by John Keahey
Usually Enna was taken only after someone in it had betrayed the defenders and opened the gates in the dark of night. Here, I got horribly lost trying to find the historic center. (It took three visits before I finally got the confusing layout under control.)
On this particular journey, it was November and dark when we pulled off the main west-coast highway at Castellammare and turned toward Scopello, a tiny village with only twenty-five permanent residents. It had three hundred at the end of World War II, but most immigrated to the United States. The bed-and-breakfast I had spotted weeks earlier on the Internet, Pensione Tranchina, was easy to find. Marisin Tranchina greeted us, showed us our comfortable room on the third floor of the remarkably restored structure that likely dates back three or four centuries, and then fixed a dinner of pasta and swordfish, prepared, she said, in the style of Trapani, the port city a few miles to the south.
The olive oil that went with the bread was particularly tasty. Marisin said their harvest had just ended; the olives from their five hundred trees had just been pressed. Moments later, she handed me a sealed can containing a liter of the oil. I’ve never used it for cooking; the cheaper, store-bought oil works fine for that. Tranchina’s oil goes on salads, over pasta flaked with basil, or is mopped up with chunks of crusty bread.
It was late. We ate and then settled our bill because we would leave for the airport before sunrise the next morning. So it was dark when we arrived and dark when we left. I immediately made another reservation, this one for three nights, for my next trip five months away.
The following morning, we came downstairs to a wonderful breakfast spread out for us during the night. We ate, sitting in the semidarkness of Tranchina’s front room, croissants with marmalade and salami with slices of cheese, and drank steaming, rich, black coffee American-style. Forty-five minutes later, we were at Falcone-Borsellino Airport for our flight to Rome.
When another traveling companion, Steve McCurdy, and I arrived at Pensione Tranchina for my second visit, in March 2010, I had this one timed right. We drove up the coast during a bright afternoon that gave us impressive views of this rugged coastline. Perched on a hill, the town oversees the Gulf of Castellammare and, beyond, the Tyrrhenian Sea as it spills counterclockwise around Sicily’s western edge. This whole peninsula, with Capo San Vito at the point, obviously is a tourist haven. It once was a smuggler’s paradise because of its remoteness: isolated beaches against steep, rocky cliffs, few roads, and fewer houses. The road leading to Scopello and the nature preserve next door is lined with houses and signs to dozens of hotels and pensioni, all blessed with dazzling views of the Mediterranean.
This time, we meet Salvatore, Marisin’s Sicilian husband whose family has been here for several generations. Marisin is Chinese. Because her birth name is difficult for Italians and Sicilians to pronounce, she breaks with tradition here and uses her husband’s surname, Tranchina, pronounced in the Italian manner, “Tran-key-na.” Women in Italy and Sicily generally carry their birth surnames while children take the father’s name. She laughs at the coincidence of her ethnicity, Chinese, and Salvatore’s Tranchina—“across China,” she says with a smile.
The pair met in Panama, where she lived with her parents; he worked on construction projects with other family members. Salvatore came back to Scopello to take over his share of the family property in 1976; Marisin followed in 1982. They remodeled the family home, adding a couple of new floors, completely modernized the structure, and turned it into Pensione Tranchina.
There is a faded, blurry black-and-white photograph on the wall of the reception/dining area dating back to 1954. It shows Salvatore and his family posing in front of the house. Salvatore is a small child, barefoot and sitting in a doorway just east of the pensione’s entrance. The photograph, taken from a low angle, shows the rough, rocky surface of the tiny piazza in front of the house, built in the 1800s.
Today, the square with a large fountain is beautifully paved. The picture shows how most piazzas looked in southern Italy and Sicily long before villages became scrubbed and modernized during the advent of mass tourism.
The Scopello of Salvatore’s childhood was a fishing village; now there is a closed tuna-processing plant, a tonnaro, with origins deep into Muslim times, down the hill on the gulf’s shoreline. It, too, has been restored and is now used for conferences and weddings. Two castle towers, dating back to the thirteenth century, are nearby. One is abandoned; the other has been converted into a home.
