A neighbor, Nanni the carter, summed it up simply: “The lake gives and the lake takes away.… What’s the good, brother?”

  Thus, the future is not something you can will. Pre-twentieth-century Sicilians deal in the future as an obligation, Alex says. “Instead of saying ‘I will do it,’ they say, ‘l’aiâ farsi.’ [I have to do it.] It’s all in that one grammatical difference.” Instead of saying “I will sing,” it’s “I have to sing.” Instead of “I will bring it,” it’s “I am about to bring it.”

  * * *

  One of the more surprising discoveries about the Sicilian language is the influence it had in the development of Italian as a national language. We know that the Tuscan language in which Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century eventually became the national language of Italy. Less known is the role that spoken, sung, and written Sicilian played in the development of that language.

  Around the mid-thirteenth century, wandering troubadours from France made their way into Italy and Sicily. This was the time of that relatively enlightened Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II—a man responsive to artistic tastes in his court in Palermo, from where he ruled Italy, Germany, and Burgundy.

  The troubadours wrote and sang poetry, and their arrival had a tremendous influence on Sicilian poets who found the form of troubadour-style verse compatible with Sicilian lyric poetry—poetry of the heart, or courtly love.

  Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini, a notary in Frederick’s court, and others entered
the scene and took this poetic form to a new level, creating the sonnet, which later spread to Europe and England, where Shakespeare used it with great success.

  At some point, the works of the so-called Sicilian School of poets came to the attention of such notables as Dante and Petrarch. In the early fourteenth century, some believe, they incorporated into their works the style and a significant portion of the Sicilian language that had been adopted into Tuscan, including Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

  Thanks in part to many of the Arab-influenced works that Frederick II made available in 1227 to the university in Bologna, then Italy’s intellectual capital, “Dante may indeed have been strongly affected [by] … the whole Arabic cultural and ideological entity…,” Menocal writes. After all, Arabs had written about Muhammad’s trip to the otherworld. Why shouldn’t Dante Christianize such a story?

  The editor of the anthology The Poetry of the Sicilian School, Frede Jensen, in his introduction, underscores this connection in a more general way: “The decisive role of the Sicilians in the development of a refined poetry in an Italian vernacular can hardly be over-emphasized. The Sicilian School is the fountain-head from which a splendid tradition has never ceased to flow.”

  Menocal puts an end to the debate, at least as far as she is concerned, over who influenced whom: “Under his [Frederick’s] patronage was born and thrived … the first lyric poetry in an Italian vernacular.” She then translates a poem that may have been heard “in the hallways and salotti [salons] of Frederick’s courts at Palermo and elsewhere”:

  I have been killed by the looks of

  women like statues, between the

  whiteness of teeth and lips of dark

  purple;

  After having said that my youthful folly

  was now over, here it is once again

  making me insane with love and passion;

  In her face I have seen the moon,

  smiling with her radiant look. Did she

  appear to me, I ask my eyes, while I was

  awake or in a dream?

  That look is a true mystery! It makes my

  body sick, but it also cures it.

  (The Italian translation from the Arabic is from Rizzitano, 1958; English translation from the Italian is Menocal’s.)

  I read this and imagine a couple of older men, perhaps in their sixties or seventies, sitting in a café drinking coffee and admiring the young waitresses who serve them week after week. These men realize their youth is gone, and they do not delude themselves, knowing the young women have no interest in them beyond getting the job done in a friendly manner. But the pair can admire from the distance of multiple decades and, for a moment, relive their own pasts. It’s a universal theme, as true today as then, that probably goes well beyond even the time of the early Arab-Sicilian poets.

  This example is but a single fragment of Arabic poetry, Menocal informs us, from a “reputed twenty thousand verses written by a hundred and seventy poets … [that were] “written in Sicily, from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries.” The tenth was the last full century of Arab domination of the island, and Sicilian Arab poets were writing there and in southern Italy for another three hundred years. Most of this poetry has been lost.

  Menocal finally emphasizes: “This lapse in our knowledge of the period, of the flavor of court life, of this other world that existed within the same walls as the one we think we know so well, is a serious one.”

  TWELVE

  The Mafia

  It was invented by man, and as all human creations, it has a beginning. And it will have an end.

  —Giovanni Falcone, anti-Mafia judge, murdered May 23, 1992

  GIOVANNI FALCONE, the judge who was blown up, along with his wife and three bodyguards, while driving at high speed along a stretch of highway southwest of Palermo, never wanted to predict when the Mafia would fade away—only that he believed it would. He knew that it is like a festering cold sore that periodically and painfully erupts and then subsides, waiting just under the skin for the next eruption. “The octopus is inside all of us,” he once said.

  Their deaths, along with the violent deaths of a handful of other judges and police officials, launched a movement that drove the once rural family bands back beneath the surface of Sicilian society. As each mafioso is captured, the state confiscates their property and, in many cases, it is turned over to the public for its use.

