by John Keahey
She says part of her work, and the work of the Falcone Foundation, which she started just months after his death, is to instill in Sicilian and Italian schoolchildren, through educational programs, “the values Giovanni believed in, especially democracy. Children and young people still haven’t understood that. We don’t have this.”
Some Sicilians believe progress is being made, especially with schoolchildren. Each year around the May 23 anniversary of Falcone’s death, thousands of youngsters and teens from throughout Italy arrive on ships docking at Palermo’s waterfront. They arrive to pay homage to the anti-Mafia judge and to attend Falcone Foundation–sponsored conferences stressing the importance of the fight against the Mafia.
In late March 2010, during Easter Week, a time when most children are out of school, I witnessed a succession of groups of local young people visiting the so-called L’Albero Falcone, or “Falcone tree” growing in front of the apartment once occupied by Falcone and his wife, Francesca Morvillo, forty-seven. It is a large magnolia tree that has become so big it almost blocks the front stoop at Via Notarbartolo, 23A. Its trunk was covered with hand-lettered posters and short missives penned by schoolchildren and others.
Three weeks after my March 2010 visit, the tree was vandalized overnight. All of the messages and posters disappeared. Then, three months later, on July 18, the eighteenth anniversary of Borsellino’s death, vandals smashed life-size plaster of Paris statues of Falcone and Borsellino that had been set up the day before along one of Palermo’s main boulevards, Via della Libertà. The statues were models that were eventually to be cast in bronze. The midday attack was witnessed by several people; no one would come forward with what they saw. Vandals elsewhere in the city ripped down posters announcing a march in memory of the two judges.
* * *
Deborah Puccio-Den, writing a chapter in the book Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred, talks about how Giovanni Falcone, since his death, has become “the object of a civic cult.” She says people post crudely lettered signs on the tree saying, “You are my saint; pray for us.” The May 23 ceremonies are commonly referred to as pilgrimages.
Puccio-Den makes a case that the martyred judges are being held, in the Sicilian psyche, to the same level as Palermo’s patron saint, Santa Rosalia, that twelfth-century Norman aristocrat who left the material world and lived on a mountaintop outside of Palermo. She became Palermo’s savior, with the faithful believing she ended the plague. Now she shares that role with Falcone and Borsellino, says Puccio-Den, who urges her readers to look at the judges’ isolation on the Sardinian prison island during preparations for the Maxi Trial and compare that with Rosalia’s self-imposed isolation on a mountaintop.
* * *
A small suite of offices, set anonymously in an outer neighborhood on Palermo’s western fringe, announces in tiny script on a lone doorway that it is the home of Addiopizzo, Goodbye Protection Money. The offices, which nine months after my March 2010 visit were moved to the former Mafia boss’s apartment, also housed Libero Futuro, Free Future. Both are made up of groups of Palermo merchants who have banded together and refuse to pay protection money. Similar in some respects to chambers of commerce in the United States, they also give merchants solidarity against yielding to the long-held tradition of paying “a beak full.” Their slogan: Pago chi non pago (I pay those who do not pay), meaning I give my money to businesses that refuse to submit to Mafia intimidation.
I met with Enrico Colajanni, one of the anti-pizzo organizers. He tells me the groups have 450 members; their goal is one thousand. They hold street fairs featuring the products and goods of its members as a way of recruiting new ones. Eventually they want to take the message to villages, towns, and cities beyond Palermo.
Colajanni said that for fifteen years after Falcone’s and Borsellino’s deaths “nothing happened” against the Mafia. Then, in 2004, seven people anonymously came up with the Addiopizzo concept. “They decided this situation of protection payments is impossible. We have to do something.
“The first message was that people who pay have no dignity. It was posted on stickers placed anonymously across the city.” He said the first year, one hundred merchants signed up. Then, in 2007, Libero Futuro was organized to bring together buyers and sellers.
But it wasn’t easy. When the participating merchants denounced paying pizzo, “banks closed the door to them getting loans, saying their risk is going up.” The group’s goal: “We have to open this door,” Colajanni said.