Paths lead down to three beaches sought after by sun-loving tourists who pack the pensioni in this tiny town from late spring to early fall. One of those beaches, Baia Guidaloca, located nearly two miles to the east, is where Odysseus, his clothes ripped off by a roiling sea, found himself after he was shipwrecked during an event engineered by, as Homer’s poem says, “Poseidon god of earthquake.” The local king’s daughter Nausicaa—who “shone among her maids, a virgin, still unwed”—found him and took him to her father’s court, where Odysseus told the stories of his adventures that make up much of Homer’s epic poem.
Sicilians, it seems, claim that many of Odysseus’s adventures occurred on or around this island: the man-eating monster Scylla at the Strait of Messina; the Aeolian islands, home of the master of the winds, Aeolus; the cyclops Polyphemus at Aci Trezza. Now he meets the lovely Nausicaa along the rocky shore in the Gulf of Castellammare. Of course, long before tourism became important here, Sicilians of all stripes in this mixed land of myth and reality knew these stories.
* * *
Marisin and Salvatore offer a tour of their olive grove, which has some of the most stunning views from the rolling hills overlooking the rich blue waters of the Gulf of Castellammare. Originally purchased by Salvatore’s grandparents, this land represents his share and the shares various uncles sold to him. For the Tranchinas, it is both a place of great joy and of great disappointment.
In 1977, Salvatore, fresh from Panama, launched a building project here. He wanted to build several small, detached resort-type units and array them around the hillside, popped here and there amid clusters of the family’s almond and olive trees. The land represents about one hundred thousand square meters, or nearly twenty-five acres. The skeletal frames, perhaps a half dozen or so, of those small, squat structures with their concrete floors and pillars, are still standing. But work halted before they could be completed.
The units are low-slung and were designed to blend unobtrusively into the tree-covered hillside, not shoot up like garish multistory, view-blocking hotels of the kind that obliterate glorious views throughout this island.
“We had all the permits, and we started building what you see now,” Salvatore tells us, speaking Italian with Marisin interpreting. The pillars went up, the floors were poured, and then “they stopped us.” “They” were regional officials based in Palermo, who wanted the land as an undeveloped buffer to the adjoining Lo Zingaro Nature Reserve, nearly four thousand acres of protected flora and fauna typical of Sicily.
The couple cannot get an explanation for the order to stop. They said that even reserve officials were not opposed to their plans because the reserve boundary begins on the ridgeline, a significant distance uphill and out of sight from where they wanted to place the units.
Some local officials, many years ago, told the couple the government was wrong in its order, but nothing has changed. It would take a great deal of money to fight it, and the Tranchinas made the decision to pour funds into their pensione rather than fight what could be an expensive losing cause.
“Maybe we have to look for some good ‘connections,’ but if you have to get involved with that…” Salvatore’s voice trails off, knowing he doesn’t want to play the Sicilian game of payoffs to get officials to act in his behalf.
So the partially completed units sit there amid, in March, a dazzling array of wildflowers, such as the yellow margarita daisy, and abundant olive and walnut trees just now beginning to blossom. Soon, Marisin says, the wildflowers will begin
to wither and dry out.
“The sirocco winds, you know. And this land will be in danger of catching fire and burning.” To prevent this, at least on their land, the couple hires workers to weed-whack the soon-to-be-brown foliage.
And, by October or November, the olive harvest begins. In 2009, the year of the oil she handed to me during my first trip, the Tranchinas harvested four hundred liters. A stronger year might yield six hundred.
We drive down the mountain on the winding dirt road and into Scopello past a large, half-completed hotel project—it would be huge in this town of small pensioni. Its construction has halted, like so many projects in Sicily and southern Italy over the decades, because developers ran out of funds.
It is dinnertime at Pensione Tranchina. On the table before me rests a sea bass. I wasn’t a fan of seafood until Marisin served me that cut of swordfish Trapanese style five months earlier. She stands at my side and patiently shows me how to debone it. I bite into the fish, caught in the early hours of that same day, and decide that she has made me into an eater of seafood.