  In mid-August 2010, for example, Sicilian police announced the arrest of a former Mafia chieftain’s associate and the confiscation of more than $1,000,000,000 worth of assets that will be given to anti-Mafia and other community groups. A hideout of one boss is now a bed-and-breakfast. Another is a retreat for journalists. Insurance offices once owned as a Mafia money-laundering front now house, in Palermo, the Fondazione Giovanni e Francesca Falcone. In late December 2010, the anti-Mafia group Addiopizzo moved its offices into a large Palermo apartment a crime boss had once owned.

  Falcone was part of a generation of new judges who rejected the social relations between Mafia and magistrates “that were commonplace in their fathers’ day,” and this would allow them “to distance themselves from those they would prosecute,” say American academics Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider in their essay “Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and the procura of Palermo.”

  The new breed of prosecutors formed themselves into a pool that tried new ways of building cases against mafiosi, abandoning methods that had long failed. The Schneiders, who also wrote the book Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo, tell us that the jurists cultivated Mafia turncoats, or pentiti, willing to testify in open court. Falcone, drawing on his early experience as a bankruptcy court judge, developed methods of scouring financial records that laid out the Mafia’s money trails.

  The result of all this work, periodically punctuated by Mafia hits on some of his colleagues, was the so-called 1986–87 Maxi Trial in Palermo involving 475 defendants. Some 344 mafiosi were found guilty, others were tried in absentia, and more than 2,500 years of prison sentences were handed out. Other trials were held in various Sicilian cities with similar results. The Mafia was cornered. The bosses went underground, some hiding out for years in the Sicilian countryside.

  The toll on the personal lives of the judges was phenomenal. Some of the men and their families, for their safety, had to withdraw from the world. In an interview with Falcone shortly before his death, Deborah Puccio-Den reports that the jurist acknowledged that “the thought of death is always my companion.” In preparation for the Maxi Trial, the Schneiders tell us that Falcone and his then-fiancée, magistrate Francesca Morvillo, whom he later married, and her mother, together with another judge and life-long friend, Paolo Borsellino and his family, were housed on the island of Asinara, off the northwest corner of Sardinia.

  The irony here is overwhelming: To jail mafiosi, prosecutors were forced to set up house in a maximum-security prison, under guard around the clock.

  That same summer prior to the trial, a handful of police officers were murdered. The Schneiders write that “the more the police went after the fugitives, the more the Mafia would attempt to destroy the police.”

  * * *

  As if the pressures against the prosecutors were not enough, in the midst of the Maxi Trial another shot was fired, this one a literary blast from none other than revered Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. He wrote, in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, that he saw the prosecutors as politically ambitious men, calling them professionisti dell’antimafia, or anti-Mafia professionals. He particularly went after Paolo Borsellino, who in earlier days had neo-fascist leanings and thereby offended the strongly antifascist Sciascia, a well-known and much beloved leftist. His pen was powerful; a champion of the people, Sicilians listened to him.

  Borsellino had been promoted, over the heads of more senior magistrates, to a position as prosecutor in Marsala on Sicily’s southwest coast. This proved, in Sciascia’s mind, that the judge was in the an
ti-Mafia game only for the advancement. The writer’s treatise “created a storm of shocked protest,” the Schneiders wrote. Then, just four days later, Sciascia retracted his allegations and, according to Alexander Stille in his book Excellent Cadavers, apologized to Borsellino.

  I ask the murdered judge’s sister, Maria Falcone, sitting in her office at the Falcone Foundation, about Sciascia’s attack. “I’m glad you asked me that,” she says firmly. “I appreciated Sciascia as a writer. He opened for us a road against the Mafia. [But] he really didn’t understand what the Mafia was—as Giovanni understood it during his investigations.”

  Her face clouds over during this part of the conversation. She obviously is bothered by the impact Sciascia’s remarks had on her brother and on Borsellino.

  “When he [Sciascia] dubbed them ‘the professionals of the anti-Mafia,’ Giovanni was very pained by that appellative. And what Sciascia didn’t know [about Borsellino] was that he left Palermo for Marsala because he had three children; he needed a bit more tranquillity because of his family.” In other words, the pressure of the Mafia prosecutions—the time spent in isolation under twenty-four-hour guard—was getting to the judge and those closest to him.

  Unlike Borsellino, Falcone and his wife had no children; their lives, Maria Falcone told me, were devoted to the anti-Mafia crusade. “Out of the presumptuousness of the writer, Sciascia never understood the work of the magistrates.”

  The author died in 1989, three years before the bomb that killed Maria Falcone’s brother, her sister-in-law, and the three policemen. How Sciascia would have reacted to that tragedy remains buried with him in the cimitero di Racalmuto.

  Despite the apology, the damage was done. Sciascia’s attack helped to fuel other criticisms of the judges and investigators who some people thought were violating civil rights of many Sicilians in their quest for bosses and their henchmen. At this point, Mafia bosses could have retreated from public view and let public opinion come to their rescue, but they did not. Killings increased in intensity.