While banks may not be cooperating, authorities are. Police continue to give twenty-four-hour security once a business denounces pizzo. Business owners can call the police to come to drive them to work. Ironically, a major hindrance is that “there are a lot of people here who are more afraid of the police than the Mafia.”
“There has been no violence so far, and our membership has leveled off,” said Colajanni.
Can such a campaign be effective against such an entrenched, albeit under-siege criminal organization? Colajanni understands the question and acknowledges the reality.
“Pizzo is a small part of the Mafia’s income. Compared to drugs and other rackets, it doesn’t amount to much. But they enforce it to keep power over everyone; it’s a way to keep control over the people. It’s like a state within a state.”
Then, he adds a chilling thought. “Right now, the Mafia strategy is to lay low. It has suspended committing the violent murders of the past. But, given a change of strategy, it could begin again, targeting us, the merchants, the police, and the prosecutors. We all know this and live with this. But if we are many, we are surer of success.”
THIRTEEN
The Forge of Hephaestus
… And Sicily’s land by Aetna’s craigs
Was filled with streams of fire which no man could
Approach, and groaned throughout its length …
—Carcinus, tragic Greek poet, quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Greek-Sicilian historian
EUROPE’S BIGGEST and most active volcano is somewhere ahead. Adrift on the A-19, moving southeast and then eastward at a too-high rate of speed, I am contemplating the foolishness of preconceived notions about how Sicily’s interior would look in July. I expected countryside burned over by the intense Mediterranean sun; instead, I see rolling hills of green and golden fields where wheat has recently been harvested, stretching to the horizon. And as I enter the northern edge of the Plain of Catania, there is a subtle shift in the landscape, a sense that I am gradually moving down, toward the Ionian Sea, still out of sight to the east. The hills ahead start to roll lower; plateaus, like the one cradling Enna, are behind me. The sky just above the hills ahead takes on a slightly different hue; strangely, I can’t tell if it is darker or lighter. It is just different from that shocking blue, cloudless sky that had been above me as I left Palermo.
Where, I wonder, is Etna? I am close enough, and I certainly know it dominates the island’s eastern landscape. It takes a few moments, then to my left, toward the northeast, I sense a massive outline towering above a series of foothills. I had mistaken this outline for sky; the colors of both, slight variations of hazy blue-gray, are nearly identical. This mountain, my unseen companion for perhaps thirty minutes, grows sharper the closer I get to Catania and the sea.
I prepare to turn northward onto the north-south A-18 toward my exit at Acireale. The darker sky color morphs into views of green mountain flanks punctuated by narrow black fields of lava formations. This mountain, called Mungibeddu in Sicilian, stays with me for five days as I lounge on its slopes in a tiny bed-and-breakfast in the mountainside town of Trecastagni. I see its southeast cone, wisps of smoke floating skyward, through my bedroom window as I awake each morning, and it is never far from my view as I walk around Trecastagni or drive from village to village in search of something new: a nice restaurant far from tourists, a bench in a quiet park, a friendly bar and a cup of bitingly strong espresso.
Villagers here seem always
aware, consciously or subconsciously, of its presence—not just because it can erupt suddenly and bury them in cinders and lava, but because the mountain gives them life.
“Where are these lemons from?” I ask the lady at the fruit and vegetable store a few blocks from my B-and-B. “Etna,” is her reply, delivered with a warm smile as she shrugs her shoulder in the direction of the mountain just outside her front door. A bottle of wine is sitting on a table display in another shop. “Etna,” the man says, referring to the vast vineyards that blanket the slopes. I look closer. The label reads: “Etna DOC.”
DOC stands for Denominazione di Origine Controllata, or Controlled Denomination of Origin. A DOC, then, is a zone, one of many throughout Sicily and Italy, where wine production is tightly controlled to maintain quality.
“It is very robust wine, from the lava,” the man tells me, meaning the soil created by the black, sometimes reddish, molten rock bursting from the mountain’s deep interior—the mythical home of Hephaestus, blacksmith to the gods. (He is Vulcan in Roman mythology.) The wine seller offers a sip from a tiny plastic cup. For reasons of health, I politely decline. “Sono astemio” (I am a teetotaler), I say with honest regret.