* * *
Four trips over a year’s time, all drives around the island, spontaneous as well as planned, have been enjoyable and invigorating. But one in particular, to visit an area that figures mightily in twentieth-century Sicilian history but remains a tragedy cloaked in mystery, had me concerned. My emotions always run high when I walk across old battlefields, whether in the eastern United States or in Europe. On this journey, I felt a need to visit the scene of an event that most Sicilians would like to forget.
Steve McCurdy and I are off main roads and scuttling our way up and around hills and plunging down through deep valleys toward the isolated village of Piana degli Albanesi. It dates back to the fifteenth century and was one of a handful of towns established for Albanian colonists. Much of that eastern European language is still part of the local dialect.
It was from here, in 1947, that a traditional May 1 procession—led by Sicilian communists along a narrow country road a few miles to the southwest—ended in tragedy. Leftists had scored a major victory at the ballot box a few weeks earlier, electing to the Sicilian Parliament politicians who enacted laws allowing peasants to take over uncultivated land controlled by Sicily’s more privileged barons.
The May 1 procession, which traditionally ended at a place known as Portella della Ginestra—it’s called Portelja e Gijinestrës in the Albanian-infused local dialect—was to celebrate that victory. Dozens of flag-waving residents joined the procession.
Bands played, speakers, standing on the Sasso di Barbato, the large, flat stone that since the late 1800s had served as the stage for these celebrations, shouted into megaphones. It was named for Nicola Barbato, a physician from the area involved in the fasci Siciliani. This was a 1890s post-Unification socialist movement that began among artisans in cities such as Palermo. It later spread to the countryside to include the peasant class, which sought land reform and opposed what it considered oppressive taxation.
The best description I have read about what took place that day was reported by British travel writer Norman Lewis in his book In Sicily. It also is documented in Salvatore Giuliano, a 1962 Italian film directed by Francesco Rosi, whose unvarnished, truthful recounting makes it a much better film than Hollywood’s 1987 version, The Sicilian. That film made the badly compromised Giuliano, the last remaining bandit in western Sicily, into a romantic hero, a sort of Sicilian Robin Hood.
The reality was that right-wing landowners, upset over the vote granting land to impoverished peasants, and in collusion with the Mafia, convinced Giuliano to attack the celebrants, Lewis reports, “as an example to the recalcitrant peasantry in general.”
Giuliano and his men, using machine guns and other equipment left behind—or somehow, mysteriously, acquired from the American military—at the close of the war two years earlier, set up on the hillside above the open area. In the midst of speeches, cheering, bands playing, and red flags waving, the guns rained death down onto the people. The numbers are not consistent, but some sources indicate that eleven, perhaps fourteen, people, including three children, were killed and thirty wounded.
Giuliano later claimed that he ordered his men to fire over the heads of the people; some sources postulate that the Mafia infiltrated his band of bandits and fired directly at the people.
Eventually, the bandits were tracked down and many were convicted at trials that began in 1950, the same year Giuliano died at the hand of one of his trusted lieutenants. By then, Lewis says, Giuliano had been isolated; his only contact to his former band was “his cousin and originally his second in command. A secret deal was arranged whereby both men would be allowed to leave Sicily and fly to the U.S.A. in a military plane.”
But the Mafia had other ideas. Mafiosi put Giuliano up in a house in the town of Castelvetrano, far to the south. Then the double-cross played out. Rosi’s film, which seems fairly accurate for the few facts known in the early 1960s, shows Giuliano being visited by his cousin, Gaspare Pisciotta, who suddenly shoots the bandit leader lying in bed. He does this in collusion with the police who wanted the bandit taken alive. But hearing the shots, officials enter the room and decide the events must be rigged to show Giuliano died in a shootout with authorities.