* * *
I imagined that I would journey to the top. I had read that there is a cable car at some place on the volcano’s south flank that roughly follows the path of French writer Guy de Maupassant, who went up the mountain in 1885.
I expect to drive to Nicolosi, just a few kilometers from Trecastagni, to begin my ascent, following maps and well-trod routes. De Maupassant started his climb in Nicolosi, today a village full of hotels and B-and-Bs catering to Etna-bound tourists. He had gotten there via a train that carried him “through fields and gardens full of trees growing in the pulverized lava” and was met by guides and pack mules for a trip that took two days. They left at four o’clock in the afternoon, he writes in his travel classic Sicily, traveling upward through a maze of steam and lava vents that he describes as “the sons of Etna, grown up around the monster, which thus wears a necklace of volcanoes.” They traveled well into the night through a growing storm and eventually stopped at a woodcutters’ cabin, where they spent a few hours before daylight on flea-infested mats.
Later the following day, they left the mules and climbed a “frightful wall of hardened cinders.” It was well into nighttime, and the travelers awaited the sunrise. The sun started its climb, and they could see all of Sicily from the crater’s rim. Off to the east and across the Strait of Messina were the hills of Calabria near the toe of the Italian boot. They headed back down, and eventually found “under our feet, the indented and green island, with its gulfs, its capes, its towns and the great sea, so very blue, that encloses it.”
* * *
My plan was to start early in the morning and, thanks to modern roads, cable cars, and being able to forgo mules, be back in time for a wonderful plate of pasta and a freshly opened bottle of water—“Etna water,” boasted my Trecastagni host, Beppe Stiolmi, as he proudly handed me a bottle upon my arrival the day before.
But when I told him of my plan to do Etna solo, he shook his head. “No, you must do it with a guide, a man of nature who can explain to you how the mountain works, the differences in the lava, the fauna. It is not enough to go up, look around, and say, ‘How beautiful. Look, I can see the Ionian Sea, and beyond, why, it is Calabria!’ That does not let you know the volcano,” Beppe said with finality.
I believed him. And, of course, he knew just the guide. But, he said, it would be too expensive to hire a private guide. I must go with a small group. Sixty euros (about $80 at the time). “I can arrange,” he said. Later that evening, he called to tell me that the guide would pick me up at nine fifteen the next morning, just after breakfast. There would be seven other people, a French family of four and a Scottish family of three. “The guide speaks excellent English,” Beppe said. “And he speaks French. No problem.”
It isn’t a problem. Mario Giaquinta is on time. We bounce along in his nine-person van, taking the confusing, narrow, twisting roads to Nicolosi to pick up the other seven. It will be a long day, Mario tells me. We will go to the northeast side of the volcano to make our way up—“the south side too hot, too hot today”—and then, after several hours high on the mountain, we will cool off in a shady gorge, the Gole dell’Alcàntara, that was carved out by the Alcàntara River through a deep, narrow flow of lava laid down millennia ago.
“We will return around seven thirty. OK?” Sure, it is OK. It will be a ten-hour excursion. I am going to get my €60 worth.
We pass tiny villages, always going up, up. Occasionally, the volcano’s southeast crater—the one I see every morning when I get up—pops through a picture-perfect setting, with green trees and vineyards in the foreground, contrasting against darker soil from centuries-old flows or rigid piles of sharp, deeply pocked rock from more recent eruptions.
Mario is full of information, speaking nonstop, first in French to the couple in the front seat and their two teenage daughters next to me in the middle seat, and then in English to the Scots and me. Then he moves on to a new subject and once again the French-English rotation.
For example, we pass through a small village that is only a few streets deep but stretches out like a belt holding in the mountain’s girth: Zafferana Etnea. “This is a place famous for the honey,” Mario says. “There are five varieties: lemon, orange, mandarino, chestnut, and wildflower. There are seven thousand inhabitants, and seven hundred produce honey.”