These officials carry the body downstairs and outside into the tiny piazza in front of a small cluster of houses. There isn’t enough blood, so an officer shoots him a few more times. But blood doesn’t flow from the now lifeless body. So someone grabs a chicken, cuts off its head, and sprays blood over the body and onto the cobblestones.
There is a photograph on the cover of a book, Mafia and Outlaw Stories from Italian Life and Literature, showing this key scene from the movie: the bandit’s body sprawled facedown on the stones, a pistol and a rifle nearby, and a group of Sicilian men gathered against a stone wall, looking down at the body.
The movie was filmed in all the actual locations: Giuliano’s village of Montelepre and the mountains surrounding it; Portella della Ginestra, where the massacre took place; in Castelvetrano in the room where he was murdered by his cousin; and in the tiny square outside.
One side note: Many of the people from Piana degli Albanesi who had survived the May Day massacre fifteen years earlier appeared in this same scene in the film. When the cameras started rolling and the recorded shots rang out, it became too much to bear for some of the participants. Many felt as though they were reliving the actual event and became hysterical. They panicked and scattered, giving the director far more realism captured on film than he had bargained for.
* * *
I visited Portella della Ginestra on a warm March afternoon, following the short drive from Piana degli Albanesi. Today, there are stone walkways through the site. Large rocks carved with the names of some of those who died there and other stones carved into with the brief outline of the story, stand like monoliths across the space. There is no mention of either Giuliano and his men or the Mafia.
The stones list names like Mergheritacles Ceri, Giorgiocu Senza, Dimaggio Giuseppe, La Fata Vincenza, Intravaia Castense—all names still common to the area, many reflecting Albanian origins. On another stone is this inscription, in Sicilian, translated by Alissandru (Alex) Caldiero:
U me cori
doppu tant’anni
e’ a Purtedda
e nte petri
e nto sangu
di’ cumpagni
ammazzati
My heart
after so many years
is in Purtedda
and in the stones
and in the blood
of murdered
comrades
Purtedda is the Sicilian name for the Italian word “Portello” and it represents the area where the massacre took place. There are low stone walls around the site. Across the narrow highway is a huge parking area. In 1947, none of this was here. There were fallen rocks embedded in the fields of ginestra, or broom plants, that naturally come out in spring.
; It is quiet here. I don’t believe a single vehicle comes along the roadway in the hour or so Steve McCurdy and I walk around the area. Slight breezes come off the flanks of the Pizzuta, the mountain that hangs over the small valley, on whose flanks the bandits were arrayed with their American machine guns. I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to why American weapons were used. Some say they were supplied to the bandits by U.S. Army officials. No one seems to know what motive the Americans would have to do that, other than perhaps the typical U.S. opposition in that era to anything that smacks of communism. I do know that Salvatore Giuliano reportedly had written a letter to President Harry S. Truman asking that the United States annex Sicily much as it had done with Puerto Rico. I don’t know if Truman responded.
The reality of what happened here may be deeply embedded in the failed separatist movement that was so strong immediately following the war. Giuliano, at war’s end, was made a colonel in the separatist militia. What likely happened was that when he was no longer needed—the separatist movement essentially died when Rome gave Sicily regional autonomy in 1946—and following the disaster at Portella, his Mafia and political handlers had to do something about him.
And they had to do something about his cousin, who knew too much. Four years after Giuliano’s death, Gaspare Pisciotta died in his Palermo prison cell when he drank his morning coffee, which had been laced with strychnine. The key players are dead; none gave enough information during their trials and incarcerations to explain the backstory of the bandit’s motives during those postwar years. More than half a century later, much of the mystery still simmers.
The tiny courtyard in Castelvetrano is still there. The gate so clearly shown in the movie is closed the day we arrived. A small garage has been built over the spot where Giuliano’s body was displayed; the doorway into the house where he was staying—it had belonged to a mafioso of the time—is shut tight; it doesn’t look like anyone is living there. Farther back, on the opposite side of the tiny square, stands a two-story apartment house. A young woman is on the balcony hanging laundry. Visitors to this spot, I am sure, are not infrequent, and she took no notice.