He points out that lemons are grown in the lower part of the mountain, at about seven hundred meters (nearly 2,300 feet) above sea level. “The landscape changes quickly,” he declares, pointing to acres and acres of vineyards above the citrus groves. “We grow what we call ‘black’ wine. It is very strong red wine, because of the soil from the lava.”
When we stop several hours later for a picnic lunch of soft bread along with various assortments of salami and cheese, Mario produces from his rucksack a bottle of this so-called black wine, and the other members of my party attest to its roughness. “It is very aggressive,” the Frenchman allows as he eagerly seeks a second glass.
Now, we are passing through Milo, “the last village,” Mario announces. “From here we have only nature, and we are going into the terraces, the old way of growing wine,” he says, pointing out the centuries-old lava-rock walls similar to the ones I had seen several years ago in northern Italy’s Cinque Terre, south of Genoa. “Only older people remain here to practice agriculture.”
We are climbing higher, and Mario gets serious about his volcanology. Etna is a young volcano, only about fifteen thousand years old, and much more active than its more famous, smaller cousin to the north, Vesuvius. Etna grew in the place of various prehistoric predecessors as far back as 140,000 years ago or more. According to the 2001 book Volcanoes of Europe by Alwyn Scarth and Jean-Claude Tanguy, Etna’s direct ancestor is known as the Ellittico volcano, a much bigger giant that helped, along with its predecessors, to create much of Sicily. Scientists also call it Ancient Mongibello, a bilingual term for mountain: “Mon” is Latin for mountain and it is joined to another word for mountain, “gebello,” a corruption of the Arabic gibel. Sicilians, in their language, call it Mungibeddu (beautiful mountain). Whatever the appellation, the mountain we know today as Etna had a catastrophic eruption perhaps fifteen thousand years ago and began to build to the shape we now recognize.
Just a scant century ago, in 1909, Etna had only one crater at the summit. This was the crater climbed in 1885 by the Frenchman de Maupassant; now it has four active ones. The southeast crater that greets me daily from my window in Trecastagni appeared during a 1971 eruption.
Other facts shared by Mario: After a lava flow, it takes four to five centuries for trees and bushes to grow in the soil that forms as the lava rock breaks down; it takes six to seven centuries before agriculture can take place on that flow. We drove through the 1971 flow on the volcano’s northeast edge; it was a
moonscape. No tiny plants peeking through. Seven hundred years from now, there would be dense woods here and, if someone is still around to farm it, beautiful rolling vineyards.
This breakdown of rock to soil occurs because specialized lichen begins to grow on the stone surfaces, tearing it down through a natural chemical process. This is further facilitated by development of plants such as the deep-rooted Genista aetnensis, or Mount Etna broom, a beautiful, ubiquitous bush with tiny yellow flowers. Toss in a lot of wind, snow, and rain erosion, and you eventually have the kind of deep, rich soil that drew the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, and a whole host of other invaders here nearly three thousand years ago.
* * *
En route to our hike, we stop and Mario opens the back of the van and hands out yellow hard hats. He pulls out a rope and a large flashlight to show us caves made by flowing lava. Deep in a birch forest, we come across a group of local women scaling the bark from long poles that will be used to replace old, rotting pole fences encircling small openings in the ground. These are entrances to the caves below.
Mario tells us the remarkable story about how early residents of the mountain would come here in winter and shovel huge amounts of snow down into these holes, filling the caves. There, it would turn to ice. In summer, men and women would return each night, around one o’clock in the morning. The men would enter the caves, chop the ice into large blocks, and haul them out and then lash them onto the backs of mules.
The women would cover the ice with layers of green ferns collected from the surrounding woods, and the ice would be hauled down the mountain to ports around Catania. There it would be used to preserve the fish caught early each morning. Day after day these workers did this. It was many miles to the various port villages—a remarkable daily undertaking.
I later read that in medieval times, blocks of Etna ice would be hauled to Messina and put on ships bound for Malta. After all, the volcano was the only regular source of snow-to-ice in the southern Mediterranean.